No, no, not all music. Don't panic. This page is just about shit music, and in particular, two aspects of music-related shitness which are particularly prolific progenitors of shit music.
Here's one of them...
During the 80s, there was a great surge in popularity of drugs based on that molecular structure. In particular, that one itself - amphetamine, speed - and its 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methyl derivative, MDMA, more often known as ecstasy, or E for short. I don't know why. They are both quite shit. Maybe it was another aspect of the growing tendency of society to encourage people to be stupid, passive, unthinking consumers, expressed as a preference for drugs that control you over ones where you control the drug.
(By the way, that last sentence is nothing to do with addiction or any kind of puritanical blanket anti-drug shite. There are two ways to experience drugs. One is to just let it take you wherever it takes you, like riding in a bus. The other is to make it take you where you want to go by the route you want to take, like riding a motorbike. It is sad that most people these days don't even seem to realise the second one is possible. You can do either with any drug, but some drugs are more suited to the second, and some to the first. Phenethylamine-based drugs tend to be more suited to the first. So is alcohol, for that matter, which may be why so many people think the first scenario is the only possible one.)
The other thing that happened in the 80s was that for the first time ever, useful amounts of processing power became cheap enough both to be affordable by Joe Bloggs, and to be incorporated in specialised, single-purpose devices as well as in actual computers. Electronic musical instruments were one such class of device. To be sure, the ones which were powerful enough to actually be any good were still so fucking expensive that even successful artists like Kate Bush could not afford them - even though she could afford to build her own studio - and had to wangle some way to borrow them long-term instead. But more primitive ones were a lot cheaper, and although they were shit, it was still easy enough to program them to make noises like doof doof doof and eeeeeeeeeeoooooooowwwwwwww over and over again, which is plenty good enough to keep a three-year-old happy.
It was a deadly combination. One of the effects of phenethylamine-based drugs is to simultaneously reduce your level of appreciation of music to one that even a three-year-old would be ashamed of, and to impart a powerful compulsion to listen to it. You feel you have to have music on, but you no longer have the ability to identify it. As long as there is some kind of loud repetitive sound coming out of the speakers, that does the trick. A sped-up recording of a piledriver in operation would do just as well.
And the ready availability of cheap shite programmable instruments meant that any fucking shithead with no more musical skill or ability than a three-year-old could buy one of these things, program it to make a loud repetitive noise, and sell the result for lots of money to a mass market of drugged-up mongs who were too bleeding out of it to realise that it was shite. So lots of them did. And when they found that the drugged-up mongs would like them for it and suck their dick and tell them how brilliant they were, they did it even more. The fact that the praise of people who are too fucked on drugs to tell gold from sewage is completely worthless did not register with them, because they were all on the same fucking drugs themselves and didn't realise they were churning out utter shite, as well as mostly being sufficiently arrogant and self-important cunts to think they deserved praise.
This resulted in the music craze called "house music", which then spawned other crazes like "hip hop" and "trance" and "r&b" and a variety of other equally meaningless names for basically indistinguishable variants on the theme of mindlessly pushing buttons at random and playing the result over and over again, and led on to the "rave scene" in the 90s which consisted of huge crowds of people using some random field or abandoned factory to take lots of drugs and listen to this talent-free, content-free shite. (It is rather odd that there are so many pages on the internet on which people passionately deny that the rave scene was about drugs. The technical term for these people is "liars", and the technical term for their assertions is "bullshit". It was completely about drugs. They were more the point of it than the so-called "music". If phenethylamine-based drugs had never existed, raves would never have existed either. The people who organised and attended raves took those drugs all the time, the rave was just an excuse to take them in larger quantities and a chance to fuck other people whose inhibitions were lowered because they were doing the same thing, and the mindless repetitive noise was there because the effect of those drugs is such that people would have gone bonkers without some kind of racket going on.)
And it is a tragic misfortune that phenethylamines do not have the side effect of inducing permanent sterility. So these people had kids. Kids who, shockingly, are now adults. And whose formative years were spent with their parents' constant repetitive noise in their ears, so now they think shit like that is music and when they hear something that requires some actual talent to play and some actual mental capacity to appreciate they don't understand it and so don't like it.
So that's one thing. The other one is wanking.
What the fuck is it with society and sex? Everyone does it, everyone likes it, but everyone also gets programmed to think there is something somehow nasty and shameful about it, and very few people, even if they do see how fucking stupid and illogical that is, ever have any real success in breaking the programming, or even in just ignoring it.
Straightforward practical considerations dictate that people cannot actually have sex as much as they want to. So they wank. To help them do this, they use sexual imagery. The internet, of course, is a big help with this. But an actual physical manifestation tends to provide more satisfying wanking material than mere images - to the extent that it still has an advantage even if it's quite a long way away and there aren't actually any naked genitals on display. To cater for this requirement, there exist sex shows.
The trouble is that due to the abovementioned stupid attitudes, attending a sex show is considered shameful and embarrassing and there is a stigma attached to it. So we get the standard human response of dealing with something stupid not by the simple and obvious method of admitting that it is stupid and not doing it any more, but by continuing to pretend it isn't stupid and doing something even more stupid on top of it. In this instance, this response takes the form of calling a sex show by a different name and pretending it is something else, so that people can go and see it without being embarrassed.
The different name they give it is "music". And of course, sex is popular. So we get a continual flood of oxygen-wasting talentless fuckwits like Miley Cyrus and One Direction and all the other useless twats in the same mould, who prance around on stage rubbing their bits through their clothing at people while singing (so they don't have to learn to even pretend to play an instrument) some mindless shite that they have not written themselves, but which has been churned out for them in some kind of unmusic factory on a production line basis.
Fucksake, just drop the pretence. These twats are sex performers, not musicians. So call them that. And fucking admit that the reason you go to see their shows is so you can have a good wank about them when you get home again. Fucking admit that that's the whole point of it and if they looked like baboons you'd never think twice about them. Because you wouldn't, and you fucking know very well you fucking wouldn't.
One of the classic examples has got to be George Michael. I wish I still had the copy of Viz where they took the piss out of him in Sid the Sexist because it got straight to the point in their usual crude but keenly-observed style. He got famous doing crappy plastic pop songs like "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" which sound catchy when they first come on, become nauseous by the middle of the record, and end with you wanting to core-drill your ears out and then scoop your brain out through the hole to get the fucking sound out of your head, which it must be admitted is quite impressive for something that only lasts three minutes. But what really made him popular was that the crappy records provided an excuse for millions of teenage girls to stick posters of him on their bedroom walls and then saturate the mattress frigging themselves over him all night. And then all of a sudden everyone found out he was actually gay and all the clitty castles came tumbling down and it was fucking hilarious.
There's nothing wrong about wanting something to wank over, for fuck's sake. But there is something wrong with pretending that your wank material is "music" so the world gets totally fucking flooded with the irrelevant sonic shite that accompanies the wank imagery and music that actually is music has to take a back seat.
(Yes, I know teenage girls threw their knickers at the Beatles. But the Beatles are still popular now, even though two of them are wrinkly old men and the other two are dead. Who's going to go and see Miley Cyrus in 40 years' time when her wrinkly tits are half way down her stomach? Fucking nobody, as you very well know. And the male examples like Oned Erection likely won't be around after even a tenth of that time, and you know that too.)
Where are the bands who are neither an excuse to have a wank nor an excuse to activate the same chemical pathways in the brain more directly by taking phenethylamines? Oh, they exist, but they don't get a fraction of the attention they deserve, because the torrential cascades of mechanical shit completely drown them out of public awareness.
For fuck's sake. If you want to have a wank, go and watch some fucking porn. If you want something to listen to while you are on speed or E, get a fucking dot matrix printer or a daisywheel or even an IBM 1403 and print out some really really long text on it. And fucking drop the stupid fucking bullshit of thinking there's something somehow wrong about having a wank or taking drugs and pretending you're into the "music" to hide what you're really doing, and stop fucking the world up for people who actually do want to listen to music and are happy to do their drugs and wanking independently of it.
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