Recently I listened to a crushingly beautiful live version of David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ from 2002:
It is a bittersweet feeling to experience art and talent of such magnitude only to be reminded that an artist such as David Bowie, who was a musical influencer to both me and my parents’ generation, is not with us anymore. And that feeling turns into agony when you take a casual glance at the Hot 100 to discover that top of charts today are dominated by much, much lesser men.
And I hate to be that guy. I’m not even in my forties and I am already starting to sound like the bitter, old men, who struggles with the fact that that they never got around to realize their dreams and takes it out on their grand children’s musical tastes, because they are too stubborn, too senile or too blinded by their nostalgia goggles to remember that there was probably plenty of shit music around when they were young too.
I am under no such delusions and I quite enjoy a lot of contemporary music as well, but you can’t help but think that there is a monumental difference in the required level of talent between the music Bowie wrote and what is required to make a top hit today.
In Ashes to Ashes, the first chorus goes:
The shrieking of nothing is killing, just
Pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and I
Ain't got no money and I ain't got no hair
But I'm hoping to kick but the planet it's glowing
Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out in heaven's high
Hitting an all-time low
Lyrics that in a poetic way describes an artist, who is increasingly feeling the loss of his childhood innocence and weight of age in a world he has a harder and harder time relating to and sees as increasingly plasticine and unreal. All while using one of his earlier hero characters, Major Tom, to portray this degeneration of his own self from a space-age hero to a lowly junkie.
Let’s compare this to one of the most popular contemporary artists of the current era, the rapper (and I use the term very loosely) Future and the chorus from his highest charting single Mask Off:
Percocets, Molly, Percocets
Percocets, Molly, Percocets
Rep the set, gotta rep the set
Chase a check, never chase a bitch
(never chase no bitches)
Mask on, fuck it, mask off
Mask on, fuck it, mask off
Percocets, Molly, Percocets
Chase a check, never chase a bitch
Don't chase no bitches
And it is not like I am saying that these lyrics took no talent to write. All I am saying is that if I, say, lobotomized a chimp and got it high off its ass on quaaludes and laxatives, it would write a deeper and more intellectually stimulating chorus on the ground with its feces.
Given that the link I posted above is a live version, I think it is only fair that I also transcribe how Future’s lyrics would sound live:
Puhomnmn, Momnhn, Puhomnmn
Puhomnmn, Momnhn, Puhomnmn
Reh thmm smmhm, goha rh thmm she
Chahm ah chehkm nevh chahm ah beh
Mahg oh, fuhm ih, mahg oh
Mahg oh, fuhm ih, mahg oh
Puhomnmn, Momnhn, Puhomnmn
Chahm ah chehkm nevh chahm ah beh
Doh chahm noh behe
A man who seems like less of a rap star and more like the worst off patient at a speaking disorder therapist’s clinic, who writes lyrics that I am sure has broken the bling ‘n bitches cliché density record some thousand times a second is apparently the best of what pop music has to offer these days.
This generation, like all generations before it, has its great artists and thinkers and if you have the luxury of still being so young that you have yet to discover the mortality of yourself and the people you look up to, I urge you to enjoy it to the fullest and don’t forget to write these people tons of fan mail before it is too late and they pass away only to be replaced by some talentless nobody and you spend the rest of your life feeling alienated among people younger than yourself
All my heroes in both music, movies and politics are aging or already dead and what we have lined up to replace them are apparently a rapper, who can barely rhyme words and got famous for his lack of diction, an endless string of 3-hour movies of CGI robots fighting interspersed with human eye candy people having dialogue that makes them seem less human than their robot counterparts and a POTUS, who looks and sounds like a retarded Bond villain.