Euthanasia needed to speed rebirth of American music

For the summer I resumed a job I had worked before I transferred to Pitt. One of my most… For the summer I resumed a job I had worked before I transferred to Pitt. One of my most constant gripes while working there was about the radio station. While I was considering begging for my old job back, the memory of being forced to listen to WINK 104 FM for eight hours a shift reared its head, then bowed it and pleaded with me to find another job. I dismissed the memory as a childish gripe. I needed (and still need) the money, so I did beg and I got my job back.

I never listen to the radio in my car. I listen to CDs while driving, and mp3s while at home, so I don’t have a favorite station with which I can contrast WINK. The music certainly isn’t of the genre I’d choose, and before I get into why it’s more than just a difference in preference and that the music is genuinely evil, I’d like to set the mood.

When Liz Phair’s epic exploration of all that’s insipid and base about the modern woman, “Extraordinary,” first broke airwaves, WINK 104’s disc jockey broke my faith in the eternal reverence all great music commands. The garbled riffs and mangled rodent whelps wound down and some phoney, deep-voiced man came on proudly announcing, “That was Liz Phair with her new song that marks the return of grunge.”

Yes, friends, the man called her music grunge. It might be filth, but grunge it’s not. I suppose there is a fine line between petulance and angst, and a finer line still between an introvert’s artistic expression and a glitter girl mewling for attention. But, most of the people who can’t distinguish them also can’t distinguish “their” from “there.”

Therein lies the truly offensive part. It’s not just that the radio station is playing what it thinks the people want. Long ago, I accepted the influence that corporations and political forces have on entertainment. However, I’ve never really thought there was some man sitting somewhere trying to stamp out originality and genuine expression. I couldn’t believe anyone would knowingly steal important music from us. I’d assumed it was a byproduct, an externality, caused by people fighting for every cent. After another month of listening to WINK, I’m convinced they’re trying to make us all more stupid, and they’re insulting us as they do it.

I’ll go to another popular song I heard when I last worked this job, Clay Aiken’s “Invisible,” to demonstrate this point. This is a song to which, the DJs assure us, women swoon. The ability to make a woman swoon is quite the gift, and so I paid a little extra attention to the words Clay was using in the hopes of learning something. And, I was shocked to discover, the song was about his stalker side and not the pathetic poet side his tone proclaimed it to be about. “If I was invisible, then I could just watch you in your room/If I was invincible, I’d make you mine tonight.”

Here’s what the entertainment industry is saying to us with Clay’s song: We can put any dweeb we want on television — give him an album and you’ll listen to it. We’ll overplay it, and we’ll get rich from you. You’re so dumb that we can have him say he wants to watch you undress (without your knowledge) and that if he wasn’t so weak he’d make you his, which some of us call rape — and ladies, they know you’ll think that’s romantic. And guys, you’ll assume it is because of how the ladies react.

Our generation is trapped. We need a battle cry. The hippies had the newborn rock ‘n’ roll to rally around. We have its twitching corpse at our feet. Perhaps a little euthanasia will speed up the rebirth of American music and give us all something important to play on our radios, iPods, CD players and, of course, to use as our ring tones. Until then, pay attention to the lyrics of these songs.

Just because they play it between “Mr. Jones” and “All Apologies” doesn’t mean it’s not crap.