yes, I sound ridiculous. But that is because I was wasting my time replying to you.

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No tongue, my lipstick!

vice magazine is boring. it is this year, and it was last year too... oh and the year before that and the year before that. its semi-decent collage source material, only for the free factor - and still that's only when someone else drags it home... but yeah boring boring boring.

Well, if it helps, I'm pretty indifferent to 70s punk and it pisses me off too. It wouldn't be so bad, but they don't even rip off the stuff I like.

People act like there's a limit on how original they can be, like they have to go back to the 70s or the 80s or whatever. But I don't know where they get that. Pop music (popular music, rather than bubblegum pop girl bands or whatever) has, for the last fifty years, mostly stayed within a very small range of ideas musically. Most pop uses the same small group of instruments in the same few combinations, the same few chords in limited combinations, the same few rhythms and so on, to the point where even someone who sets out to do something original generally doesn't look beyond the guitar/bass/drums line-up, for example. Electronic stuff is a bit more varied, but even then, as it gets more readily available, people use less and less imagination. It's shit when you hear a record and not only know that it was made on Reason, but can identify the presets, given how easy it is to customise them only very slightly and instantly make something less generic.

It's lame to preach, I know, and I won't pretend I'm doing anything much better, but it really is frustrating when you hear musicians in particularly moaning about the bland state of music, when they're doing as little about it as anyone else.

No idea what happened to my original post, but it was of Russell Mael making the comment on how pop music today has become bland and uninspired. Like nobody is taking chances or deviating from a standard formula.
This is Sparks we're talking about here. The polar opposite from little on experimentation.

And without going "underground," just the mainstream stuff, it has become very bland and dull. Just spend an hour on your local pop station to see this. It sounds like a solid hour of Mariah Carey or Avril when in truth it's more like 7 or so different singers. THEY ALL SOUND THE SAME!

The one hit wonders of the 80's in pop music were far more experimental then this tired, sampled, digitized beatfest of today.

It's the rock folk that bother me more. Pop at least occasionally comes up with an interesting gimmick, but rock seems to think that, because it has a few guitars, it is inherently Better Than Pop and thus exempt from having to be original, interesting or innovative. There are exceptions, but they're not usually the people who complain the loudest.

The best example, and a great victory, was when Coldplay and the Crazy Frog were jockeying for the number one slot on the singles chart. You actually had people calling foul, like it was the modern equivalent of the Sex Pistols being stiffed out of a number 1, rather than just a case of the Coldplay song being bland even by their standards. People seemed to think that they were somehow owed a hit, or that it would be some great victory over pop. It makes me angry really, because it's the kind of thinking that keeps music bland. The pop stuff is meant to be bland, or at least accessible (and you can be accessible without being bland, obv.), but when people who are supposedly the opposition to that kind of music are making equally bland music and still thinking they're somehow better. All they're really doing most of the time is playing bad, gimmickless pop songs on guitars instead of synths, and I don't understand how so many people are fooled into thinking that they're not.

Sparks probably had an advantage in a way, in having come to prominence when stuff like punk was happening - they had to actually WORK to be interesting.