Actually, DON'T explain her appeal to me

Recently while replying to a dear friend's blog post, I went on a (somewhat off-topic, I'll admit) rant about the sorry state of commercial radio.  Contrary to their claims that they provide invaluable exposure to new artists, I retorted that mainstream radio plays only those acts hand-picked by the music industry at large as potential platinum-sellers.  This involves playing styles of music which, by and large, I regard as at best irrelevant and at worst unlistenable.  Further, I made the claim that I hadn't heard any musician I liked and subsequently followed on the radio for the first time since I was nine (likely either Nirvana or Guns and Roses, judging from the age).  This last was, of course, an exaggeration and an infamy.  I was probably closer to twelve.

As my long-time readers (all six of you) have doubtless noticed, my tastes in music run somewhat to the extreme and eclectic.  This is, however, a relatively recent development--not until I by and large renounced mainstream radio for more inclusive sources of information (chiefly the Internet) did I discover such artists and musical styles.  As an example, allow me to present Godflesh.



Fronted by Justin Broadrick, this English industrial-metal band was active between 1988 and 2002, recently reuniting for several European festival dates.  Though not my favorite band by any stretch (I do not, at present, own any of their albums), I like them quite a lot.

Think about this for a few moments.  This band formed in 1988, released seven full-length albums (including one remix album), seven EPs, two singles, and three compilations, played innumerable concerts and festival dates, then broke up in 2002 in a not-unspectacular manner, with Broadrick suffering a nervous breakdown and canceling a tour at the last minute (financially ruining himself in the process).

And, until about 2007, I knew not a thing about any of this.

Before you ask--no, this band was by no means obscure.  By the time of their dissolution Godflesh had acquired a formidable international reputation, with many bands (both very good and very, very bad) citing them as influences.  Glenn Danzig attempted to recruit Justin Broadrick as a guitarist.  No less a personage than Kirk Hammett declared Godflesh to be "the heaviest band in existence".  They appeared on the soundtrack of a really shitty wide-release movie.

And yet not once did the tiny men in my mom's car radio see fit to play one of their songs.

You might be tempted to argue "C., you sheltered twat, clearly you weren't listening to the right stations!  Godflesh might have been big-ish, but they were never Top 40 material!"  That's a good point, actually.  Why, was I not listening to the stations geared to this sort of music?  I can't think of a single reason--oh, right, there fuckin' weren't any.  Not out in the redneck hellhole where I spent the bulk of my formative years, at least.  (Funnily enough, my family was actually friends with the family who ran the local radio station.  Decent people, but they wouldn't have known an eclectic musical style if it bit them on the collective ringpiece.)  This is getting back to the problem of commercial radio only playing the sort of music they think will make them money.  "The free market has spoken!" they say.  "Lowbrow pop and corporate rock is the best music in the world, because people listen to it!  More Ke$ha singles for all!"

Well, balls to that I say.  Much as I hate to turn this into a political/economic rant, it's becoming more and more clear that a free-market ideology is no way to run an economic system, so why the almighty hell would you use it as a gauge of artistic merit?  Nothing is more subjective than musical taste--there's a reason the "pop" in "pop music" stands for "popular" and not "good".  My theory is that many people are, by nature, somewhat uncultured and desperate to be seen as "fitting in", so by and large they listen to/buy what people around them are listening to/buying.  For every diehard, true-blue Lady Gaga fan (and can one of those people explain her appeal to me?  I ask in all seriousness, there must be something I'm missing) there are ten copycats trying to look cool, and those copycats then get copycats of then own...you get the idea.

Noticing this, the blind idiot god Mainstream Media proceeds to pump out even more product (at this stage it can no longer be fairly called music) similar in style to that of the profitable artist.  "One Lady Gaga makes money," it thinks, "so ten Lady Gagas will make ten times as much money!"  It never works quite that well, but well enough for the industry to do it over and over and over.  This phenomena is by no means confined to the music industry, of course, but to go into any more detail than that would make this already-too-long post even longer.

Hence, a pop-culture Ouroboros is formed, with the serpent's head of the Music Industry swallowing the tail of the Mass Market.  Or is it the other way around?  No matter, I suppose the metaphor works either way.  Meanwhile dozens of legitimately original and talented artists, foolish enough to view a major-label deal as their "big break", wither and die, unnoticed by all except those true fans not cool enough to attract sufficient hangers-on.


I suppose in the end, I mean this post as a love letter to the Internet, possibly the world's first and only form of disinterested mass media (for the moment, at least).  Without it, I never would have known Godflesh--or any of Justin Broadrick's other musical projects, for that matter.  Most people alive today still equate "listening to music" with "listening to the radio" in their minds, and yet it wasn't until I got the hell away from radio that my musical tastes started to develop a unique personality.

Curious, no?