Well, it’s official, the heat has melted my brain and I don’t feel like writing a story. But what to do? Hummm, how about some news? Yeah that’s it, I could write about rock news. Let’s see….
There’s some poll in Rolling Stone about how Van Halen I is the top 5th album of the 70s. There are articles commemorating Elton John having a garage sale and selling off all his stuff, some year ago. There is an article where Rod Stewart said he’d never play with Jeff Beck because, well, he still hates Beck. I saw something sad about young Jack Osbourne’s wife Lisa suffering a miscarriage, sorry Lisa and Jack. I saw a reference to Sebastian Bach turning down the offer to replace Vince Neil in Motey Crue a long time ago and lamenting over that. I saw this current tour bill featuring Alice in Chains and Jane’s Addiction, and thought, hey it’s the Alice and Jane tour. But here’s the thing, I don’t like anniversaries, not very much anyway, and I REALLY don’t like polls or surveys or whatever those things are called, and the rest of that doesn’t seem like news, except Jack and Lisa, and yes, I again say I’m sorry to them. So while in the what-to-do phase, I put on the radio, alternating between my hard-core, slightly electronic music/rap music pop station and my “alternative rock” station, looking for inspiration, looking for news inspiration, specifically. BTW, personally, I think classic rock on Sunday is something to sleep to, okay I know, the five hours (or whatever it is) of the Beatles is really great, but I don’t know, I want something new, especially on Sunday morning.
And that made me think what I always think. I think radio is too stratified, so stratified that this almost-exclusive rock audience would have little idea about anything other than classic rock because you NEVER hear it. I could tell you stuff about what I think about certain pop songs and why they seem much more rock now and therefore you might actually like them. I could tell you that David Ghetta (he’s an electronic dance music dj) is on yet another song; he seems to be featured on almost every pop star’s song that I like as of late, giving a very different bottom end to pop music – a much edgier bottom sound, and a good thing, especially for those of us who are tired of the rap/hip-hop influences in pop music. Another btw: the current song is one with Enrique Iglasias, whom I heard some dj introduce as 50-something, probably mistaking Enrique for his dad Julio, which made me laugh, although I’m not really sure I got that right. And before you go to sleep or want to throw something at me for even talking about pop music, let’s see. Well, I did hear something kind of cool on the alternative station yesterday. I heard the dj going on an on about how David Bowie is rumored to be on this single to be released tomorrow, September 9, from a current-ish “indie”, “alternative” band called Arcade Fire, a combination that appears to have played before live but not on recordings (at least according to my Youtube search). I checked out that dj’s report, and that seems to be the trending story. I even tried to link the leaked David Bowie on Arcade Fire single, but every place I try has the link removed already. I guess we can wait until tomorrow though for the single’s actual release.
So this seems as good a topic as any, but for me it goes deeper, and here’s what I’m thinking. If the alternative rock dj could go all goo-goo-ga-ga about David Bowie on an alternative station, then why is there this stratification in radio? Why are there all these formats to rock? It seems to me if you pick up a guitar and play and you call it rock, it should be rock. Why is there such a split between old and new such that the people who listen to “new” never hear “classic” and the people who listen to “classic” never hear “new”? Perhaps I’m going to study that some more because I’m pretty sure the answer for music, for rock music’s “classic” artists to be fully relevant now, lies in figuring that out. And how amazingly cool would it be if we didn’t have to figure out the answers to those questions? How cool would it be if one little song with David Bowie on it could prompt the “new” to embrace the “classic” so completely that the “new” music stations would play the new music of the “classic” rock artists (new in quotes because I don’t think the stuff from the 90s that still plays on the alt-stations is actually still new)? I believe, if that happened, classic artists’ work would sell like crazy, I believe music tastes would shift, I believe some new-classic artist’s song would hit people like those songs from Van Halen I did and we wouldn’t be celebrating “classic” rock anniversaries like they are all that matter, and (Whisper looking up as if in prayer and hearing a little imaginary chorus playing church music) we could stop having polls!
So on the eve of David Bowie being the first of these “old guys” to play on “new” stations, at least so far as I’ve noticed, I say Godspeed Mr. Bowie, and may this little leaked single break it ALL open. Oh how I would love to have guitar invade it all. I can hear it now, producers everywhere wanting that Van Halen I guitar sound on their next pop record, or … David Ghetta could put some beat track on a classic rock guy’s song, then we could call that pop and all stations would have guitar. Aw, a girl can dream….
(Photo: David Bowie and Arcade Fire)
Song: