BeTWEEN No Rock and a Shitty Musical World Run by Disney

In case you haven't realized it yet, we are amidst another wave of teeny-bopper (now dubbed so cutely as tweens) music mutilation. Hannah Montana is the anti-christ at the epicenter of this epidemic and the Jonas Brothers are currently whipping the four horsemen of the apocalypse as this tsunami of shit barrels its way across the world. We were lucky enough to have controversial figures like Eminem (I refuse to call that motherfucker an artists. Yeah, he's got skill with words but his music is just phlacid. You wanna know how to combine a biting tongue with sick beats then check out Saul Williams' Amethyist Rock)skate us into the new millenium while Spears, Aguilera, and Moore were drowned out by kids who wanted something dangerous.
And this is the appeal of vacant pop music marketed towards the Disney set for parents. It's safe. It takes no risks and offers nothing but filler until the kid gets into high school and their musical tastes are permanently fucked. They will go on to consume whatever the turd du jour is happily while ignoring classic, innovative artists who dared to push the boundaries into the level of brilliance. To put it simply, those cats will never understand "Sister Ray" or think of checking out the Stooges or become awash in the feedback glory that is the Jesus and Mary Chain. What the tween scene does is set up an entire generation of fans for ruined ears.
And now it seems like it is an unstoppable cycle. The New Kids on the Block are getting back together because a generation of mother's JUST HAS to share the clit throbbing anthemn "Please Don't Go Girl" with their daughters and, fuck I can't believe I read this, let alone will be re-typing it, the Funky Bunch (of Marky Mark fame) are re-uniting sans Mr. Walhberg, of course.
This threat has progressed to an inter-generational level disaster. What started with Raffi and the Wiggles has crept its way further up the chain and you can see the end results of this sort of bile with uninspired and utterly generic bands like Fall Out Boy. Or, even worse, it leads to the kids seeking out faux-serious "emotionally tumulutuous" crap like 30 Seconds to Mars or whoever the fuck Victory Records is pushing these days.
But, there is a benefit. There are small portion of kids who see through the bullshit and try something daring and are brave enough to fail. They discover new things on their own and keep the underground going. They become inextricably attatched to genres like punk and hardcore, drown themselves in the ideologies and practices and learn to truly deconstruct music and find out just what makes a song a great one no matter the genre or classification. Some stay in their respective scenes and keep 'em going strong and others absorb the knowledge and ethics until they decide to move on to pastures that look more green from their viewpoint.
No matter how many Elvis Costello's or Joe Strummer's or Brian Wilson's or Lou Reed's or Joey Ramone's (all whom transformed the universal axiom of adolescent rage into beauty and transcended norms to become rock 'n' roll icons), we are given nothing will stop the surge of safety coveted by soccer moms.
Once again, we must weather the storm and wait for the geniuses to emerge. Sadly, it doesn't seem like we'll be getting to many from this lot. Time will tell.

Seth Godin Teaches Dipshits How to Further Evil in the Music Industry

I had no idea who the fuck Seth Godin was until I started working at the bookstore. But, after having to pull his tomes and display them, I learned he is some big dick marketing guru. Of course, I'm going to have to invoke the whole Bill Hicks "If you're in marketing do us all a favor...kill yourself" axiom here. He recently posted on his blog (which he proudly boasts is the most read marketing blog around) a lecture he gave to corporate music industry dickpigs about how to save their sinking ship.
His main point was about marketing to what he calls "tribes." Yeah, his solution to the clusterfuck the record biz has gotten itself into is to ruin everything with an ounce of purity left. Look, I'm not gonna get up in arms about Warner Brothers trying to pimp out some new twat de jour by having her piggyback on Brittany Spears. That is expected. What I find more troubling is the commercialization of once vital subcultures that Godin is proposing.
Here's a telling quote, "The next thing is this idea that people care very much about who is sitting next to them at the concert. They care very much about the secret handshake. They care very much about the tribal identification. “Oh you like them, I like them”. FUCK. THAT. NOISE.
Even Deadheads would scoff at having yuppies infultrate their "tribe" so why wouldn't a more reasonable set of music fans? Take the last Flogging Molly show, for example. I've seen that band everytime they've played Houston and what used to be a wild, insane punk rock show has now devolved into drunken frat boy theatrics. Seriously, the biggest assholes at the show were carting their chicks away before Dave King ever said, "Aye." Or how about the Converge show at the Engine Room a few years back? A.K.A. the Night of 1,000 Fights. Fuck, try to go and see a Dropkick Murphys performance now and not witness a sea of popped collars and white caps. Marketing to the tribe isn't really what Godin is proposing. He is subvertley suggesting marketing the tribe to the outsiders. And NO ONE wants their scene infultrated by tourists and fashion victims who leach like vampires.
And fuck you, Seth, for the presupposition that just because I like Band A and Band B are in the same genre I dig both. I fucking adore Jawbreaker but 99% of bands that wear their name out on the press releases have more to do with My Chemical Romance. Once again, marketing will out.
So, shut the fuck up, Seth. Let the tribes alone and steer the record companies towards simply offering us a product, trusting our tastes, letting us make our own decisions about the quality, and then acting. I really hate being pandered to and that is all you are proposing.
Ya know, Hicks was right. Please kill yourself.