Another new year has begun and it lies heavy with possibilities and promise. I’m not sure what to expect from this new year, but I’ve compiled a little list of my hopes and wishes for the proceeding 12 months.
Wish number 1 – the death of dubstep
Another boring-ass, technology driven, rigid, music sub genre. The UK Garage scene blossomed and collapsed within about seven years, drum and bass lasted about a decade. Now we have “musicians” who’ve taken the worst parts of both of these genres, glued them together and formed, with a cartoon gloss and VST smell, the single worst genre of music since goa-trance. It’s not possible to express anything in the medium of dubstep, only to shout loudly with a heavily LFO’d detuned lead, and be allowed into the musical “what’s hip” club for the next few weeks.
Wish number 2 – the death of the Black Eyed Peas
The music we listen to, the music we allow to be used in adverts, at clubs, on the radio, is what we will carry with out throughout the rest of our lives. Like it or not, this gets engrained into us, sitting in the Zeitgeist, hanging on the our collective unconsciousness. This is the music we will look back at as ‘our music’ – and it’s a fucking travesty that we allow something so horrid to be published, let alone adored. The Black Eyed Peas are not only talentless market driven dickheads, but they are making that a viable social status. They have become the Paris Hiltons of the music world. Undeserving, and nothing to give, but loved by millions of slack jawed buffoons. Life imitates art directly, and if we persist to have this utter bullshit poured upon us day after day, we may well end up as stupid and as ignorant of art as the Black Eyed Peas’ management thinks we are.
Wish number 3 – to listen to an album again
As my free time and attention span slowly eroded away over the years, so has my appreciation for challenging music. Having a playlist of 20,000 plus songs is wonderful in theory, but the reality is I’m not sure when I last sat down and enjoyed an album… Or even a full track for that matter. It’s always on random, it’s always a mishmash of ‘this and that’, or having a backlog of music downloaded that get’s forgotten in such a large library. I’ve always thought it was an interesting phenomenon that as ones ease of access to new music increase, our appreciation for it decreases – and in my case, quite sharply. From now on, I’d like to have the time and the mindset to relax for an hour, with a single album to consume fully. I’d really like to do this once a week, and upload a review not long after it, but we’ll see just how that pans out.