Shine On, You Crazy Topaz

Floyd.  So much of what is totally absent in pop music today -- mystery, musicianship, perfectionism, layers.  Four guys going into a warehouse to jam on e minor to a7 for four hours every day for a month or so.  Going into the studio for a year.  Sweating over every pad, fill, transition, riff.  The idea that a recording isn't just some fucking marketing tool, but a piece of art in itself.  Not just a delivery device for a song.

And how about lyrics that say more than "moon/spoon/june/swoon"?  Meditations on the human condition.  Pondering the big questions.  Life. Death.  The world and the individual's stance against it/with it.  I compare it to what passes for pop on the radio today and I just laugh.  I mean, some of the shit that's out there is SO ridiculous.  I can't even know where to start.

Satellite radio is kind of like cable.  It's clear, great quality.  Same all over the country.  But you can flip the channels for two hours and find little to dig.  And what little there is that's cool is played just a little TOO often.  But man.  Some of the songs I came across were just laughable.  Fucking interchangeable.  Overcompressed.  Weepy.  Come back to me. Fire/desire.

FIRE DESIRE!!!

This rhyme should be retired permanently from music.  Anytime I hear the rhyme fire/desire I just think that the pussy who wrote the song just got lazy. 

So I have Pandora on my baby laptop, and on comes "Shine On You Crazy Diamond."  Synth pads.  Slide guitars.  Ninth chords.  Tempo changes.  It's a big, beautiful "fuck you" to anyone who expects to have it handed to them without a little investment of mental energy.

So yeah.  I'm one of those people in his 40's who has begun to look to the past and admonish the present for sucking.  But face it.  The present sucks.  We're all beholden to corporate whores, and our collective art too often follows suit.  How the fuck are we gonna break out of this?  Is europe the answer?

This country is crazy.  Evidently, a man kissing another man is disgusting.  A man cutting another man in half with a hail of bullets is not.  It's sad.