Re: Why does mainstream seem more like , downstream these days?

[tEd ® KiLLiAn <tedkillian@charter.net>]

Many good points being made.

But, the original question doesn't seem to be asking about the state  
of "avant-garde" or "experimental" music so much as it is addressing  
the other side of the issue: "popular music" . . . the "mainstream."

Perhaps "mainstream" seems like "downstream" because the cynical  
industrial machinery behind creating each new mainstream "next big  
thing" itself never seems to change very much.

It only seems to get more efficient and exacting at seamlessly  
creating new clones of things that were already mega-successful in  
strict money-making terms.

This decade's latest blonde bimbette slut-singer (Lady Gaga) is much  
like last decade's (Madonna - or whoever).

This week's teenage pretty-boy heart-throb idol (Justin Bieber) is not  
substantively different than last week's or last year's (Justin  
Timberlake).

This year's country boy with a guitar, a big hat, an American flag,  
and a enormous tour bus . . . or this era's dangerous outlaw urban bad  
boy "gangsta" in oversized shorts and backwards hat hardly represent  
new wrinkles on what went before them either.

The greedy maw of the machinery behind the process that develops them,  
gives birth to them, and then sucks them dry, also delivers to their  
immediate replacements in an ever faster stream of salacious  
odiousness without even batting a fake eyelash.

The basic changes seems to be only the most incremental surface  
changes to already established, proven successful, forms.

The sluts get a little sluttier, the pretty boys get a little  
prettier, the cowboy hats (and their flags) get a lot bigger, and the  
gangstas get more "dangerous" and mock defiant.

The mainstream seems more like downstream because it actually is -  
none of this entertainment industry stuff has anything to do with Art.

Certainly these folks are creative, artful and talented - but they are  
exploiting whatever gifts they have been given to feed "the beast" of  
the industry.

Many of the same attitudes and much of the same industrial mechanism  
that infects "pop" music also infect "art music" these days.

 From "classical" through the "avant-garde" many who begin as  
passionate unique idiosyncratic artists get caught up in their own  
marketing plans and become mere shells of what they were at first - as  
soon as significant amounts of money becomes involved.

And, we all would be guilty of the same if we were given opportunity -  
we all desire to be "successful" in some fashion.

We all would make similar sorts of compromises to "deal" with the  
beast if circumstances presented the opportunity . . . all of us . . .  
the temptation would be irresistible.

Thank goodness I am neither pretty, sexy, or particularly talented.

The beast will never come looking for me . . . never . . . and I know  
it.

My invisibility is an advantage though.

I can still work on killing the beast, or at least work at putting a  
few crooked nails in it's coffin.

To me, that's the work of an artist: working toward the ultimate  
destruction of the beast that would take all that is creative, life- 
affirming and good and send it "downstream" to the same, greedy, money- 
making cesspit.

Mainstreem is downstream - whether it seems so or not.

ˇViva la revolución!

Ted

On Feb 14, 2011, at 2:14 AM, andy butler wrote:

> William Walker wrote:
>
>> .Why does mainstream seem more like downstream these days? discuss...
>> Bill
>
> perhaps because the so called Avant Garde has hardly progressed  
> since the 1950's
>
> andy