Critical Hype - Radio Glee

(I'm back. Did you miss me?)

I am well known amongst my friends for being pretentious. Alright, let's be honest: anyone who talks to me for more than five minutes knows I'm a horribly pretentious snob that hates fun. Passionately. So it probably shouldn't surprise you that I don't have fond feelings for Fox's new foremost show, Glee. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the show consists of the poorly scripted antics of a Glee club, interspersed with autotuned musical numbers that make Rent look exciting. It's not exactly high art, even for television.

So why do I care? After all, I barely watch television as it is, so why can't I leave well enough alone? That link I embedded should make things clear. To summarize, the cast of Glee (who, may I remind you, can't sing a note without the aid of computers) are now the foremost musical group in history, in regards to the Billboard charts. Yes, they are now, at least on one level, more successful than the Beatles.

I'm mad. I'm so mad that I can't even swear properly. Half an hour's gone by without me taking the name in vain; I'm sure my coworkers must believe I've gone catatonic. This is the final sign of how awful pop music has become, the surest signal I've seen yet that the music industry has drowned itself in an ocean they weren't even aware of. Pop is dead.

Which makes it very ironic that the modern era is what has brought us the insulting 'poptimist' movement. They assert that one should not judge empty, vapid pop music harshly, because even it displays a particular brilliance of songwriting. Fuck you, no it doesn't. Let's ignore the Tin Pan Alley written-by-committee aspect of most pop for a moment and address simple content: do you honestly intend to compare "Umbrella" with "Suzanne"? Danceability and hooks-per-minute are not competent measures of musical quality; emotion, lyrical depth, and lyrical/melodic complexity are.

I'm not arguing in favor of complexity for complexity's sake. I hate math rock and progressive metal as much as most other people. What I'm arguing for is a sense of human connection. You know I love blues music? It's not because it was recorded on impossibly shitty equipment (which has no bearing on anything other than when the artists were alive and how poor most of them were), it's because, despite the poor fidelity, you still feel something when you listen to those songs. I do, at least.

The more committee driven music becomes, the more we allow computers to perfect every pitch, and the less people care about where the music is coming from, the less authentic and emotional it becomes. It's not difficult to make people feel cheerful and upbeat, but it is difficult to make them think of something. Good music, really good music, elicits a response either by reminding you of something in your past or making you believe in what the singer says. This isn't easy, which is why artists are a rare breed. Everyone can make dance music (remember disco?). An Avon lady could make a competent pop song, given enough time and a crack team of producers to back her up. But no one remembers her for more than a few minutes.

Genre Dictionary - Twee As Fuck

EDIT: Changed title from "Fuck Twee" to the above in order to keep up my formatting. My sentiments, however, remain unchanged.

People who love/enjoy/appreciate the current trend of indie/twee music will often cite its ‘happiness’ as a reason for their own adoration. This is happiness in contrast with the ‘anger’ or ‘sorrow’ or ‘threatening atmosphere’ of rock music. Twee music is constructed from the same cookie cutter as dance music, except that dance music occasionally pushed some kind of boundary (see: Michael Jackson, Madonna, or even Lady Gaga) while twee seems content to wallow in its kiddie pool, dressed up in second-hand clothes and making ‘cute’ little remarks. It’s that cuteness that really gets me; that insistence that being random and silly is somehow preferable to acting like you have some semblance of dignity/class. I can see a fat man dancing (poorly) outside a window and it somehow seems like the perfect simile to use. The only people that find these twee-as-fuck nitwits cute or funny are people with similar outlooks on life. Everyone else (myself very obviously included) simply see an insufferable git prancing about as if their Target-bought shirt with a ‘clever’ slogan is somehow original, despite the fact that 10,000 copies of the exact same thing have been sold nation-wide.

More interesting to me is the supposedly negative aspect of rock music. Somehow, the passion embodied by such music is labeled as a bad thing. I’m the first to admit that sometimes things can get out of hand (as in gangster rap) put decided that anger and sorrow are somehow cliché and overplayed is a bit presumptuous. For better or worse, art can contain/represent emotions across the entire spectrum. Rap ranges from the cheerful and silly (“Birthday Party” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five) to the embittered and inward looking (“Message” by… Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five). Neither end of the spectrum is necessarily bad, but only one of the songs above is considered a hip-hop classic (hint: it isn’t the song with kazoo).

“But wait,” you might say, “’not necessarily bad’? Aren’t you contradicting yourself?” Of course not. I hate twee music because of how it deliberately scorns any emotion deeper than insufferable cheerfulness. I’d call it Mary Poppins music, but even that movie had a range of emotion (compare “Spoonful of Sugar” to “Chim Chim Chiree”) while twee music, as I said before, wallows. It’s a matter of execution; the darker emotions are seen equally in punk and emo, but I only like the former because the latter often gets a bit too cliché for my tastes. Same thing with black metal compared to classic metal; it’s a matter of degree. I’m not saying people who prefer the overblown, in your face emotion of, say, Linkin Park have bad taste. I’m implying it.

It’s a matter of degree and also one of ego. The perception that twee music is fundamentally better than darker music is absurd; mainly because (as I addressed above) other genres are far from homogenous. Hell, singular artists/bands aren’t homogenous (“Folsom Prison Blues” vs. “Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog”; “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” vs. “I Got You (I Feel Good)”; “Love Me Tender” vs. “Jailhouse Rock”; etc.) so how could their respective genres be that way? There’s no use/point/need for a genre devoted to silly clichés. That’s what the radio is for.

PS: Fuck Jason Mraz