"...Take
Aesop Rock, for example. A rapper with a massive vocabulary who never gets any kind of radio play- well, not mainstream radio, anyways. Not the top 10 hits or anything. But
he manages to rap intelligently. Or there's that super left-wing rapper, Immortal Technique. I don't agree with his politics. Every single one of his songs is a political commentary on one issue or another, and usually it's anti-American, but at least he's taking a stance and defending it intelligently. M.I.A.
almost made it a bigger part of the international music scene when she had that single from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, (almost every single one of her songs has a deeper
political message), but a lot of people seemed to miss the point.
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Probably the same people who combined Rihanna and cats....not that they don't pair well.
And the bigger point is that the majority of mainstream music doesn't make you think, and it's not going to start anytime soon. It's completely possible to do it, the rappers I've listed, and probably a dozen others I can't remember or don't know yet, they do it every day. We just don't enjoy that feeling of flexing that muscle all the time. It's exhausting. But it's healthy to do it sometimes, and I wish a bigger percentage of music on the big radio stations were more intelligent.. or at least used more than the same 10 nouns, 9 verbs, and 8 adjectives. Dumbing things down just shows disrespect for the audience, at that point.
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| Come on Music Industry, give us something. |
Then there's the other side of the argument, where you look at it from the radio station's perspective and think, 'What's going to make money?' And you decide you don't want to take that kind of risk, because you could alienate a lot of people that way. The industry giants are so big at this point, they have so much invested in every release. Well, they got that way because they're in the business of making money, not losing investment money. The people who are actually directly in charge of the radio play, DJ's and their assistants, they don't see a cut of those massive profits, so they definitely won't be playing a political commentary during the lunch hour, even though they could. That would be some kind of grassroots DJ revolution...and honestly, when is that a realistic thought? It's gotten so only the
indie artists can take any kind of risk.
So risk, intelligent or political music in mainstream media is all kind of a pipe dream. Even if it were a bigger part of the musical conversation, I think it's more of the kind of conversation that ends in, 'Well...that's a shame.' Instead of the kind of conversation that ends in, 'This music is terrible, change the channel!' Now, music industry is basically 'Bonfire of the Vanities,' but with prettier people."
