R&B has taken over

While working tonight on some code, I had the TV on and flipped around the music channels, and I noticed something strange. I flipped around between MTV, MTV2, and VH1, and everything was either rap, R&B, or hybrid pop, which seems these days to sound like a mix between sensitive singing/songwriting and R&B. Peppered in here was tame crap like the new Green Day non-punk slow garbage and the 80's sounding vanilla stuff No Doubt sings lately. Even the White Stripes are coming out with tame crap. Nice job, douchebags. And the rap wasn't even good rap. I love good rap. This shit is rap love songs or club anthems.

We're getting to an age of music reminiscent of the 80's again. Music is non-threatening, non-angry, non-intellectual, non-thought provoking. Take a look at 80's videos. You see weird meaningless montages, love songs, songs about partying, meaningless nonsense. Look familiar?

And yes, I know there's music out there that's good. What interests me is the mainstream. This is what most of the nation is listening to. There's a reason why if you turn on rock radio stations, all you hear is the songs from the 90's. Certain genres are absolutely stagnant right now, in terms of what's being created for the mainstream.

I'm trying to remember when this started. Did we start backing away from any sort of challenging and creative music after 9/11? Did that scare us out of good music? It could just be cyclical. The 70's had a lot of earthshaking music that pushed boundaries and commented on politics, the 80's were a lot of nonsense and fluff, and the 90's had a lot of opening of doors and breaking down of walls between genres. Maybe we're due for generic shit. Maybe we have to wait a few more years for people to wake up and want something more challenging.

One interesting side note is that if you want to hear any rock at all, actual rock(contrary to popular belief, Coldplay is not rock), you have to actually change over to Country stations, I shit you not. When you consider rock and roll in the original Elvis and Beatles sort of rocking, you can't get that anywhere but mainstream country at that point, and that's just *weird*. A lot of it isn't any good, but god help them, they're trying to rock out and tell a story. That's more than I can say of most of the other genres.