Corporate Rock

My biggest disappointment in modern civilization is the destruction of any kind of American culture by our corporate system. To see this first hand, just look at where we shop. I remember the day when one knew the merchants that we purchased our goods from. I always enjoyed chatting with our local grocer when my family made its weekly pilgrimage to Delpino’s groceries to procure our share of American agricultural abundance. In the summer, the vegetables would come from local truck farmers. We would pass our future meat on the road to town. The shops where we spent our money were owned by the people who waited on you. There was an excellence in service, a quality of goods and a pleasure in the experience which cannot be matched in a mall. We all buy our clothes from the same haberdashery run by a suit in some far off office building. Every American mall is populated by the same ticky tack stores. One nation under one brand for all.

Ray Kroc changed the American diet along with our farming system. McDonalds gave birth to the prepackaged nonsense that folks call meals today. He had a great hand in burying the American family owned farm. We now buy our food from a food industry armed with hypodermic needles and chemicals to speed its tasteless tidbits to our table. How could so many jaws gnash Big Macs unless the cattle themselves were somehow engineered to get from the pasture to the table in the blink of an eye? I have never had a burger at McDonalds, Burger King or Wendy’s for one reason. When you drive by one of these clip joints to admire their extra big flags waving in the breeze, take a deep breath. Do you really want to eat something that smells like that? I don’t mind that corporations run our government or that they destroyed our taste buds or even that they produce a race of workers more tired eyed and dull with each passing year. I have little love for these culture vultures because they changed one of the most important elements of our heritage—our music.

As a musician, I have been watching and wincing at the hostile takeover of our music for years. It most certainly started when large record companies realized that, although Elvis shook his hips in sexual frenzy, sang songs that were from the murky southern black culture and was not the brightest bulb in the box, he was cute enough to sell and Little Richard was not. Suddenly, Pat Boone, Bobby Rydell and countless other purveyors of tasty paste were leading the charge to sell rock and roll. There were a few years in the sixties, seventies and eighties, when rock and roll refused to be a slave to fashion, but these years no longer have any relevance. The birth of MTV and synths started to make musicians irrelevant also. What you saw became as important as what you heard. Seeing a concert now is like watching an exercise class at the local YMCA with the music turned up to a deafening level. The first one to realize that you could produce record sales from the tone deaf was my favorite frozen icon, Walt Disney. He started with The Mickey Mouse Club. He knew that if you could put the same smiling faces on the tube at the same time every day, you would have the first artistic assembly line. Design it. Manufacture it. Sell it. Over and over and over. Even my first wet dreams were products of Uncle Walt. Annette jumping from the roof of my parents house floating gently through the suburban sky buoyed by her flesh balloons directly onto my love lap. Fresh from the freezer, Walt has recently given us the most overvalued piece of musical furniture of all time—Brittany Spears.

The final coup that killed American music was American Idol. “Idol”…an object of excessive or blind adoration. This show should be titled, “Screeching for Dollars”. They are pretty. They are young. They are vapid. Just yesterday I got to view the newest in the line of prepackaged musical pimples, Justin Bieber. This kid, dressed in clown sneakers two sizes too big for him, was doing his best to be white ghetto. He even grabbed his hairless crotch a few times. He is a wonderful example of the genius of modern orthodontics, but a root canal without pain relief for the treble clef. He had about twenty buff black men in back of him doing jumping jacks as he swam around each note trying to settle on his favorite. Where or where were the musicians? Either hiding in shame behind a curtain or captured in a can to be turned on and off by a grizzled sound man. Drums are machines. Pianos are computers. Strings, horns and background vocals are bits and bytes. The musician has been abandoned and the aerobics instructor has taken his rightful place on stage. This dreck is so dull it hurts.

I would rather have a good story teller with no physical beauty seated on a stool singing from his heart than a pretty face spewing drivel as he grimaces his way into millions of sales. So if you want to participate in a process as undemocratic as a general election, here are your instructions. To cast your vote, text 911 for musicians and 000 for entertainers.

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