'Rolling Stone' Loses Mind, Folds Time and Space, Explodes, Crumples, Implodes

Hahaha, ahhhhhhh.

Yup: Nine Inch Nails! ziiing

x-men without hats?

Look, I know Last Stand was terrible, and the Wolvie spinoff looked awful enough that I never bothered to see it, but god damnit once upon a time the X-men movies were pretty cool*!

I am just saying that even in their current sorry state, you have to at least give them credit for being less atrocious than the Black Eyed Peas.

*Obviously Halle Berry is an exception.

(1) I like Last Stand quite a bit, actually. Think of me what you will.

(2) (You guys know Will.I.Am really is in Wolverine, right?)

There's very little wrong with any of the X-men movies, I find. I mean, we're not talking about some Alan Moore material here. It's the X-men! It's a soap opera for boys. Yeah, maybe it's allegory for puberty too. But what were people expecting?

Moff wins the internet.

I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE IT BACK, PLEASE.

Sorry. Winners Weepers.

The second X-Men movie was the best.

And I sound like such a snob there…I love a LOT of pop music, I'm not saying everything has to be Rachmaninoff (it would be nice though) I think anyone who takes pop music seriously, though, recognizes how pitiful the Black Eyed Peas are. They're the real life equivalent of the Hamster Dance, or the Jellybear.

Numa Numa at the very least.

There are reasons for the Black Eyed Peas' success. Sure, in part it might be because, broadly, we are becoming more simple-minded as a culture. (Might. I'm not entirely sure that would be the best way to put it, although I totally see why it gets pegged that way so easily. The truth is, mainstream tastes have never been sophisticated; coverage of those tastes was just highly limited for a long time, pretty much because the people in charge of covering tastes dismissed them almost reflexively. Today's mainstream tastes are very likely more sophisticated in many ways than ever before; and more people in general are probably enjoying more rarefied tastes than ever before.)

But their success is also probably because our media have decentralized so much that the most effective way to connect with a huge mass of people — the way, say, Michael Jackson or Madonna used to be able to do — is to write simple, hugely catchy tunes that deal with the experience of coming together in big celebratory groups. It's harder and harder to get people's attention these days; to get a lot of it at once, you either have to craft something really well and sort of flash-in-the-pan (say, Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy") or hit 'em with the broadest strokes possible. And it's not so much that the Black Eyed Peas were necessarily deliberately setting out to do that (although they probably do now) as it is that they flourished because they happened to be the ones doing it.

Ding. They are also very good at flooding the zone, as it were, with their imagery.

Honestly. And who'd have thought hiring Fergie was a stroke of prescient genius?

Moff, every band knows it helps to have a chick singer.

OK, true. But so many of them still don't do it!

@Moff, in reference to the notion of mainstream tastes being more sophisticated (and I'm willing to accept this as plausible, but I'm not sold yet at all)

- really it depends on how you see the history of mainstream though. when we're talking about music…we don't necessarily know what was accepted, taste-wise, by mainstream culture. It's easy to say something like "Bach! Mozart!" but was Mozart even really accessible to anyone outside of the priveleged? It's not like people had walkmans back then.

I don't know. I don't know that Joe or Jane average were sitting around singing Geswualdo Madrigals. Maybe they made up songs about Having a Good Fun tonight (Mazel Tov!) We can easily trace Western Music back to Minstrel Shows and Early Folk music and such and such. I guess maybe we only develop taste in retrospect?

But fine…I accept that North American masses kind of like average things that are catchy. But do we have to like the worst things? Michael Jackson was produced by Quincy Jones…you can make the argument that the lyrical content (The Girl is Mine) is simplistic, but some of the music (most of Thriller) is ultra complex. Madonna and Gnarls Barkley…both create new sounds by blending genres while maintaining strong pop sensibilities (essentially, making things sound simple when in fact they are rooted in complicated rhythms, chord progressions, and Meters.)

Conversely, the Black Eyed Peas have no substance. Rhythmically, Chordally, Melodically (good lord, lyrically)…it sounds simple because it IS simple, and that's what's so unnerving about them. There's nothing under the layers to interest anyone. It's just a dance music template they use, and if anyone thinks they couldn't write a Black Eyed Peas song in under an hour, they're wrong. It's like selling mustard sandwiches in a fancy restaurant. Buy some bread and mustard yourselves!

The "mainstream" is actually a pretty recent invention, I guess, since it's basically a metaphor dependent on the ability to observe media consumption on a massive scale. We haven't even had the ability to distribute media on a large scale for that long, much less the ability to observe the consumption.

But anyway, OK, look at it like this: Up until not quite ten years ago, music labels were doing pretty well. Certainly when Michael Jackson and Madonna were becoming superstars, the business model was bringing in plenty of money, such that a label could afford to pay Quincy Jones to craft some motherfucking musical masterpieces. More to the point, the prospective audience was much more diverse as a whole — if you wanted to hear new music, you had to listen to a handful of radio stations. Of course there were music snobs who eschewed the mainstream even then, but they were a minority; there just weren't that many alternate avenues available to them. So you had labels that could afford to produce "smarter" content and probably greater audience demand for that content, because smart people who liked catchy music didn't have a lot of options besides what was on the radio.

Nowadays, labels want not just artists who write catchy songs, but artists who write songs that reach well beyond radio and CD and MP3 players. I mean, every one of the Black Eyed Peas singles can be played at a sporting event, in a commercial, etc., etc. If you were a music label, why would you not devote yourself to making sure these guys had a career?

So, that is what I mean when I say their songs are the broadest strokes possible. The other part is, who is writing consistently super-well-crafted catchy pop? (Again, "Crazy" was a flash in the pan; I dig both Gnarls Barkley albums, but there's nothing there that touches it for pure hookability.) Maybe someone is, but honestly, if you have any artistic pretensions whatsoever, are you really working in the dance-pop genre with aspirations to operate at a superstar level? (About one person is right now.) So who is there to take the Black Eyed Peas' place? Not that anyone who cares much about music is really going, "GOD WE NEED TO STOP THE BLACK EYED PEAS I'M SO TIRED OF HEARING THEM," because except for a few seconds during a commercial or something, no one is forced to hear them; there are plenty of other options.

On that note, to takeaway from a Rolling Stone cover that we now like the "worst" things is probably pretty silly. For one, RS has a vested interest in helping promote what the labels want to promote. Because for two, it's not exactly the barometer of the mainstream anymore; tastes are becoming too diversified for a magazine like that to represent them well. Plus, the Erykah Badu album debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard chart this week, and Sade is still holding strong at 15, after apparently having sold a shitload of copies. So it's not like the sky is falling.

By "the prospective audience was much more diverse as a whole," I mean: All kinds of different people had to listen to the same radio.

I agree with the notion that their label loves these guys but:

"because except for a few seconds during a commercial or something, no one is forced to hear them"

Completely false. Sporting events, Commercials, Movie Trailers, Grocery stores, pharmacies, background music pretty much anywhere. If you don't leave your house, then fine, maybe you can avoid it. I leave my house. I hear it everywhere. There are no other options but headphones. But like arguing a driver can avoid billboards by looking somewhere else, I shouldn't have to wear headphones. But you can't tell me I'm not put in positions every day where I have to hear 'I Gotta Feeling'. These songs are licensed by the label to pretty much anyone with the intent of oversaturating the public to ensure that everyone at some point hears these songs. Sorry, we absolutely are forced to listen.

"(Again, "Crazy" was a flash in the pan; I dig both Gnarls Barkley albums, but there's nothing there that touches it for pure hookability.)"

'Smiley Face' kicks ass, and is totally catchy. Subjective though.

I suppose my issue is that I don't believe the same way you do, that the mainstream is responsible for what they consume. The oversaturation is a contributing factor to what people buy. The more we hear things, the more we have a connection to that thing. If the labels pushed Satie or something, people would buy it. And sales of Gymnopedie do go up everytime it's used in an advertisement for Volkswagon or whatever. We consume what we know a lot of the time. "Catchy" doesn't exist. Everything is catchy if we've heard it enough. 3 Blind Mice is catchy, I'm not going out to buy the new 3 Blind Mice single. But if the Black Eyed Peas did a cover version of it, and the label pushed as much as they could, you can be sure people be buying 3 Blind Mice.

Djfreshie, I agree with you. I can be a snob, but I know a good Britney song when I hear one and have no problem admitting it. But what you say about talented people making complicated music that merely sounds simple is one of the fun things about listening to fun music–you get to go back and notice something you may have missed. The BEP are among the worst offenders because they know they are barely trying (I will admit that Will.i.am, ugh, is a very competent producer) and that people will eat it. If Goldfrapp got shoved down everyone's throats then everyone would love Goldfrapp. Not like they don't deserve it.

Thanks Frederic! I get upset sometimes by the complacency of tastemakers with regards to laziness and mediocrity of artists.

Here's my question though…if you admit that BEP are barely trying (and maybe they are trying…could be this is the extent of what they're capable of..I really liked Behind the Front many an eon ago though, so I'm pretty certain they're capable of more,) then isn't that the byproduct of i.am's producing? that is, if you can hear laziness, isn't that the producer's fault?

And speaking of Britney, Toxic is a kickass composition. A friend of mine pointed out how cool it sounds if you swing everything and play the melody as you would a Jazz standard. Awesome.