Bad Music Is Like Bad Cars Is Like…

Call me a stickler, and you are very well entitled to that because I read this thing about my date of birth and what type of person I am, and it classifies me as a loner, which is true in a sense. I can be surrounded by thousands of people, but I can still mission around by myself. I’m happy going on my own missions at parties and in life, like I’ll sometimes just get in my car and drive…because I can. The freedom of the road is something all guys enjoy.

Another thing about my particular date of birth is that I like beautiful things. And that’s why I only buy things that I really want, items of clothing that I’ve thought about for a while, etc etc. So I’m particularly shocked when people have jobs, and produce shit that people know is shit, and then people actually still buy that shit.
Imagine me, picking up some dog shit in the morning, looking at it and going ‘This is shit’, and then selling it to 5FM. They go ‘Well our listeners are sheep, or pigs because they’re going to wallow in this shit all day and not actually think otherwise to maybe tune to another station, so we’ll pay for that shit’
The Ultimix at 6 on 5FM is like shit being inserted into my ears until it fills my head up. Do you know what happens when you smell shit all day? You get a shitty headache. And that’s what 5FM is doing to me, they’re giving me a shitty headache.

And you may very well be entitled to say ‘Well turn the radio off’, which is what I have done for the past 7 or so years. People always ask me ‘Did you hear so and so on the radio’ and my answer is always no. I exclusively play CD’s in my car, and at home I don’t have a radio connected. But I’ve been trying to listen to the radio to research this article. And I’ve realized that what’s worse than 5FM playing crap music, is the fact that people are actually making this music!

I just sometimes wonder about some things on earth, and I was watching Stephen Hawkings program on Discovery channel, and one of the basic laws of physics or science or something, is that nothing is perfect. Except Sean Lloyd (Subliminal messaging! You didn’t read this…but it’s in your head!)
So yes, nothing is perfect. So fat people, ugly people, short people…they are all just a certain product of the laws of the universe. Fair enough. And this is also the reason why Porsche manufactured the Cayenne, why BMW manufactured the X1, why a man and a woman gave birth to Lyle Lovett. Nothing. Is. Perfect.
And this is the reason why we have shit music. But to actually make a song that is crap and then release it out into the universe is beyond me. At least with an ugly child, you pomp, and then after that you have to leave it up to the beauty Gods. You can’t review your pomp, sculpt your sperm, eat healthier…you just leave it and see what happens. With music, you can change every step of the production process. You can write, record, find better bandmates, find better managers, play it to test audiences, rewrite, re record until it is perfect. So why do musicians not take advantage of this? As a musician, you have the power to remould your dreams. Music should be your dreams, and no one has shit dreams. Shit dreams are called nightmares, and you should not make recordings of your nightmares, because that’s just depressing!

And yet year after year we are subjected to the same shit on the airwaves! 5FM is like eating camel shit as your staple diet, with the finest sushi and gourmet sandwiches thrown in 10% of the time. It’s that 10% of the time when you rave to people how awesome the food is that you’re eating. You phone people and make a noise about it. In the same way that when 5FM play a good song, you turn the sound up to make a noise about it, you tweet about it and Facebook it. Whenever you have a lot of bad, it makes the good times so much sweeter. Wanking all the time is made worthwhile by that little bit of sex. Drinking box wine is made bearable by that fine red that you get given occasionally by your mate who is a wine taster. That R1500 pay check is made sweeter when that lottery win comes in.

So bad music gets made, ok, fair enough. But then radio stations still buy it! And play it. And people listen to it. So somewhere along the line, a filtering mechanism is not working, and that’s a problem. And the only filter that should really matter is the user/listener/audience filter. If the music is shit, don’t listen to it. But humans get these habits going, they’re bored during the day so they put the radio on. They mindlessly listen to music and absorb it. Modern radio stations are like old advertising. People saw adverts and immediately believed them. People assume that because a radio station is there, they should listen to it. That’s like seeing a monkey in front of you and thinking you should pomp it. It shares a lot of DNA with us…but it’s not us. In the same way that bad music has a lot in common with good music. Drums are used, guitars are used, voices are used, they’re burned to CD and shared on the internet. Except that small percentage that makes them different is the difference between amazing and bad. That small percentage difference is why good music makes you smile and laugh, and it’s why shit music makes you want to tear your ears off. In the same way, the small genetic difference between monkeys and humans allows humans to fly into space and invent whatever it is we feel like, and monkeys just have to sit around, eating stuff and making a damn noise. Hell, monkeys and bad music actually have a lot in common then. Bad. Noise.

And it’s going to take time to break this cycle, but luckily for us we do now have choices, we just need to make them. We have 2oceansvibe Radio, we have internet radio from around the world that we can access, we have streaming music, Last.fm, CD’s, MP3’s…we have an entire world out there, I just don’t understand why people still listen to traditional radio with all the crap they play. Commercial radio is like eating shit to wait for the sushi, it’s like being fat until you’re 90, only to be thin from 90 until 100, like having no IQ until you’re 90, only to be Einstein until you’re 100, when you proceed to die.

Remember people…5FM isn’t your only choice…

What I’m trying to say is that bad music, bad radio stations…we don’t need them and we have a choice to not listen to them. Let’s make that choice, let’s vote commercial radio stations out with our knobs, and lets vote private radio stations in with our mouse clicks.

Commercial radio is dead to me, bring on the revolution.