PBS Frontline: The Way The Music Died

[pseudonym]

I hear ya pseudo... I'm from L.A. myself and uh, I left.

Thank's for that Lee, I was the total midwestern middle-class kid who watched TV all day and believed in the California "dream". When I nursed a '54 truck with all my possessions half-way across the USA, to land in LA, I was miffed @ why so much hostility and crime, etc..... I finally figured it out that LA doesn't let people "go", they have no way of escaping!

 

I can say "for-sure" there is a vibe in LA that I've never got before or since, it must be the ocean, or the moving fault lines or something, everyday just seemed so "new". Maybe youth, maybe lack-of-knowledge, but that was the first time anyone gave me an IQ test when applying for a job. I still don't know what the score was and at the time, it just didn't figure into anything I wanted.

 

I knew a "big-shot", whom was my dad's friend in his growing-up day's, but we just didn't mesh, even after I saw his homes in the Hollywood Hills and Belaire. It just didn't make an impression on me, maybe for my own ultimate demise. I was into Jimi Hendrix and he was into the bible and the Omen..............

[Phil B]

I noticed the new EQ has a big story on the recording of the new GNR/STP album. I guess their publicist hasn't been sleeping much these days.

[M Peasley]

I was at the gym (late) when it was on and I caught a minute here and there between sets. So I can't speak to the overall show.

 

But what did resonate with me was the comment one of the people made about the large-corporatization of the music business over the last decade-plus. About the emphasis being put on making the next quarterly report look good for stockholders and the short-sightedness of an industry that's lost it's love for it's product and retains only a love of it's profits.

 

I'm a pretty lo-profile guy when it comes to political and social-critical opinions, but this I must say hits one of my biggest sore spots about American (and some other Western) cultures.

 

I'm in business, and I've know I don't know how many business-people, and the modern entrepenuers in particular. And most of them see absolutely nothing wrong with making a product or building a retail store,and giving everything they've got to see that product and/or store on every corner of every street, lane, dog-track, interstate, highway or back alley in the entire globe.

 

They see this as the "American Dream" but it's not my American Dream. Their vision is more like a nightmare to me - where the dumbed-down narrow vision of a handful of monster-corporations reduces the planet to a endless row of big-boxes and fast-food joints pumping out as few products as possible at the highest prices possible to as many ignorant consumer-drones as a dying planet can hold. Great for the stock market.

 

Ok, I'm all carried away here - we're just talking about pop music. But the whole trend to for corporate profit-making to dumbify our culture and homogenize life to the lowest common denominator (ok, terrible mixed metaphor, I know) just puts me in the red zone.

 

M Peasley

[Lee Flier]

Boy, I hear ya on all that, M Peasley.

 

There were definitely some individual sound bites and interview clips in the show that were good. It just lacked any cohesion of any kind and spent way too much time promoting the two "artists." Some background narration would've been helpful, at the very least.

[Kaz]

Originally posted by M Peasley:

Ok, I'm all carried away here - we're just talking about pop music. But the whole trend to for corporate profit-making to dumbify our culture and homogenize life to the lowest common denominator

This sort of statement is made so often, I'm beginning to think it's part of the process... I'm starting to feel it, it's happening, I been hypnotized

 

In drone voice: it's the dumbing down of our demonitator, it's the lowest common cultuization, it's the homogenification of all those big fat fast food eating moron consumers, but they won't get me...