Most don’t care to admit that the so-called ‘Top 40 songs’ or ‘New Zealand Top 40’ are not necessarily liked by anyone with a fully developed brain. For the most part they’re decided on by people who have yet to develop chest hair, let alone any intellectual acuity: the 13-and-unders.
Those that are buying the records taxonomised under the misrepresentative mantle of ‘The Top 40’ are younger than sense, and probably don’t realise the affronts to taste that they’re involved in. Fair enough; but any person older than this who acquiesces to peer pressure by allowing themselves to get caught up in modern pop music should realise their culpability in musical waste distribution!
To reify this position, consider the latest song by the corpulent reggae rip-off artist (I’m being very generous by allowing the word ‘artist’ to slip into my description) known as Sean Kingston. His latest ear-singeing single is ‘eenie meenie’, a song that steals lyrics from the children’s counting rhyme often used, in a very jejune way, to select a person when making a decision. The lyrics, to his immortal shame, contain the passage “you’re an eenie meenie miney mo lover.” Sigh. Not much more needs to be said on that. Basically, popular music is getting to the point where it’s closer to children’s music than anything else.
I’m not trying to be facetious when I say all this; popular music is now sculpted for the cultural group known informally as ‘tweens’. It presents a vapid and puerile view of events and life that young teenagers seem to cling to. The songs are created to be astoundingly simple, astonishingly plain, and painfully formulaic, while using lyrics and themes that are amazingly stunted.
Unfortunately these musical abortions have a near-hypnotic effect on some of those in our age bracket, exemplified in the masses that dance to “hey, hey,” “yeah, yeah” every Saturday night, and accept this torpid attempt at a chorus as something transcendent and interesting. In my view, many are simply too polite, or too encumbered by peer pressure to admit that most of the stuff that’s peddled as ‘popular music’ is well below their usual mental standards. Most importantly, popular music doesn’t represent the tastes of the vast majority of normal people on whom record labels push this indolent and mentally moribund refuse; it merely pretends to do so.
The Media and Me - 13
