Yes, Dear Reader, I'm back.
DRaftervoi: The hot knife in your buttery online world is here to CHALLENGE thee with a task, nay, verily, a QUEST!
For starters:
What do these people have in common:
John Lennon, Harry Chapin, Sibelius, and John Cougar?
Well, beside the fact they're all white guys, they're all dead. Yeah, I know, Cougar's technically still alive, but the way he runs through cigarettes and cheeseburgers, it won't be long before he's an Indiana worm farm. And besides, since he killed off the "Cougar" stage name, you could make a case that there is no "John Cougar" at all, there's just that John Mellonball fellow. So: four dead guys.
At this point, I can hear you saying, "Okay, DRaftervoi, they're dead. So freakin' what?"
It's my major premise that the youthful soul of your average baby boomer is so much grisly gutspilled roadkill on time's highway, and that the baby boomers' ability to absorb new and challenging musical ideas was left curbside like a dead skunk somewhere back in 1976.
Why is this important? In the grand, sweeping cosmic view of things, it's not. If you're talking about the final, end-of-time, zero degrees Kelvin, cessation-of-all-Brownian-molecular-motion, Heat Death Of The Universe, well, it's pretty small potatoes. This is just another jackass rant by another message board attention whore. But I'm guessing you'll stick with me to the end of the page, just to see where I'm going with it.
Baby boomers are musically conservative. Look at the lists presented here of fave music (mine included); almost to a man, it's all old, dead people, or people that passed their creative peak somewhere back during the Ford Administration. Baby boomers are responsible for the airwaves tyranny of "classic rock" and "oldies" radio formats; a format for people who DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ANY NEW MUSIC. I can imagine no fate more horrible than to have my musical taste frozen like a fossil fly in amber, preserved unchanged for millennia.
This attitude leads to the familiar litany you hear on the boomer boards all the time: "I like all types of music. Except for rap. But that's not REALLY music." This kind of boneheaded, ignorant blather is usually made by someone who's never actually LISTENED to a rap song all the way through; their only exposure comes from having a group of surly black teenagers pull up next to them at a stoplight with the stereo blasting, and start giving them the greasy evil eyeball. We like the cars that go boom, indeed. Well, "shoop" this, folks: "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash was one of the greatest records of the last 50 years. Start there, and work your way up through N.W.A's "Straight Outta Compton", and then you'll only be a decade out of date.
And claiming you're "with it" because of a nodding familiarity with your daughter's Christina Aguilera (the thinking man's Brittany Spears) CDs is like our parents pretending they're "hep" because that really "dig" that nice Pat Boone fellow. If you ever hear me spout a fountain of crap like that, take me out behind the barn and dispatch me with the edge of a shovel.
So I say: wake up, throw that left over Sixties Classic Rock that you've heard a million times into the dustbin of history, where it should have been tossed circa 1975, put down the freakin' cafe latte, and get down to the CD store AND BUY SOMETHING RECORDED IN THE 1990s.
There you go: Take the DRaftervoi Challenge: Buy a completely NEW artist working in a modern style, and come back here and write about it. No cheating: none of that retro neo-swing stuff, no "country rock", no no NO GODDAMNED SINGER SONGWRITERS. We're talking up-to-the-last-decade stuff like Catatonia, the Manic Street Preachers, the Fun Lovin Criminals, Primal Scream, Apollo 440, Cornershop, Blur, Skunk Anansie, the eels, Radiohead...the big major groups of the last ten years.
I will take the same challenge, and report back to you in a week. Don't tell me you can't afford it, or haven't got the time: the way some of you spend all your time indoors stuck like a starfish on valium to a computer screen, you ought to thank me for getting you out in the sun and preventing a Vitamin D deficiency.
Юå±êrvÕ¡: The 43,152nd hardest working man in show business
P.S. And as long as I'm at it: What the hell is up with Diana Ross' hair? It looks like a freakin' Chia Pet; no wonder the tour tanked.