"The music business is a cruel and shallow money
trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and
good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
- Hunter S. Thompson, misquoted.
Hardly new ground to cover, I know. The whelpish Canadian professional mewler is already enough of a hate figure on the internet, most recently for saying that he '{doesn't} really believe in abortion'. Of course, unless there's some serious gender confusion going on there, he's somewhat unlikely to ever have one, and what's more doesn't seem to have grasped that unlike the existence of fairies, belief is not an essential part of the process, the issue being more about the availability of a competent obstetrician and a woman's right to control what goes on in her own velvet underground.
But that's a small reason to hate someone, especially someone who's sixteen. Christ, when I was sixteen I thought I could write poetry. So there's no underestimating the stupidity of youth. And people have said far stupider things about abortion, given that it's one of those issues that seems to invite male privilege and all the attendant idiocy. With that in mind, I'm not quite declaring myself for the Bieber hatedom. It's what he represents that I have trouble with.
Picture the scene. It's about three in the morning on a Sunday, and I'm back home after a long night out and a few drinks. Unwilling to go to bed, I find myself collapsed on the sofa with another drink (always a good idea), half-watching some kind of poker tournament with the sound off. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But during the ad break, a trailer for some kind of film about the exploits of everyone's most-vaguely-tolerated pubescent pop-R&B Canadian came on. This left me somewhat baffled, I admit. Who is watching TV at 3am, poker no less, and really, really wants to see an hour and a half of Justin Bieber? I mean, clearly he has fans; you can see hordes of teenage girls losing their collective shit at being within a mile of him. Fair play to them, I suppose, because when you're young you're allowed to do stupid things that you kick yourself for later.
So it wasn't even that that got me. It was the little fine-print strapline that flashed up for a second during this trailer, where you'd normally see little consumerist koans like 'offer void where prohibited'. And it read:
Contains no material likely to offend or harm
And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Montag household. Contains no material likely to offend or harm?! That right there is why western civilisation is doomed. I hope fervently for the day when the Chinese decide to get serious and we get to spend all day in forced labour camps building cinderblocks on the steppes of Mongolia, purely because on the day that happens, the person that brought us that sentence will be in there too.
Perhaps I should explain. I've done some music journalism. Nothing world-changing, or even that notable, but enough to feel invested in the state of the music business. Certainly I've always found it helpful to apply Sturgeon's Law; '90% of everything is shit'. But for fuck's sake, I don't think I've ever seen the reason why that's the case stated as boldy and as simply as in that tagline.
Contains no material likely to offend or harm. That seems to be the world we're heading for, and that leaves me a little conflicted. I love me some political correctness (but that's another rant), but when it gets to the point when everything has to be anodyne and encased in metre-thick cotton wool armour to prevent any unpleasantness from entering into the equation, as far as I'm concerned we might as well just give up and let humanity be ruled by sentient yoghurt, a la John Scalzi. At least then we'd have some culture.
Music is meant to embody passion and soul and love and hate and rebelling against your parents because, like, no-one really understands you. Yeah, a lot of it's bullshit. But you can either believe that or face the possibility that in the grand scheme of things nothing you ever do, say, feel or think will ever have the faintest amount of meaning, and that you will enter and leave this world utterly alone, having spent as much time as you got in utter pointlessness. I know which one I prefer.
Good music is inherently subversive, to my mind. Whether it's taking refuge in high camp or in the unspoken irony of thousands of people shouting, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me," at once and on command. This family-friendly, watered-down photoshopped bullshit will not stand, man. You might say, Montag, you grumpy bastard, this is just for kids, let them have their fun. Fuck that for a game of soldiers. MOR, AOR, the same thing's happening everywhere, real people losing out to the airbrushed master race of corporate-sponsored morons. And when the suede-denim secret police kick down your front door for listening to a singer who sounds like he's just smoked two dozen cartons of unfiltered cigarettes, downed a bottle of cheap bourbon and been punched in the throat a couple of times for good measure, don't say I didn't warn you.