1. Music is the soul of God personified through music. End of discussion. I have spoken.
2. Music is art first, Business second. That is why I never cared for teeny bopper garbage like Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, or anything else from that realm. Also, I never liked bands like KISS or Def Leppard who admitted they only made music to get rich from it. Now, yes there is a business with music, and most of the time it can’t move forward without it. However, music is an art and should be made the way it should be: to create, express, and show artistic merit. It’s meant to have a soul within it, which manufactured teeny-bopper crap sorely lacks.
3. Disco paved the way to the manufactured, soulless dribble of teeny bopper garbage that seems to rule pop charts nowadays. It also paved the way to the likes of dubstep, techno, and any other form of music that uses only samples instead of actual instruments. That is all.
4. Hair Metal is the worst Heavy Metal genre, hands down! I mean, seriously, who in their right mind would want to dress up like a chick, and try to pick up chicks by screaming like your balls are being squeezed in a vice? Also, the plastic-ness of the sound that most of those bands have is just revolting. No wonder why guys in Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer used to make fun of hair metal every chance they got. And on that note….
5. Emo is shit as well. Emo is to punk rock as what hair metal is to heavy metal. More whiny ass sounding music with bands looking like chicks, trying to get chicks. I remember years ago, one of my friend’s cousins was an emo kid and we used to make fun of him because he was wearing jeans that looked like his girlfriends, so we asked him if he borrowed a pair from her. Also, he had a friend that had a haircut that made him look like a chick. I think he was gay too, I’m not sure.
6. Punk Rock, in a sense, did save Rock N Roll in the seventies. It did return it’s “back to the basics” view that it once had in the fifties and the early sixties. In fact, the reason The Ramones formed in the first place was to play music reminiscent of what was popular before the psychedelic period in the late sixties. By the mid-seventies, Rock N Roll was really becoming the complete opposite of what it stood for in its fifties heyday. It was no longer rebellious; rock musicians were looked at as more like millionaires or businessmen than performers, and it was just losing its fun. There needed to be something to shake the foundations up a bit, and it turned out to be punk rock.
7. Hip Hop has some good music, but you have to dig deep for it. You really have to look hard to find some really good hip hop. For easy picks, there’s Beastie Boys, OutKast, and much of the eighties hip hop groups like Run DMC and Public Enemy. The Roots is one of the very few that actually use real instruments, and Jurassic 5 mixes samples of jazz into their music. And above all, they don’t rap about drive-bys or promote crack smoking.
8. Nirvana was a good band, but they weren’t the best to come out of Seattle. Nirvana came around at the right time, their first album Bleach was released in 1989, which was the time when major record labels were coming up to Seattle to sign bands from that scene. Also, the decent promotion that album got, Nirvana did fairly well in the rock underground in the US at the time and even had success in the UK. They were perfect candidates for a major label, so they got signed. The irony is that their label didn’t expect Nevermind to sell no more than 250,000 copies, boy, were they in for a surprise. If you want to check out some really good music from the grunge scene, the other popular bands, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were much better musically. However, check out some of the lesser-known bands from that scene, you’ll be quite surprised. Here are some to check out: Melvins, Gruntruck, Screaming Trees, Tad, Green River, and Mudhoney.
9. Jazz and Rhythm & Blues should never be forgotten. They are the basis of all the music that is made, and what people listen to, to this day.
10. We should’ve listened to Lars. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, it is Lars Ulrich, the drummer for MetallicA. He was one of the first, if not the first, major rock star to stand up against the downloading service Napster back in 2000. He knew from the very beginning that downloading music from the internet was going to ruin the music industry, and told record labels to start cracking down on people for getting music without paying for it, stealing more or less. However, Ulrich was hit with a lot of backlash from fans, calling him a greedy multimillionaire rock star who only cares about his balance statement at the end of the month over his own fans. He, along with his band MetallicA, would eventually sue the site Napster, and win, thus turning the free downloading site into a paying downloading site. Unfortunately, the damage was already done, and once Napster was gone, other sites took over like Kazaa, Limewire, Pirate’s Bay, and so forth. As more people downloaded their music over paying for it, the quality of new music seemed to have gotten much worse, to the point now that almost everything in music whether it’s pop, rock, metal, etc. is filled with samples, autotune, drum fill-ins to the point it sounds like literal shit. Thankfully, the past couple of years people began to see the error of their ways and returned to purchasing music instead of downloading it for free. However, there’s still a steep hill to climb from it.
11. MTV should just die. The once-great music cable station is no longer a place to listen to music. In fact, it hasn’t been a music station for a long time now. I blame the show The Real World, that was the beginning of the end for MTV.
12. Radio stations needs to up their game if they don’t want to end up like MTV. Simply put, go back to the roots of early FM rock stations, play whole records in their uncut entirety, and play the music that is not on Billboard charts. Go underground, there are many great undiscovered bands out there.
13. Finally, Lou Reed is the greatest singer-songwriter that ever lived. No one comes close, I have spoken!
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