Sunday Sermon - The Wasteland.

What is wrong with 21st Century Music?

Lack of novelty.  Is anything new being achieved in music?  Bands are shadows of older bands; genres are loveless cross-overs;  voices are the parrot pronouncements of passed singers.  Modern musicians seem happy with what was good enough for their fathers, which is the definition of death!

Too much novelty.  Why does the industry reward quirky characters, unlikely looking pop-stars, and the visually novel?  Isn't music an aural medium?

Too professional.  How sanitised are modern musicians?  Dressed, coached, choreographed, cleaned.  Throw them in the trash!

Too unprofessional.  In the past creators knew what their public needed to be elated by music.  They knew how to speak, and were understood in new languages of tones and tempos.  Do modern musicians know anything?

Absence of Hate.  What happened to our critical faculties?  Why is everything okay?  People who say Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the same breath don't deserve oxygen.

Absence of Love.  Great music makes you remember a forgotten ecstasy.  Modern music is auto-eroticism.

Failure to communicate.  Bad habits galore!  Lyrics are inaudible at live shows (which was acceptable back when guitar-music was the principle dance music, or something greater, but nobody's dancing any more.)  Live music fails to communicate with the audience in a way that no other art does.  

Too much communication.  You songwriters with your embarrassing earnestness, your artless frankness: save it for your diaries!

The 21st Century Musician's Motto:  Good enough.

The  21st Century Motto That We Need:  Enough!

Unpleasant.  We miss dearly the late 18th century classicists, who insisted on sonority, as much as we miss the late 70's punks, with their brilliant primitiveness.

Too pleasant.  In the future, all music will be so universal that nobody will like it.

This is the word of LVD.

Distortion Forever!