Conor Kenny
Online Opinions Editor
It only dawned on me yesterday afternoon how much of a depressing chore flicking through MTV Hits has become. Nicki Minaj, Maroon 5, and will.i.am were smattered across the Top 10 countdown, while the grating voice of Fearne Cotton introduced each song with increasingly over-the-top hyperbole. The twin evils of auto tune and drum and bass are taking over the stations, and it is time to face the fact that our generation is becoming musically illiterate. Why is modern music so shit? If teenagers aren’t listening to the overproduced indistinguishable club dirge that’s never off the radio, they’re feigning interest in the so-called “hipster” landfill bands that wouldn’t withstand the flush of a toilet.
I travelled up to Phoenix Park two weeks ago to watch The Stone Roses reunion. The majority of the crowd, like the band, was middle aged, but that didn’t detract from one of the most impressive live performances I’ve ever witnessed. What it did signify, however, was how uninterested so many young people have become with rock music in the last decade. There are now only a handful of bands around with any sense of longevity and presence. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, with a career stretching back as far as 1983, have certainly left their mark in history, but who else is there who could possibly claim the mantles previously held by bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd? The one I answer I always seem to get from people when I ask this question is predictable: Coldplay.
It is easy to see the appeal of Coldplay, which is perhaps what makes it so much easier to hate them too. They are polite, inoffensive, arty, and entirely radio-friendly. They are also perhaps the most boring band in the world, utterly devoid of any attitude and personality. All around them are similar sounding and equally dull artists, seemingly determined to out-bore each other. Worryingly, a large proportion of these bands seem to be emanating from Ireland. If The Script, The Coronas, and Snore Patrol are the best we can do, then there really is a problem. To think that a country which previously spawned Thin Lizzy, My Bloody Valentine, and Rory Gallagher, now produces songs like “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved” is enough to induce nausea. These current flakes are not rock bands, they’re the modern day equivalent of Phil Collins and Journey.
And yet it might not simply be rock music that is having trouble staying afloat. Hip-hop too has become bastardised by modern day overproduction, with every new track in the genre seemingly featuring a guest appearance from the latest Rhianna impersonator. The kind of rap pioneered by Tupac, N.W.A and Public Enemy is now unrecognizable from the banal dog shit churned out by 50 Cent and co. Even the brilliant Eminem, once lauded by the distinguished poet Seamus Heaney as having “sent a voltage around a generation”, seems to be fading slowly towards obsolescence. What we are left with is a horrible hybrid of dreadful lyrics and fuzzy R&B sodden gloss. Chris Brown? Give me a break.
So where does the hope for rock music lie, if at all? Not in The Kings of Leon, who scuppered their chances a long time ago when they decided to start cutting off their album sleeves and aping U2. The Arctic Monkeys are veering off wildly in the other direction, committing commercial suicide by becoming increasingly abstract with each passing record. As for The Strokes, despite their small flash of utter brilliance ten years ago with their debut album, everyone but for the dedicated hipster seems to have lost interest in them. Muse and Kasabian are creating music that’s as inventive and groundbreaking as anything Radiohead have done in the last twenty years, but still seem to passionately divide opinion for whatever reason. A word of praise should perhaps be saved for The Black Keys, who are beginning to make it seem as though The White Stripes will not be so sorely missed after all.
Is it possible that rock music is now defunct? The most exciting acts at the moment have been strongly influenced by the work of 80s new wave music. “Electroclash” bands like Justice, Chromatics and Goldfrapp have a distinct sound that is quite unlike anything in the charts at the moment. The soundtrack to last year’s neo-noir crime thriller “Drive” was a spellbinding score, and worth checking out. Maybe the death of guitar music isn’t such a bad thing after all. After all, it’s difficult to stay relevant with an instrument that’s over three thousand years old.
