Mind on Music

If you Google the name "Nickelback" you are likely to encounter some less-than-flattering results. One YouTube video shows Nickelback getting absolutely embarrassed by an audience's use of rocks (ironically) and utter silence. After viewing another site, it will become apparent that these Canadian rockers have in fact embodied a new definition for the word "horrendous." As you will realize, this is mainly due to their seeming inability to write two non-identical songs.

The point here is not merely to shed light on the atrocity that is Nickelback. Such an article would be as pointless as a piece on how water is clear. Instead, I am talking about the state of music today, which I believe indicates a greater cultural phenomenon: the general and widespread apathy toward it.

In case we've all forgotten, there once was a time when loving rock and roll meant that you believe it could change the world. It was this music that compelled a generation of youth to break out of their suburban homes, drunken and/or stoned, seeking to fulfill carnal desires in the "green grass." To witness rock and roll was to stand with that same generation "all in one place" with smoke billowing to the heavens, while Jimi's guitar sang the dreadful cries of Vietnam in our own national anthem.

There was also a time when jazz was the sound of women cutting their hair short and wearing skirts. Then jazz danced those women to the polls on election night and screamed with joy as they finally escaped the cult of domesticity. Remember the blues, not the White Stripes and Led Zeppelin, but Robert Johnson at whose foot the aforementioned worshiped? What about hip-hop? Do you remember when MCs and DJs fused the pride and horrors of living in urban America into a radical new cultural art form? Do you remember when music really mattered?

Just to put it out there: I don't remember any of these things and I am not happy about it. As we inherit a world that someone else's music created, a grudgingly painful realization leads to a final line of questioning: does our generation even care that we have no music of our own to cling to? I say that on this subject, we are apathetic at best, mostly concerned with our silly little futures, leaving us essentially inattentive to the lack of significance in a collective present repulsively devoid of any musical meaning.