One Direction and the Dead Generation

Is It Me? Maybe.           Am I getting old? Maybe.

How long has the durge that the pop music industry churns out at the moment stayed the same for? Seems like an eon to me. Today’s pop music is just light-weight, same-sounding lift music and there’s not really been any change in years. What have we done to deserve this lot ? :-

Coldplay          

Utter middle-class shite, Dire Straits for the digital generation.

Rihanna            

Wearing barely anything seems to be the only way she can sell herself.

Justin Bieber      

Kurt Cobain killed himself a month after Justin Bieber was born. Says it all really.

One Direction   

A young, talent show boy band – nothing new there, that genre goes back to the Monkees in the Sixties.

This lot are the dead generation, how many will still be around in 20 years time ? None I hope.

What we’re missing is the next ‘youth revolution’. But will it ever come ?

Mr Manchester, the late, great Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and Granada Reports presenter had a theory about all this, he’s quoted as saying :

“I used to have this 13 year cycle theory that British youth culture exploded every three years. It wasn’t much but I noticed that the Beatles happened in 1963, then punk in 1976 and ’89 was acid house. Then someone pointed out that if you go back 13 years from ’63 you get teddy boy. Anyway, it suddenly made some kind of sense.”

Maybe he had a point, maybe not. Nothing happened, as far as I can remember in 2002, maybe it skipped a generation and something will happen in 2015, maybe not.

Maybe the youth of today have everything they want. Maybe they don’t feel the need for a ‘youth revolution’ anymore. Maybe they just can’t be arsed getting up off their X-Box, PS3, PC, Tablet etc etc to revolt.

Where have all the Musical Genres Gone ?

It’s a shame how the music charts have gone in the last decade, the genres of music they contain have gone, some forever. This is the Top 40 for this week in 1980    

Look at the variety of musical genres in that chart : Rock, Pop, Soul, Disco, Punk, Heavy Metal, Reggae, Two-Tone, New Wave, Easy Listening, Electronic, even Rock-a-Billy is in there. Also there are a number of true legends and tracks that are still played today.

The music also influenced the fashions then, if you liked a certain genre you wore their style of clothes, another thing long gone, everyone dresses the same now.

Formulaic Drivel

What we need today is a move away from standard, formulaic, process driven pop. A move away from X-Factor drivel. We need to get some youth anger and angst back into it. We also need some stars emerging that we’ll still want to listen to in 20 years. 

So let’s hope Tony Wilson was right and his theory did just skip a generation – otherwise we’ll have the ‘dead generations’ stalking the charts for the foreseeable future.

Bigger Pictures ?

Looking at the even bigger picture. Maybe its part of the whole drive for everything and everybody to be the same. Clothes, music, the shops we shop in, the look of our high streets. The nanny state will decide what is good for you and what is dangerous, we’ll all be the same, individuals will not be tolerated, it’s the route that capitalism is now driving us down and is not dissimilar to the communist doctrine that we so fight against. Regulate less and give us true freedom is what I say.