There is a certain sound in the world of pop music that actually turns my stomach. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it but I'll do what I can. It's a bit like that famous legal effort when the judge declared that, while it is very difficult to describe an elephant, we all know one when we see one. The music I'm talking about is precisely like that. It can be spotted from that very first tired plink on the keyboard. It's unmistakable, entirely predictable and it's to be found with every turn of the dial. Worse again, there seems to be nothing any of us can do about it. It's out of our hands.
To pin it down is difficult, however. All I have to assist me are a few inadequate labels and the names of those responsible. Sometimes it's referred to as "Adult Orientated Rock" - but that's no use. I'm an adult and it makes me ill. Sometimes they call it "mainstream", but that's no good either. New musical fish enter the mainstream every day of the week and eat the old fish and that's fair enough. But the stuff I'm talking about is some kind of terrible and permanent presence like a virus that can't be killed. It is the sound of the giant media organisation itself.
It is the triumph of hype over content. Maybe, for now, I'll call it corporate rock. At the core of corporate rock is Celine Dion. Like Dreyfus at the mention of Clouseau, my face begins to twitch at the very mention of her name. Herself, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and all those other alleged divas churn this stuff out with terrifying regularity. All three were (un)naturally at the Oscars singing meaningless songs with such painful sincerity that the television literally had to be cursed and switched off on several furious occasions. I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but it does. I fear a conspiracy - although I accept that Celine Dion and the rest of them might merely be the messengers. And traditionally they are, unfortunately, spared.
If there is a conspiracy, what is it? If I was a Marxist I would work on the basis that the masses really don't know what's good for them and that they really do have bad taste - a taste which has been nurtured by capitalism itself. In other words, people are fed this garbage until they think they like it. And perhaps it is precisely this kind of vacuous corporate rock, rather than religion, which is really the opium of the masses: inhuman enough to numb the brain and keep everybody tightly within the rhythms of production. That might sound a bit far fetched, but there's certainly something going on. If only I knew what it was.
It follows that any conspiracy, if it does exist, must be between the record companies and the various agencies down the line: marketing people, shop-keepers, programme controllers, DJs and so on. The difficulty is that none of the above is as all-powerful as people tend to imagine. Remember that none of the major forces in popular music has ever been spawned in the expanse of either an executive office or a DJ ego. Don't forget either that they missed rock 'n' roll by a mile. They also missed disco, they missed punk, and they missed dance - only catching up with things later with their regular capture and re-package routine. So whatever about a conspiracy, it doesn't always work the way they want it. Cheap home-recorded dance music was certainly never on the agenda.
That said, there is still something seriously wrong. There is no doubt that these combined agencies are absolutely capable of making anything a hit if and when they decide to go with it. The process is simple. Someone like Celine Dion makes a record just like her last one. The song is then tacked onto a movie which is also made by a major corporation and the movie too is a hit. The record sells millions. The songs wins an Oscar. The movie wins other Oscars. Celine makes a mint. Everybody makes a mint. Everybody loves Celine. And yet as far as I'm concerned - it all makes my skin crawl. Is it just me?
And here is the problem. By criticising this bland, empty, horrible yet very popular music I will be accused of elitism. Maybe so, but popularity is not necessarily a good thing. There have been many popular phenomena though the years, from tank-tops to dictators, and none of them ought really to have been encouraged. Just because something is a cult or a craze doesn't mean that we all have to approve of it. Just because some of us are at odds with popular opinion on the matter of Celine Dion doesn't necessarily mean that we're wrong. Maybe popular taste really has been corrupted?
It was Elvis Costello in the song Radio Radio who sang about those who were trying to "anaesthetise the way that you feel." Certainly that crowd at the Oscars looked fairly anaesthetised - so much so that Roberto Begnini scared the hell out of them. Imagine what someone like Little Richard or Woody Guthrie or Joe Heaney or Jimi Hendrix or Howlin' Wolf would have done to that gathering. It would have caused such a meltdown that recording and movie executives would have had to frantically dispatch Celine back on stage to do whatever it is she does to the human brain.
But maybe I'm taking it all too seriously? After all, music only became the thing it is today with the arrival of recording technology. And before records, there was no recording industry. Evan Eisenberg, in a book called The Recording Angel, digs deeply into this territory and points out that records are not music anyway: they are only recordings of music. And if I might take it further into the corporate 1990s, I would contend that many of today's records have nothing to do with music at all. In fact, a considerable number of records have involved hardly any musical considerations at any stage of their existence - the initial idea, the writing, the hack performance, the promotion, the robotic radio-play, the purchase and the listen. Absolutely nothing to do with music whatsoever.
I'm not for a moment trying to suggest that there was once a more heroic time in popular music when nobody cared about rights and royalties. I'm not for a second suggesting that there were ever noble days when no artist would ever consider some cheap trick to sell a few more records. Nor am I saying that there was ever some extraordinary era when artists weren't manufactured, hyped and marketed. Pop music has always been like that.
The important thing however was that, at least at some stage along the line, there was somebody who actually cared about what was happening in a way that wasn't cynical, exploitative and prompted by the alleged need to "dumb down."
I love conspiracy theories. If corporate rock is part of a conspiracy (and it might be) it's a rather dull one even so. Yes there might be the odd clever and sinister shark up there somewhere, but primarily the whole thing is a conspiracy of the bland. Certainly it's effective, but that's simply because nobody sees the need to challenge it. In fact, the main players, don't even understand why anyone would ever want to challenge it. They've all got their free leather tour jackets and their back-stage passes and people like Celine Dion are paying their rent. If however it paid the rent more effectively to issue live recordings of an average day in a dental surgery, rest assured they would do it in a flash. Furthermore it would be played on mainstream radio - and people would certainly buy it. For the moment however, as far as the music industry is concerned, the diva of the bland corporate rock ballad is the genuine golden goose. But who really wants to listen to a goose?