I remember the first time I went to a club in my hometown of Luton (stop sniggering!). It was in a club called Liquid and I loved it, good tunes, getting drunk, dancing the night away. This was what being 18 was all about. Continued to go once a week or so, going into other clubs befre Liquid; places like Chicago Rock Cafe and Exchange. But after a while, the music started getting a bit monotonous and repetitive, met with groans and “Didn’t they play those songs last week/yesterday?”. By the time it was time to leave for university and a new city (Nottingham), Liquid had, in my eyes, degenerated into a club full of students who would dance to pretty much anything, intoxicated or otherwise. Whether I had outgrown the place, or it was generally just crap and no one else saw it, I couldn’t be bothered with the place anymore.
So off to Nottingham I headed and within a week of arriving, I found Oceana. What a place! I avoided the main room, or Liquid room as I liked to think of it as, and headed straight for my musical Makkah: the R&B room. Such sweet sounds, tunes I had never heard played in a club before, and yet they weren’t obsure tracks, they were bog standard club tunes. Nevertheless, it had become my new haunt, a place I could dance the night away for weeks to come. My friends in Luton were jealous and so they should be; Oceana and Nottingham in general was far superior. Going back to Luton and going out meant Liquid, purely because it was the best club out of a bad bunch. After a few months of returning to Luton, I decided never to go back to Liquid (and after going again, reaffirmed my stance).
But then something horrible happened. Oceana started getting boring as well, and other things began to bug me. For example, have you ever been on the dance floor dancing with a random guy standing there not moving, in your way? Or perhaps he’s moving about like he’s fighting the invisible man and u caught an elbow in your shoulder? Well that is what I started encountering. Problem was, Tuesday was the only available “student night” I had to go out, other than Saturday, which wasn’t very viable as most of the people I knew went home at the weekend.
So, it appears I have drifted off the point of the post a bit. Allow me to go back to “Liquidgate”. The reason for its crapness? Repetitive music. The same DJ playing the same songs, in more or less the same order to the same crowd of people and I felt like one of the only people (my friends saw it too, but not to the extent I did) who thought this was wrong. Some might think, “yeah, well people go there to have a good time, and if they do, what harm is done?”. Well, that is true, but as I said before, they’d dance and have a good time to ANYTHING. I mean, who would honestly dance enthusiastically to Baywatch and actually enjoy it without geniunely feeling embarassed in anyway (unless you’re drunk like I was)? Watching people cheering and trying to dance to the Fresh Prince theme tune would normally be the cue for me to leave the dance floor, waiting for a good song to come back on.
And it seems the music industry is following suit. Every advert telling us about “the greatest rock album since Nevermind” (which wouldn’t be nearly as overrated if Kobain hadn’t killed himself the way he did, but that’s for another post), or “5 stars, best album of 2009 and the decade!!!” when really, it wouldn’t have sold half a million copies 10 years ago, nevermind going multi-platinum. You know when music is losing it’s edge when pop music is suddenly no longer bareable anyway. Before, cheesy tunes were catchy and you’d hum along to them without noticing and when you did, you’d immediately stop, reminding yourself you dont like this song. Or pop songs that were actually good and defined an era (Michael Jackson anyone). Nowadays, you get stuff so bad, the CD they come on wouldn’t even produce good glue if you melted it down. Never mind illegal downloads harming the music industry, it’s the poor music produced that’s affecting sales, and the music companies know what they’re doing. They’re probably laughing to each other, while sitting in their luxurious leather La-Z-Boys at how stupid their consumers are: “They’d buy anything if Paris Hilton said it was cool!”, they’d say.
But it’s not just pop that is following this trend, it’s seeping into the one genre that was against this very fad: indie music. Something of an oxymoron it seems, indie rock, for me (and probably only me) is incredibly dull, and I don’t mean proper indie rock, as in the stuff you never hear on TV or on Radio 1 or any major commercial radio stations, I mean the now commerical rock tunes we are incessantly pestered with. No, the lyrics aren’t amazing, they’re just talking about they’re normal, boring lives. Please, cut your hair and actually sing instead of shouting into the mike. Thanks. The disease continues, however, into the very genre that seemed to define the 90s with artists such as Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Mary J Blige and Boyz II Men to name but a few, alongside the likes of Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Notorious B.I.G, Wu-Tang Clan and Nas. R&B and Hip Hop. The classic phrase, Hip Hop is dead, was correctly publicised by rapper Nas:
Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game
Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business
It forgot where it started
So we all gather here for the dearly departed
As good a beat A Milli has, hip hop artists like Lil’ Wayne are perpetuating hip hop’s sorry demise from the days of De La Soul and Public Enemy. Where have all the soul samples gone? What’s wrong with using James Brown, instead of “pussy, money, weed”? And speaking of the Godfather of Soul, where the hell has soul and funk music gone? It seems that genre has all but died commerically.
While the third side to the soulful black music triangle, R&B, is experiencing a joyous time in the charts, it has nothing on this decade’s predecessors. For example, let’s look at Shontelle’s T-Shirt. Okay, so you’re wearing your boyfriend’s T-shirt. And he’s away a lot, so it makes you feel close to him. That’s fine. Not really worth spending hours in a recording studio mixing the song though, is it? I mean, it’s something you may tell your girlfriends, but not what I’d call musicworthy. But apparently it was, and it seems 4.5 million views of its video on YouTube pays testament to the song’s lyrical genius. Now, no disrespect to Shontelle, I’m sure she’s very talented, but the song isn’t good. I was talking to my friend about it and I was saying how I coulsn’t imagine anyone going to their local music shop and actually physically looking for the single and putting their hand in their purse/pocket to take out money to pay for it, and leave thinking they’d made a good purchase. For once, the music critics agreed with me on the whole album, some calling it “forgettable”.
For those who have gotten this far without thinking “this guy is chatting shit” or anything to that effect, you’re entitled to your opinion, as am I, but the fact remains, and it is a fact: older music is better than music from today, and that doesn’t mean music in the 00s will be better than music in 10s, it means music from 90s and before is and probably always will be better than music that’ll be made from now. That is, until consumer’s take note of what older music sounded like and realise the stuff you hear today just isn’t that good. I’m not saying, that all music from 2000-2009 is rubbish; we’ve had some very good songs and albums from this decade and new genres like funky house and grime, but the operative word there was “some”.
And I’ll leave you on this final sombre note. My favourite music shop in Nottingham (and the whole world), Selectadisc is closing down at the end of the month, due to low sales and high rent costs. It was one of those indie music shops where you knew you’d find a hidden gem. The owner and former employee, Phil Barton, who only bought the shop a couple of years ago when it was facing extinction, believes “there is no one under the age of 25 buying music anymore”. While there’s some truth to that statement and there are many debates towards that viewpoint, I can see where he’s coming from. But if he was stating pure fact, could you blame them, with the utter dross churned out every month? Then again, I’m sure he didn’t stock such rubbish while in charge, nor did the previous owner.
