p e n g u i n d e v i l

A music scene where there are thousands and thousand of bands from scores of countries, no major labels involved and a fairly small fan-base who tend to share a distaste towards anything that gets too popular, leads to a deafening variety of music… Styles, bands, languages… There is so much going on in that genre that it’ almost too much. I think about it after spending too much time browsing around at last-fm. One thing that I like to do is look at the different Groups that one can join to see what bands the group members are listening to. What always strikes me is that I seem to come across three types of groups. The biggest one is where the band listened to by the most members in the last week is always “Radiohead”. This seems to be regardless of the attempted musical focus of the group. It just seems that everyone out there listens to Radiohead. But then there are the second group, sadly the common style for people interested in Vinyl collecting, where the top two bands listened to always seem to be Bob Dylan and The Beatles. I am always relieved to check out the Black Metal Groups where, when you go to their playlists, it seems that no one there listens to any of those bands. Frequently, there is such a wide range of bands listened to on those groups that I haven’t even heard of more than half of them. The whole notion of Pop music, especially national or international, seems so dull. I mean sure, there are bands that are good enough with a widely appealing sound who have worked hard enough to deserve widespread listening and recognition, but it seems like most music listener’s never seem to even look beyond top-40 or what their friends are listening to, and with the vast variety of music out there in the world, it just seems sad.

Since we’re on the subject of music, I happened to glimpse a bit of the Grammy’s tonight. Something that I haven’t done for many, many years. It seems very odd that they spend so little time actually televising the awards. It’s one crappy overblown “music” production after another. Then the occasional award being given to a bunch of dull music. And while I have to give props to Aretha Franklin, they needn’t have played her gospel piece, or they at least could have made it a bit shorter… But the whole concept is lost on me. I mean, what does it really mean to call one album “the best rock album of the year”? Is it the one that the people who voted listened to the most? The one that will have the most influence on future music? The one that had the most ground-breaking style? The most pleasant sounding one? The one with the songs that will get stuck in your head the most? The one that the most work went into? It’s all very strange.