music here: a fresh rant

I wish people would stop asking me what I think of the band:

Sweaty, with crazed glee in their eyes, they'll say, "So, what do you think of the band, pretty awesome, eh?"

I'm a lot more tame now. Whipped into standard issue Canadian politeness I will say, "Well, they're not really my thing..."
To which they'll reply, over the blare of Hotel California, "Huh?" they're heads bobbing up and down to the sweet awesomeness of the song.
I'll repeat, "They're NOT REALLY MY THING."

So the conversation ends.

I used to say, "Fucking hell, this is absolutely the worst crap I've heard since the last time I was out in Ottawa listening to music. How is this possible? Are ALL the bands in this town competing to be the most unoriginal emitters of saccharine shit around? How is it possible that there is not an iota of creativity amongst musicians here? And what is wrong with you people actually encouraging this utter garbage?"

This also ends the conversation with added bonus of glares. It is also a lot closer to the truth in terms of my feelings about local music.

Last Saturday I met a friend at a bar in the trendy part of Ottawa, the so-called 'Glebe', which sounds suspiciously like something you might find under a toilet rim. She was there because her friend played in 'The Band'. I was there to see her and was willing to put up with inevitable gunk coming out of the amplifiers. They were a young bunch of guys: two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer, and a keyboardist. Sadly the venue was so small the bassist was almost sitting on the drummers lap, and the guitarists were forced to do the 'The Two Guitarists Rubbing Their Back's Together Thing" out of necessity rather than the sheer coolitude of the act.

They played all the standards that Canadians are obsessed with involving three chord progressions, four/four timing, and the kind of whine usually associated with the highest calibre of pussy. This kind of thing is on par with the faux-british accents of punk rockers, and the soulful throaty bellowing of jack-asses and their ballads.

What finally did it for me was when they burst --to the obvious happiness of the crowd-- into country music. I did a double-take; yes they were a band of twenty-somethings in the ubiquitous plaid shirts and jeans playing country.

Country music offends me. It's a little like mullets in that it's common knowledge that they are totally uncool, and that none of your friends has one, and none of their friends has one, yet you know they're out there lurking in some inbred throwback possum-eating town waiting to cause you paroxysms of horror and/or giggles.

In the blessed quiet after the band's set I found myself in conversation with a woman in her fourties. She asked, "So, what did you think of the band?"
"Erm..."
"They're pretty great aren't they?"
"Ah?"
"I think these guys are going to go far" she gives me a sly, modest, smirk, "I'm actually kind of promoting them."
I can't resist, "Go where? They didn't play anything original. Then again it may be just what Ottawa needs; another cover band to replay the same music written by people decades ago because nobody has the creative muscle to come up with something different today. I'm not positive, but I think I can safely say that if my asshole was an amplifier that's what it would sound like."
"So, I guess they're not really your thing, eh?"
"Yeah, pretty much. Good luck with that promoting thing though."

Since I've returned to Ottawa I haven't heard a single band that has caught my fancy, and yet everyone is a self-described musician. . .Shit, I'm a self-described musician (among other things), but you can forget me assaulting other's with my sound in anything other than a campfire situation unless it was new, unique, imaginative, and good.

There's a new song on the radio. It has the exact same melody/progression as the song Werewolves of London ("A-woooooo, werewolves of London"). Because these assholes couldn't come up with a chorus for their rip-off they used Sweet Home Alabama, verbatim .

Essentially what has happened here is the blatant combination of two of the most overplayed songs on contemporary Canadian radio. If you were to line up the the fans that embrace this whole-hearted chicanery, the pig-fucking sales people that promoted it, or the creativity by-pass motherfuckers that perform it and gave me a flame-thrower, I would not know who to torch first.

This, to me, is the sign of a coming localized musical apocalypse --'apocalypso' you might say. Music in Canada --what is popular-- is imploding into a black hole which will suck the last squeaks of Canadian creativity into it.

I suppose I can't blame the musicians though. The close-mindedness of the audience perpetuates the brutal cycle of unoriginality that saturates this country.

But I tell you this:

If I hear one more jerk with a guitar telling me how confused he is, or another glasses-wearing pixie girl describing how battered and bruised on the floor she is, or another fuckwit clever-hairstyle sporting band revelling in the hot girl across the room, or any songs about heroes, dancing, what they're striving for, what they're running from, retards that succeed, or successes that retard, I'm going to start getting violent.