Where is the music?

To beat lethargy and shut out the world, I’ve been plugging in to old rock songs.

Raw and rude music, I like.

From the first time I heard good rock (i think it was Dream Theater’s album Scenes from a Memory), I knew there was no turning back to pop music. I was amazed, I didn’t know music could be played like this. I got addicted to music, bought into the “without music, life would be a mistake” cliche, and started feeling a need to carry a CD/MP3 player around.

Compared to rock, popular music is inadequate and commercialized. I can’t feel the passion for music in the young singers who managed to cut an album or two simply because they looked cute and were not entirely tone deaf. I can’t feel the amount of thought put into making a song with catchy, repetitive tunes set in a formula proven popular, and abstract lyrics that don’t mean anything. I can’t enjoy rhythm-less and tune-less music heavily masked by loud African drum beats.

Whatever happened to the originality and invention of music from the baby-boomers era? The best bands that can qualify for the “legend” category all came from decades past, while we have the likes of Linkin’ Park and One Republic producing pseudo-rock music that are far too formulaic and polished, a far cry from the signature honesty and rawness of rock. And let’s not even go into the overplayed likes of umbrella-ella-ella.

Maybe it’s the iPod effect. With music made available to everyone, market forces cause music to gravitate towards catering for the masses that favor catchy tunes, which are quickly replaced by new ones once people lose interest in them.

Music no longer needs to be classics that can remain popular forever. I wonder how many of these radio tunes we have now will still be performed 300 years from now, like how baroque music is enjoyed by many now.

Back to Led Zeppelin’s Since I’ve been Loving you, on loop.

(By the way, I’m pretty disappointed after revisiting Bon Jovi’s old albums. In my opinion, Bon Jovi is very good only for 7 songs: Livin’ On A Prayer, You Give Love A Bad Name, This Ain’t A Love Song, Bed Of Roses, Always, I’ll Be There For You, and Never Say Goodbye. That means the only Bon Jovi album anyone needs is Crossroads, which has 6 out of 7 of their most representative songs.)