A Rebel With a Clue
O ccasionally, I get on a rant about the sorry state of what is referred to as popular music. It cycles through phases, and I believe that the present represents low ebb in the state of music. It is harder to find anything of quality to listen to, and radio is the last place I turn for solace. In fact, I have never turned to radio, even when I was young and naïve enough to think that I would find something there. I used to browse the record shops – Record Museum and Sound Odyssey back in the old days and Tower Records more recently – wondering how record companies could manufacture all these records by thousands of artists, yet I would only hear a small fraction of them on commercial radio. As I grew older and more cynical, (i.e. realistic about the way the world works), I would come to realize that it had little or nothing to do with talent or mass appeal. What really mattered was the amount of money that the record label could throw at the station to get them to play their songs. T...