Requiem For Quality Music: You Know What I Mean

Lets bring back the music that is so, so much better than the swill that passes for it these days. We cannot stomach another faux era where talent is sadly taken a nose dive. So-called performers like Mylie Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black. Mylie goes for the raunchy image and seems to feel that she must thrust out her Gene Simmons like tongue, wear as little clothing she can get away with and make a real fool of herself. She has to do something that will surely have more longevity than any of her songs. She sounds good in the studio but God-awful live. She sang "The Climb" on American Idol and it was so cringeworthy I felt embarrassed.  Without the use of autotune, none of these Disney kids can carry many notes and, as I had said, some of them
rely on shock value antics.

And Justin Bieber (whose family home is frighteningly and perilously close to mine) actually has some raw talent and can sing. But like all the Disney graduates, they invariably make headlines as out of control brats. I cut Bieber some slack because his parents pushed him into the dark world of celebrity and seem to enjoy spending his money.

Lindsay Lohan is perhaps the saddest of the bunch, with her many mug shots, car accidents and shovelling the white lady up her nose for eleven years now.which has hurt her career, perhaps permanently  Her parents are lost causes. Dina (I party with my daughter so I can keep an eye on her.) What a load of crap. Her father's even worse and has a rather disturbing drug habit. It's never a good whore out your children. Lindsay put out a couple of records and has a lot talent under the smoggy bad behaviour.

I think you have the idea, that the kids are seemingly mucking up the music landscape and running it into the ground. We need to take a stand. I know that a lot of you reading this agree with me and if we pool our resources, surely we can do something to stand up and show the Disney brats what talent and hard work can do. Give them a taste of songs of the 1980's and  1990's  and see their reaction. I'm hoping it will lift the veil from their drug-addled haze.

I'm not posting any pictures of these delightful urchins, because their faces are ubiquitous--
everywhere you go and I want to carve out a community that is Disney kiddies free.


I've been watching the decline and gradual fall that is the music business for two decades now. It ain't pretty, let me tell you. Cracks in the wall began to grow ever deeper and threaten to crumble into dust. Sure, there are some exceptions, but the bad stuff so overwhelms them until one never really knows where cringingly God-awful material begins and the brilliant artistic singer/songwriter  ends. So it does actually have an expiration date? Is a brave new world gutsy enough to trample over the sewage and the cobwebs, the blood and the spilled stale bilge and produce some new, exciting and original artistry and groundbreaking, sensational talent? Well, we're waiting, just as we've done since alternative rock took a swan dive into oblivion and irrelevance.  Grunge didn't last very long, did it? And in its wake we've seen Disney brats like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and the spate of so-called "boy bands" ( The backstreet Boys and InCinq had some fairly good material, but fizzled out as a number of the bands' performers got into drugs and rode the rahab train to obscurity.) To be fair, these children were under a near-unbearable stress---often exploited by greedy parents who seem to feel that it's their right to push naive offspring into the cut-throat world of the music business.

Moving back some more, the music  of the 1980's, much of it seeming to tumble into a manhole cover (Keep it clean, folks) disappearing as the hot tar paralyses them and sets them on the road to nowhere--to hell on a handcart or words to that effect. I mean, I really immersed myself in the pulsating beats, pretty boys like Duran Duran, the exciting period that became known as "New Wave" era.  Peter Gabriel, Eurythmics, Daryl Hall and John Oates (more of a pop/rock band) Culture Club, New Order, Wham and Thompson Twins, to name a few. But there's one phenomenal couple of guys known as Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys. Now, writing intelligent lyrics with a disco beat had morphed from "nerd material" (complete with the glasses, which may or may not have had tape on them) to terrific music and lyrics equalling excellence beyond earlier disco darlings, ABBA  I just LOVED them and still do). Now, there are those who, for some very strange reason, appear to rate their music as "gay as gay can be gay". I do not understand what someone's sex lives had to do with their incredible talent and just as I thought homophobes couldn't get any shallower, they somehow manage to drain a little more out of the pool.



A dirty pool drained dry
No description needed here








Shattered hopes and dreams.
Frantic hands trying to find their way out of 2017 and back to 1981-1998. Won't ever happen, though.


Neil Tennant singing It's A Sin in a 2009 live show in London, England  
Angels and a group of people that seem to be surrounded by a dead or dying Jesus.
Scene from the Losing My Religion video, believed to be Michael Stipe's "coming out" work.
Personally, there are many, many much better songs than the band's so-called "signature" efforts, in my opinion.


I realise that I have featured only a few influencing acts of the 1980's and 1990's but this blog would go on and on for pages if I were to highlight more musicians from the disco boom and aggressive 90's. grunge. And as anyone hanging around You Tube will attest, my posts are often the length of 400-page novels. 

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