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Where are the titans?

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Hendrix on the Lulu show. We’ve all seen it. But FFS, it was the Lulu show! And listen to the noise he makes! Quite apart from the fact that other than maybe a dozen people in tbe King’s Road, no one even looked like that! Truly a being from another planet, changing everyone’s sense of what’s possible with a few bits of wood and some valves. Where are today’s game changers? (…I do hope there are some…).

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  2. Game changers? In art or popular culture? Not in rock or pop music that’s for sure. You have to get rid of this quaint notion, Twang.

    A mate took his teenage daughter last month to a sell out large venue show of some vapid international Vlogger who literally (and I mean’ literally’ in the old fashioned meaning) did NOTHING! Just chatted to the audience.

    Now that is impressive.

    These qvnts have nothing.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/11031778/Zoella-Tanya-Burr-and-the-UKs-YouTube-superstars.html

    Must we throw this filth at our kids?

    Yes, because if we don’t, then we are hypocrites.

  4. Actually, I ain’t actually watched that Hendrix clip all the way through in years! Thanks Twang, it’s bloody brilliant, and yes, it must’ve been mind-blowing for your average Lulu fan at the time?

  5. Today’s game changers are probably active in something like computer gaming.

    At the age of 12 I was bonkers about music. For my son now, it’s Minecraft, Super Mario , Call of Duty (oops!) and all the innovative stuff that comes out on Steam.

    As you comment, Jimi not only sounded like something from outer space, he also dressed like no one else. Fashion and pop went hand in hand in the 60s.

    Not too many modern artists that come to mind who sartorially stunning. But I’m sure there are some.

    • Agreed on computer game-changers. Same here, at home: Minecraft, Steam, Lego Marvel Superheroes, and all the associated YouTube superstars. Stampy, Diamond Minecart, popularMMOs, markeplier, jacksepticeye (eek!) (The latter two now banned indefinitely.)

      No interest in music, none at all, and none of my friends’ children seem to be either, even the older ones, although they might make an exception for 1D. Makes me sad; even at 3/4 I was playing my Mum’s records.

  6. Snapchat? Whatsapp? The ability to instantly stream content from your PS4? Oculus Rift?

    Yesterday, I took a taxi ride to Gatwick. The traffic was really bad. Thankfully, I use Waze, an app which crowd sources user data to deliver what is basically SatNav on steroids. I could see where the traffic would end, what had caused the snarl up and also average vehicle speeds all along the road.

    Not arty enough? From Software’s Bloodborne feels like a game changer (quite literally: ho ho ho) to me. Some of the smartest level design I’ve ever seen, a brilliantly cohesive backdrop and two or three absolutely superb game mechanics which set it apart from most moder video games and will almost certainly influence a generation of game developers. It’s probably the best designed game I’ve ever played.

    But then, I’m an old fogey. The real revolution in games is happening with MOBAs, like League of Legends, and in the e-sports arena. That’s where the really explosive change is happening, and all the kids are heading. That’s the future.

    It may feel like there’s no exciting progress in music, but that’s only the case in certain genres. If you chase the thrills of your youth and only listen to acts who sound like Pink Floyd and Nick Drake, then obviously there are no titans, no sense of huge leaps being taken. It’s a well explored field with more of an eye on respecting the past than nailing the future.

    If you listen to (say) electronic music then quite the opposite – something exciting happens most years, and there’s a constant sense of forward movement. They’ve not finished bottoming out the genre yet, there are still new sounds to be heard. Burial had a Hendrix like impact on me, and many others (although even that was nearly a decade ago). More recently, Skrillex (although not always my cup of tea personally) has had a colossal effect on what kids in the States and elsewhere listen to.

    We live in exciting times. Whisper it softly, but they’re actually far more exciting than the 60s, or even the 70s. Titans everywhere.

    • Whatsapp is hardly game-changing, it’s more gimmick than genius. Streaming is also just a convenience gimmick, an effort reducer. I use streaming all the time, but I could easily live without it; I already did that for years. Oculus Rift has yet to find a need to match its solution, unless you’re a retailer of analgesics. SatNav, even on steroids, is again a convenience, nothing more. If it’s eight miles to the next motorway exit and I’m doing 1.5 miles per hour in a three-lane queue that stretches to the horizon, no bloody mobile phone app or GPS gizmo is going to make it take any less time to reach the off ramp. I don’t think anything truly culturally revolutionary can or will ever happen on a screen via software, or through loudspeakers from an electronic means of production.

      • Sat Nav: I can cope with the motorway exits, it’s the city centres where it really comes into its own. After years of driving around unfamiliar places with a map on the passenger seat I wouldn’t be without it.

      • You stream footage of yourself playing video games directly to social media all the time?

        We can all play the above game: Jimi Hendrix was “just a bloke with a guitar making a racket”, if you want to decontextualise. But I guarantee you that Whatsapp has far, far more impact on the lives (cultural and otherwise) of young people than any guitarist you can think of, past or present.

        Oh, and Waze enabled me to catch my flight by switching to roads I knew to be unclogged. Felt revolutionary to me.

  8. Kid yourself if you want to, but we don’t live in exciting times.

    Robert Elms every Monday has a spot on his show called ‘Listed Londoner’. The last question is always ‘If you could go to any part of London’s history, past or future, where/when would you go?’

    Rarely does anyone go into the future, one or two might mention Pepys or Roman times or the 18th Century……four in five people answer Soho in the 50s and the swingin’ 60s.

    I think they’re right to.

      • 1660s – great. I know. I was there.
        1960s – great. I incarnated in time enough to absorb the zeitvibes

        The 21st century is a materialistic dystopia of consumer me-first below the knee of selfishness shorts clad flip flopping shaven headed zombies going around in pods like migrating cretins to the frozen pizza aisle of soulless carniverous shit eating yak yak brain of no hopesters as the planet dies.

        It all went downhill with the cessation of Goddess worship, and the rise of cities, agrarianism, football, space invaders and rap. Ner ner ner ner nerrrr nerrrr. Boom chick a boom cher. Ner nerrrrrrr. Duuf duuf duuf. Ner…. Music of the Ethereal Spheres this not. Soulless drivel to slowly erode the pineal gland and turn you into a neo con dron cog cock maggot.

        Back to the Yurt. No visitors.

    • I’m a regular Elms listener. The point has often been made that you would need to go 50 years or so forwards to get any benefit from forward time travel as places don’t really change that much in ten or twenty years. Imagine going from 1970s London with corrugated iron, vacant lots and houses with no inside bathroom to present day. It would be astonishing, like Blade Runner with the glass office blocks lit with LED.

  9. Adding to the “things aren’t what they used to be” theme, I am very partial to Start the Week on Radio 4. A couple of weeks ago the guests with Andrew Marr were Joseph Stiglitz, an American author called Masha Gessen and Steve Hilton.

    Steve Hilton is profiled as co-founder and CEO a political website called Crowdpac, and “former Director of Strategy for David Cameron”. The man was so unbelievably shallow. He had some trivial ideas that he thought were ground breaking, but were exposed in about 30 seconds by Stiglitz. When the other guests brought in references like political thinker Hannah Arendt, it was rather clear that Hilton had no idea what they were talking about.

  10. I’m prepared to be shot down in flames, but my gut feeling is that popular culture -for quite some time- has been on an inexorable drive away from the possibility of any meaningful opt-out from consumerism.

    Even our angry riots are largely about the appropriation of stuff.

  11. I would say that Jamie XXs album, which is astonishing, shows the level of invention and progression still possible in electronic music. He’s taking the last thirty years of dance music, as Hendrix did with the blues, and making something that sums it up and makes something entirely new. Is it a game-changer? Of course not. He field is too crowded, the medium too mature, for anyone to have the cultural impact Hendrix had.

  12. You want a titan?

    Take a visit to Jazzville and check out Kamasi Washington who has just released a CD set called The Epic. It’s like one of those pizzas with extra everything. The man has self-confidence and style.

    Hendrix had verve and flamboyance. You’d notice if he walked into the room.

    At the risk of sinking to clichés, many of the music styles popular today are rather introvert.

    Singer song-writers wear lumbersexual, flannel shirts and have big bushy beards. And that’s just the girls!

    The EDM crowd seem to spend most of a gig crouched over their laptop.

    An honourable exception to this is Justice who, dressed in black leather jackets and sunglasses, seemed to spend most of their gig chain-smoking and looking extremely cool. Röyksopp also put on a good show.

  13. Well Bingo Little, 80 per cent of the guests on Listed Londoner (most of them ex-punks) when asked when they’d want to go back to say the 50s and 60s.

    Check it out, maybe the guest tomorrow won’t, but it’s a shoe-in that the ones in the following weeks will, and I’d join them.

    • People nostalgise their youth.

      I love the music of the mid 90s. Because I was 16 to 18 at the time. It doesn’t mean that everything before or since is worse, just that I have an emotional connection to the era.

      I love Jimi Hendrix. But if the question in this thread is “where are the bold, futuristic Mavericks playing forward thinking music, but who sound like an artist who died 40 years ago”, then of course there aren’t any. If Hendrix were 20 years old today, it’s quite possible he might never have touched a guitar at all. He certainly wouldn’t have been writing Crosstown Traffic.

      Finally, I don’t know who Robert Elms is.

      • You’re missing the point of the OP Bingo, in your enthusiasm to diss the 60s. I didn’t mean “who has come out who’s better than Hendrix” – I meant, at that time, he was like something from outer space, amazing, doing something no one else could do. And on the fucking Lulu show. People in the 6th form play like that now. I was asking in our time, who do we think is having an equivalent impact. No comparison necessary.

        • I wasn’t responding to the OP, Twang – the conversation had moved on, so it seemed to me.

          I have no enthusiasm for dissing the 60s. Some of my favourite records and films were made back then. I was being all ironical to demonstrate a point, which is that it’s generally daft to dismiss the music or culture of any era. And just as daft to believe that you coincidentally happen to have been born at the specific moment to allow you to enjoy the greatest/most iconic music of all time while still young.

          Apologies for contributing to the thread hijack. To answer your question: Pewdiepie. It’s just that no one on here gives a shit about him, because he’s for young people. Just like Hendrix was.

          • Pewdiepie is definitely a subject of conversation here. Usually when my son is dissing him. He doesn’t rate him as highly as the likes of Total Biscuit, Yogscast, Nerdcubed or whichever Tuber he happens to be into this week.

            This lot are sending a message out to the kids like him that you can make a living through YouTube, I tell him “You can but you need to be very talented.”

  14. (I take that last comment back. I like punk. I don’t like the year-zero nonsense and all that, but even so, that comment was unnecessary and I didn’t, on reflection, mean it. Soz, Deram.)

    The Elms comment is true, mind. 😉

      • At the risk of starting an argument, I don’t know why Elms is so disliked*. OK, so London broadcasting isn’t going to appeal to other parts of the country and he can overplay his Blitz Club/Spandau “I lived in a squat once” past a bit but compared to other local radio broadcasters I’ve heard he’s very good and has a real enthusiasm for the city and subjects he covers . His show is quite Reithian in that it Informs, Educates and Entertains (not everyone it seems). Try listening to BBC Sussex sometime for banal local radio.

        *”Ducks for cover”

  15. Speaking as a denizen of The Land of Mossy Ruminants I’d just like to say that I’m quite looking forward to the 1960s.
    If it’s half as thrilling as the last episode of The Glums I may well wet myself.

  16. BBC4 had a documentary some time ago- ‘Kings of Rock ‘n Roll’. Just one hour long, so only offered brief, though highly entertaining, snippets about the following artists who were all active and successful in the late ’50s – Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Buddy and Little Richard. Read it and weep, I say.
    I read recently that Joni Mitchell was quoted as saying- ‘there’s very little talent in the current generation’. I couldn’t possibly comment, as an unregenerate old fart.
    Another snippet I read asked- name the iconic artists in popular music from the mid-50s to 1980. Then, name the iconic artists from 1980 to now. Note the word ‘iconic’.
    *sits back, awaits torrents of spluttered abuse

    • but that’s bit of an unfair question, seeing as most people would probably see ‘iconic’ as some combination of talent plus looks plus impact multiplied by time, and the old farts are always going to have an advantage in the last part of that equation. Nevertheless, for post-1980 iconic artists I’d offer up Madonna, Michael Jackson, 2Pac, Iron Maiden, and Eminem for starters, and there are probably more.

      And then there are those whose careers started before 1980 but didn’t achieve iconhood until that year or later – Springsteen, Siouxsie, Joy Division…was Bob Marley even that big a deal on students’ walls and around the world until after his death?

      • Plus Kurt Cobain
        Prince
        Bjork
        Kanye West
        Jay Z
        Metallica
        Prince
        Lady Gaga
        Amy Winehouse
        Radiohead
        Beyonce, etc

        I’m not a fan of them all, but each is massively iconic.

        I think you can make a fair argument that, to a global audience, Michael Jackson is the single most iconic musician of the 20th century.

      • Point of order, Mr Dynamite, about Springsteen: he was iconic in the true sense of the word in 1975, with the release of Born To Run. Cover of Time and Newsweek. Rock and roll future. Nineteen-seventy-five. Album sleeve known all around the world. And yes, Bob Marley was a figurehead in the ‘seventies.

        • Point taken, Mr Craft, although I think an argument could be made that it was the BITUSA album that made him iconic outside of the US. Marley…well, I wasn’t aware of him until his death, but I was eight at the time and more concerned with Lego than chanting down Babylon.

  17. Hmmm, but they’re not eulogising any old past, otherwise they’d say they wanted to go back to the 1930s or 1980s, it is very specific…..the 1950s and 1960s.
    The people who lived in it always want to return, the one’s who didn’t also want to go there.

    Don’t blame me, I’m only the messenger.
    If you don’t like it, you’ve always got your Duran Duran records. Cosmic!

    • OK, problem 1: it’s a local radio show, and thus possibly not quite meeting the standards for a decent sample. Problem 2: I’ve just had a look at the page for it. Every last one of the blokes who’s contributed – all blokes, bar one – appears to be in the age range 49-65. Problem 3: Robert Elms is 55, so it’s JUST possible there might be some selection bias going on there.

      So, y’know, I’m not sure the Elms Methodology (TMFTL) is quite standing up to scrutiny here as a way of proving the theory “1950-69=best”. 😉

      • Quality will out, irrespective of time period. Some good, yes, largely independent etc but mainstream ? Enough said if you have ears in your brain, and as for all the soft soaped whingeing half arsed crap ? No voices anymore.

  18. Oh I think there is game-changing music around alright, just not aimed at us old foggies on The Afterword. Black Americans are leading the way, seething with anger at the police killing of unarmed people. They are blending the political and the personal, bringing a poetry to protest. I’m thinking D’Angelo, Run The Jewels and, of course, Kendrick Lamar.

    In addition, some electronic artists are inventing a new musical language. They are largely young women, unafraid to express their sexuality through their music. Try FKA Twigs and Jenny Hval.

    That Battle Is Over is the least challenging track on Jenny’s album

    • Can’t we just leave it at that each generation has its iconic, life changing moments that in the great scheme of things mean little or nothing to those that follow? Nothing in my life will hit me as hard or mean as much as Blonde on Blonde.
      The other evening Mrs S enticed me to watch on Sky Arts a band called OMD in some sort of recent-ish revival concert. She was entranced, zilch for me.
      I personally think the albums listed by Tigger are pants but I am perfectly sure there are other, most likely far younger than me, who think these are life-changers.

      • With all respect, the discussion is about ‘titans’. I slightly hijacked the OP by asking who were the ‘icons’ since 1980. With the best will in the world, it’s impossible to equate the impact of Andy MacCluskey (minor hit-maker for short period and producer of Atomic Kitten) with that of Dylan.
        Again, who are the current icons who are worthy of veneration? 1D provide entertainment, but, then, so did Alma Cogan and no one’s claiming she’s worthy of respect.

    • Tigger, sure there may be artists out there doing something slightly different, but ‘game-changing? Don’t think so. Also, they’re not even household names in their own household, far less ‘titans’ or ‘icons’. They’re barely even fringe artists.

  21. I first read this thread as Where Are The Titians?

    Which caused me to say in Peter Cook voice – S’over there, Dud, next to all those Reubens where the bums follow you round the room”

  22. But he’s an iconic 80s artist, surely? Nobody thinks of him as a 70s artist.

    I’m also not sure how iconic Little Richard is these days. Great? Sure. But iconic? I suspect most people couldn’t name more than two of his tunes at a push.

  23. Hi Kid D – Jacko’s solo career began early ’70s and he was already a star. Marley is a ’69s artist, Joy Division ’70s. I think one has to look at era artist began in – otherwise someone like Nick Drake could be claimed as a ’90s icon.

  24. Little Richard is, undoubtedly, representative of his era and was a titanic, subversive figure. Not sure how well known, say, Sam Cooke is nowadays, but doesn’t lessen his impact on the field of popular music.

  25. Stevie – you’re talking about Little Stevie Wonder of ‘Fingertips’ and ‘Ma Cherie Amour’. I’d refer my learned friend to my Nick Drake example.

  26. For me an artist of any stripe to be considered ‘iconic’ whatever that means has to have relevance that spans decades.
    By relevance I mean their work has to contain the power to connect with an audience. To move you, to speak truth to you to make you want to move your feet, to excite you, to make your life just that little bit better.
    If any work of art, be it high or low can do those things and many more year after year, decade after decade, century after century then that’s iconic enough for me.
    There has always been talented individuals in all walks of life. There always will be. One just has to seek them out with an open mind and an open heart.
    There is room for everybody.

  28. Dare I argue that there two different versions of being iconic?

    Man in the street iconic: if you show a photo of this artist or play a track to someone in Tesco, they will recognize them.

    Examples: Tom Jones, Beyoncé, Mick Jagger, Mr Blobby

    Music nerd iconic: if you do the same in a record shop or at a music festival.

    Examples: Nick Drake, Joy Division, Rammstein, Bender from Futurama

  29. DisappointmentBob, did you actually get your Maths O-Level?

    These are exactly the people who you wouldn’t expect to pick the 50s and 60s as ultimate destinations! Do the sums. Born 1950s, missed the 1950s/60s.

    Back to the original Lulu/ Hendrix thing……most of the audience would have known exactly who Jimi was in January ’69, he was battling in the pop charts with the host, and the Beatles and the Stones and The Kinks and Dylan etc…..

    At the time of the show being aired the NME hadn’t started telling the public who to listen to as public taste was determined by who was doing well in the charts. the fact that this coincided with the greatest era for popular music is/ was a happy aside.

      • I realise they weren’t around at the time, but that’s not my point – more that middle aged white blokes (perhaps especially ex punks) are often nostalgic musical conservatives. Nature of the beast, regardless of generation.

        (Punk, after all, has its roots in 60s garage – the whole point was to ignore the progressive excesses of the 70s and go back to a purer three-chord way.)

        Anyway, there’s no point going round and round on this one. You’ve decided there’s an objectively right answer, and that part of the proof of that lies in the opinions of a small number of middle-aged white male guests on a little-listened-to local radio show. As Eric Morecambe would say, there’s no answer to that. 😉

  30. Kid, you may well be right about Marley. I have a gut feeling that his music is very well-known throughout Africa, for example.

    How one earth can these things be measured? Where’s an Iconometer when one needs one?

  31. The iconic thing’s interesting.

    It used to be the case that the only way to be iconic was that you had to actually create a body of work or, Buddy Holly/Eddie Cochran style, do a ton of stuff really early on at a genuinely pivotal time and then die young.

    Fast forward to Amy Winehouse and, correct me if I’m wrong, but her whole recorded legacy lasts about the length of a Carry On film……and she was a recording artist, in theory at least, about four times longer than Buddy Holly!

  32. Bob- probably agree with your point about Nick Drake, but I was only pointing out that though he’d only become quite famous by the ’90s, he can hardly be claimed as an icon of that era. I think John Lee Hooker also probably sold more albums in the ’90s than the rest of his career put together.

    • Yeah, fair dos. Interestingly, I think of Pixies as an iconic 90s act despite releasing all but one of their records in the 80s. They seem much more OF the early 90s to me – possibly because that’s when I first heard them!

  33. Not a massive fan of the Elms either, but I will contest that BBC Radio London (11 million and counting…..indeed by 2030 apparently going to be 13 million) isn’t a ‘little listened to local radio station’.

    I suspect that even the least listened to show on the network at 4 a.m. outsells a no. 1 in 2015 (20,000?) by a considerable margin.

  34. In the older meaning of the word, she is becoming iconic. If you walk round Camden, there are paintings of her on walls and inside cafes and bars, and they blend in with the pictures of the Madonna and Child on the back shelves behind the counters in the Greek shops. She is genuinely becoming a symbolic figure, although of what, I don’t know – but it’s only loosely related to her music.

  36. Very witty.

    OK, 500,000……quite a large number in the context of record sales circa 2015 I’d have thought.

    Remember, this is a time when with the Beeb, crying out for any kind of audience, a concept as simple as a Top 40 show (let’s for argument’s sake call it Top of the Pops) is a complete non-starter.

    Alas, pop music, and I mean that in the sense of ‘popular’, not non-classical, is a dead art form.
    Wish is wasn’t.

    • Pop music just isn’t that popular. The “music industry” is dead in the water and nobody has ambitions to work in it. There aren’t any big labels giving out big contracts to big names any more. Doesn’t mean that there’s not some good music being made, but it’s disposable product with a limited shelf life, whose only real distinctive quality is that of “newness”, as if that in itself is good or interesting or worth buying. It’s illusory, this newness. It gives the latest recordings a kind of excitement and relevance, but what we’re hearing is … already old. Older than yesterday.

      In Hendrix’s time, he was a product of a wider, connected culture that expressed freedom and change and a genuine, exciting sense of the new. It was the first time for everybody. And as every addict comes to learn, addiction is a continuing and weakening attempt to recreate that first time, to get back that rush. That’s what music is today, a worthy but doomed attempt to get the rush back. It’s understandable. Pop music, rock music, this was the best of life, and it was ours. We can’t let go. We’re still hoping for that second coming, a Dylan, a Presley, a Who, a whoever. Someone with so much talent they light up the world for a while. Not going to happen. Different times.

      But the “old stuff” has never seemed old to me; it gets better all the time. I can listen to it all over again and hear it new, or almost. Hendrix comes through my speakers with as much force and vitality as he did in ’67. I don’t have to replace him, or the hundreds of other acts that bloomed back then. And I certainly don’t have to replace him with, say, the Decemberists or Joanna Newsom, or any other half-baked bunch of politely competent artists currently deemed exceptional. I’ll play the originals, I’ll listen to the best. There’s more than enough to last my lifetime.

      • In 2014, global sales, downloads and streams raked in around $17 billion, a figure that has been stable for some time. Disney’s Frozen shifted 10 million units and Taylor Swift 6 million. I’d call both of those ‘pop’.

        You neglect Rap as a global, cultural phenomenum, Sauce. That’s the genre to go to if you are looking for something connected, expressing freedom and change, whilst sounding exciting and new. It has been a dominant genre for years of course, but, gangsta is now ‘old’ and it has fresh impetus following the police killings of unarmed black Americans.

        We, older white guys aren’t the target demographic, that’s all, just as our grandparents weren’t when Jimi & Mick hit the TV screens in the sixties. My dad was in his thirties in the latter half of the sixties. He’d rather listen to Frank Sinatra. I recall, when I showed an interest in T.Rex, Bowie and Roxy Music, he talked just like you about how it had all been done so much better before.

        If you are saying ‘rock’ music is dead, didn’t it die a long time ago?

        Now. Where’s that Paul Simon LP….?

        • Rap? Gave it my best shot, during a period of frustration at nuthin’ much happening. Delved deep for the acknowleged classics, gave myself a thorough intiation. I’d like to say it’s a genre I can appreciate, from a subjective distance. A genre whose craft and skill is apparent yet to which (grammar) I fail to relate. I’d like to say that I recognise the failure to connect is my own, based on prejudice and habit. I’d like to say all of these things because it would give an impression of me as a broadminded soul who’s just a little too out of the loop to get anything from this vital art-for. But I can’t, because my considered opinion is that rap is ugly, lazy, garbage. As a global, cultural phenom, of course, it is of course a global, cultural phenom. Like global warming, or pollution. The picture of you, in your cardie, a mug of cocoa at your elbow, rocking out to Fukk Yo Ass-Bitch is a curious one.

          Oh – and I “dig” Sinatra as much as I’m “into” Hendrix. I’ll take Billie and Basie over Ella and Ellington, but I’ll take any of it over anything from the eighties, or the barren wastelands of decades (I believe there have been others) that followed them.

          • I know.

            I’m somewhat immune to the foul language and misogyny in Rap. I don’t enjoy it but I’ve heard it all before, working on building sites in my teens. The only real difference was that those Irish and Northern lads preferred power tools to guns.

            • Tigger – merely quoting the turnover of what’s loosely termed the ‘music industry’ is absolutely meaningless, as proven by your mentioning the sales of a Disney soundtrack album. ‘The Sound of Music’ was a huge seller in the ’60s, but that meant fuck all in the grand, cultural scheme of things. More money is spent, partly as a result of inflation, but mainly because there is more money in people’s pockets to consume ‘the product’. When I were a nipper, I thought long and hard before spending my meagre pocket money on even a single. I had to beg to get the ‘Twist and Shout’ EP. I couldn’t afford the White Album as a 14 year old. No tears, please and no sniggering at the back.
              As for rap music, I find it’s become a dead-end – repetitive and, frankly, dull. I say this as one of the very first people to buy ‘The Message’. Now, I couldn’t care less what the ignorant, misogynistic, nihilistic, homophobic, bread-headed dullards are ranting on about. Sorry to disillusion you, but they really couldn’t give a shit about cop killings, other than it provides raw material for their whinings and attitudinal posturings. Cash from cop-killings, as distinct from cash from chaos. The prime exponents are more concerned with expanding their brand – they’re the most cynical, rapacious corporate capitalists you could meet.

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