Damn you, Todd Storz

I just read an article from where I discovered the story of the birth of Top 40. Around 1949, Storz watched teenagers playing the same songs over and over again on a jukebox and started to wondering: why can’t radio be like that? “If the kids want to hear what was popular, then let’s give them what is popular over and over again. Advertisers loved the idea because there was never any controversy. Only the most inoffensive stuff with the broadest appeal could crack the Top 40. The format was a godsend to people worried about sex and race and rock and roll.”

So we know the name of least one of the villains.

To rant off against Top 40 or best seller lists is to rant against the most basic of human tendencies. I’ll do it anyway but this is the noble aspect I run up against. As soon as I hear some great music I want to share it with someone; I want everyone to start listening to it. I also find it much more satisfying discussing with someone a band or a song they know rather than music only one of us has heard. Its the shared culture thing. Leaving aside issues of quality for the time being, Top 40 like Seinfeld or Buffy or Stephen King ro any other relatively popular body of work gives us common ground.

But, then we run up against the tyranny of the majority or in unkinder terms the dominance of crap. Like almost everyone I know, I hate mass market radio, and mass market culture in general. For some reason, mass market radio seems baser in the context of music than lousy books in the context of fiction. Maybe it is because it is omnipresent and impossible to not hear. If someone is reading drivel near you, it doesn’t seep into your brain.

And its not the case where if you are exposed to good stuff you’ll not go towards Top 40. My daughter, now 12, grew up on Nirvana, Pixies, Beatles, Traffic, Chili Peppers, and though she still likes Frank Black, she is also bopping to Hollaback Girl, various Idol winners and all kinds of what sounds to me as substandard material. I am waiting to see what kind of a music listening adult she will become. And don’t get the impression that I think that classic rock listeners are ahead in this game. Though I think there is a lot of very good music back then listening to the same stuff over and over again just doesn’t work for me.

I’ve always found music to be a learning experience as much as entertainment and I know that translates into an elitism at times which I can’t quite come to terms with. Because at the bottom of it all, I know that we all listen to what makes us feel good and then later make up our reasons as to why it is good.

That’s it for the intro/ramble . Another one of those topic its hard to stay focussed on. But even if Top 40 is naturally human, I still excorciate Todd Storz. The bastard’s little offspring is peeing in every pool I swim in.

Oh, and if one more person tells me that Christine Aguilera can really sing, I will kill them. SHE CANNOT SING! Bjork can sing. Lots of people can sing but if Aguilera has a voice she doesn’t have the music brain to make it work. Its kind of like when people used to say that Madonna was a smart businesswoman as though that should make me like her music. No. Sorry. And I don’t admire her. Smart business women are all over the place but I will not buy their cds; don’t really care whether somebody is smart or not as long as they make good music. Gotta go now, out of time.