Shift to the right in American politics aided by the decline of the music industry?

Music goes in cycles. It was great in the late 70s and early 80s, and then Phil Collins and his ilk (not to mention hair bands, and the resurrection of a bunch of 60s acts riding the Big Chill bandwagon) drove creative bands off the radio. Then in the late 80s, U2 and REM led a movement of creative acts like Sinead O'Connor and the Church and Love and Rockets and the Cure onto the charts, culminating in the commercial breakout of punkers like Nirvana and Sonic Youth. Then, as creative acts will do, some of those bands self-destructed. U2 put out crap music, Kurt Cobain killed himself (which meant that Hole lost its creative force too), and Pearl Jam decided to waste a couple of years fighting TicketMaster. Ice-T wimped out and became an actor. NWA broke up, and one of the keys to that band suddenly dropped dead from AIDS. Tupac got shot. (I'm not gonna mention Biggie, cuz I'm not that impressed with his music. He doesn't belong in this list.) The big corporations stepped into the void with acts who understood from the beginning that they were disposable commodities, and allowed corporations to dictate everything about them. Which inevitably resulted in nauseatingly bland music. And while bling-bling rap has some appeal, I guess, at first, there just aren't that many ways to say that you're rich and bang alot of fine ho's.

To put it another way, Alex, you don't know what you're talking about wrt creative music getting commercial airplay.

Sometimes I get pissed at how awful commercial radio is right now, but then I realize, I've lived through these cycles before. I have some hopes that the Vines-Hives-White Stripes might become something special.

 

It used to be you had lots of record labels pitching songs to lots of relatively independent radio stations. Good music would catch on with more station program managers and become popular. Market forces at work to bring the best music to the top. (Of course some music succeeded by appealing to the lowest common denominator, but there was a decent amount of legitimate music that succeeded on its merit.)

Now you have a small number of labels who must convince a small number of corporate radio conglomerates to play their music. Clear Channel probably selects its music by committee. So the music that gets played is selected by a few people who probably have nothing in common with the average radio listener (unlike the local program directors in the old days). They probably have a whole lot of non-artistic criteria for selecting what gets played. Record companies want to push music thats cheaper to make and that appeals more to kids with disposable income.

The decline in music has to do with media conglomeration. Perhaps it benefits the political right. But that doesn't explain why people who turn off music for talk turn to right-wing shows instead of left.

I'm thankful that we have a cool locally owned FM station here. http://www.cd101.com

I despise Clear Channel for ruining what was, for 20 years, the coolest radio station in the state WLVQ.

 

Everyone likes to knock Alex. It's an interesting idea. I'd like to see music ratings figures. Is there any evidence that people are in fact not listening to music as much on the radio?

I've experienced quite a few cab drivers parrot Rushisms over the past couple of years. Makes you wonder. The power of right-wing radio seems clear. Whether it's benefiting from people not listening to music, I have no idea.

 

I think things have gone down ever since "What's Going On" and "Get Together" fell off the charts.

 

Maybe superdave means you don't know what your are talking about because you are trying to find good FM music. Don't waste time on that. Get some CDs,and find a good independent CD store, and hit the web.

Now me, I just listen to Tito Puente and Kraftwerk, so I got no problem.

 

I doubt that this process occurs all that often. Granted, I'm a liberal and I rarely listen to right-wing talk radio, but in my experience, the thrust of the commentary is aimed less at converting the non-believers and more at preaching to the choir--keeping conservative true believers in a constant state of froth over fresh outrages. The level of political discourse on these shows is pretty moronic; it may succeed as pep rally, or as pure entertainment, or as a source for smack-talk zingers on political message boards (ahem), but as a means of actual persuasion? Fuggetaboutit.

(Ask yourself--if Rush Limbaugh, for example, were a left-wing talk show of similar intellectual vacuity and strongish entertainment value, would you change your mind? Didn't think so.)

It may be partially true that the crappiness of mainstream music is driving the success of conservative talk radio, but I can think of any number of more persuasive reasons:

1. Demographics: The audience for political talk radio is overwhelmingly mid to late middle-aged, white and male. The baby boom generation is mid to late middle-aged, so the potential audience for talk radio is pretty huge at the moment. These people don't care that mainstream pop radio is overplaying Britney Spears and underplaying the White Stripes, because they don't give a good goddamn about either one.
2. Better research: This is just a guess on my part, but in the same way that SoundScan revealed to (young, hip, urban) record execs that there were more people buying country and Christian contemporary music than they had previously assumed, I suspect that better research into radio audiences has revealed that there is more demand for right-wing talk radio than the (young, hip, urban) radio programming directors had previously assumed.
3. Industry consolidation: other people have brought this up, but it's worth mentioning again. As the number of entities controlling radio stations gets smaller and smaller, the number of radio stations willing to take risks with any kind of programming gets smaller and smaller as well. A right-wing talk show has a built-in, predictable audience which enables advertisers to speak to a demographically narrow but desirable group of consumers, which is the same phenomenon which drives "all teen pop, all the time" radio.
4. The ubiquity of pre-recorded music players: there's not a lot of cars that don't have a tape deck anymore, portable CD players are disposably cheap, and MP3 players are getting to that point sooner rather than later. There's just no reason for anyone who cares about any music which diverges more than a couple of degrees from the mainstream to ever listen to the radio--yet another factor driving radio stations (especially AM radio stations, which haven't been significant music media for years) to the arms of the safe and predictable formats which appeal primarily to people who lack the means or the inclination to spend significant time and dinero on building a decent pre-recorded music collection--bubblegum pop and talk radio.

I hold in my trembling hands a book called The Top Ten, 1956-1980 which contains the Top Forty charts for those years. To take one year more or less totally at random, the top ten singles from 1969 are:

1. Sugar, Sugar (The Archies)
2. Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (The Fifth Dimension)
3. Honky Tonk Women (Rolling Stones)
4. Everyday People (Sly and the Family Stone)
5. I Can't Get Next To You (The Temptations)
6. Dizzy (Tommy Roe)
7. Crimson and Clover (Tommy James and the Shondells)
8. Build Me Up Buttercup (Foundations)
9. Hair (The Cowsills)
10. One (Three Dog Night)

The closest you come to liberal ideology there is the commodified counterculture pastiche that is the soundtrack to "Hair." Most of them are pretty good songs, and I'd say that at least three of them are great songs, but it's not like commercial radio went through this period of all agitprop, all the time. A casual look at the pop charts for any year at any time shows that a huge chunk of the audience wants to hear a catchy pop tune. This has not appreciably changed since the advent of radio.

 

This is actually quite an interesting notion. Although I don't think it's sustainable, insofar as you CAN argue that the bland homogeneity of mainstream music is likely to cause people to look elsewhere, but you CAN't argue that it will drive people to a specific location, in this instance right-wing talk radio. Depends on your available output, I suppose. When I'm driving, I listen to a CD, or I listen to current affairs, history or dramas on Radio Four. Or I listen to sports.

Mind you, we don't have the same sort of "platform" media outlets you lot have. We don't have "comment" shows where one particular political perspective is exclusively promoted. Even TalkSport (Murdoch) only has one rabble-rouser phone-in show which is just the typical guff you get when you allow cabbies and retired factory workers an on-air opinion. You'd like it actually, Alex, it's hosted by one of those "now, I'm a reasonable man, but ... " types.

 

Since you and oman both missed my point, I guess I didn't write well. Let me try again.

What I was trying to say is that if I were 19 years old, then my earliest radio memories would be of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and U2 (Achtung Baby era) dominating he charts. And I might think that was the norm.

What I'm saying is, that's not the norm. Sometimes it's 1986 or 2000 and crap music is dominating the radio, and sometimes it's 1982 or 1993 and good music is dominating. Since we've had crap music before, and those other times it didn't have the effect you think it's having now, the logical conclusion is that it's just a coincidence, not cause and effect.

 

Unlike the mainstream news industry, I don't think the mainstream music industry creates a political climate as much as simply tags along behind.

That said, dave is right that historically since the 40s at least, popular music has gone in cycles wrt the relationship between creative, "quality" music and the mainstream.

As far as I can tell, outbursts of creativity have as much to do with

1) decentralization of record company and radio/record store ownership and

2) new technology in either musical production (electric gtuitars and synthesizers, for example) or distribution channels (music videos).

as with general inner artistic creativity.

While there is always new and interesting music out there if you're willing to invest the time and energy into digging deeply enough and wading through enough crap to find it, the last ten years has been a mainstream wasteland because ownership of production and distrubtion has rapidly and decisively concentrated and because the only new technology to hit the scene has been the internet which if anythnig has had a fragmenting effect on the audience and driven each musical subgenre ever further up its own ass rather than providing fruitful "cross-pollination" as it were now that the rap-metal fusion has long since played itself out.

I feel sorry for kids these days. Because of advertising, every new generation has to believe that it rocks louder, fucks more, is more shocking and parties harder than its parents but ever since the mid-90s, this has been demonstrably untrue. Even "extreme sports", "Girls Gone Wild" and school shootings can't make up for the obvious lack of "advancement" on the party hardy front. So what's a kid to do and he knows that mom and dad partied at least as hard if not harder in the pre-AIDS days than he's been able to and that their rocks heroes were every bit as subversive, offensive and drug-addled as his? Hell, given the lack of creativity these days leading to the various "retro" crazes, he's even stuck wearing "neo-" versions of his parents' clothing! Man, that's gotta suck.

 

And whereas my parents had Janis Joplin and I had PJ Harvey, kids now have Avril Lavigne, an even more cynical construct than any of the boy band fluff out there, if that were possible.

Sucks to be a teenager.

 

I too am in a rush and don't have nearly as much time as Alex.

I'm with Matt Clark. It is a very interesting notion but I don't think it leads directly to the specific conclusion that you reach, e.g. that people end up at Limbaugh, et al. by dint of disgust with FM music selections.

I do lament the lack of hard-hitting countercultural and/or "alternative" music with social commentary. Say what you will about the Reagan years, at least we had Black Flag, Two-Tone Ska, Dead Kennedy's and about a million other alternatives to mainstream groupthink to help us weather the storm.

And if anyone has any suggestions regarding what's going on now in that area, please let me know.

 

I think that's why "kids" (meaning high-school/college age) are going to the right to counter their parents. If you can't party as hard as mom and dad you then get into other things like politics and make sure you have a different ideology than your hippy parents.

 

Ditto Thatcher - The Jam, The Damned, early Depeche Mode,, the Smiths, the Cure, Joy Division ... it's official! Right-wing lunatics are great for music!!

 

This may help explain the mini-boom in "Alex Keaton" types in the early 80s but, statistically speaking, nobody born after, say, 1976 is going to have had "hippy parents". Even at the height of the late 60/early 70s, real "hippies" were still a very small group. If anything, there's been a temporary and likely short-lived growth in the numbers of young deadhead-wannabes following the various "Baby Dead" bands around.

Also, not that I've done any scientific studies on the topic but my sense is that neither high school kids nor college kids are moving en masse to the left or the right. Or at least, I could point to any number of campus movements such as the fight against sweatshops, for example, to show that their political activity is more single-issue-focused than broadly ideologically inclined. My guess is that most (but not all) high school and college kids are more into chugging beer, knowing the new bands and trying to get laid than in fighting for social justice on the left or for smaller government on the right.

One thing I am fairly sure of is that the current mainstream music scene is not exactly influencing political choices these days.

 

Oh I dunno. You're just not paying enough attention to the subtext of "Touch my Bum" by the Cheeky Girls.

 

I'm just going by the 20 year olds I meet when I drop by my old frat house. All a very hawkish pro-Bush crowd, with mostly liberal parents.

 

I have absolutely no doubts that some Cult. Stud. idiot somewhere in academia is writing a "post-modern" screed on how rebellious, paradigm-shattering, wickedly subversive and threatening the Cheeky Girls are.

 

I think I've found the problem...

You remember the "Bloom County" comic strip from the 80s? Remember the "Steve Dallas" character and his pro-Reagan frat buddies?

I think the problem resides in your insufficiently diverse sample set.

 

Re: I think I've found the problem...

Possibly, they're still brag about black balling Bush the Elder at the Yale Chapter, but that's another thread entirely.

Back to the music, is it possible that the lack of artistic integrety has left a youth culture that's blaise towards everything, including politics? It may not be a shift to the right, but a lull in liberal expression that allows the right to be more apparent. Does MTV still promote all of the causes like young voting, anti-discrimination, etc.? The times I watch MTV it's all Osbornes and Surf Girls.

 

And on the other hand

There was talk radio 30 years ago, too. None of it was syndicated like today, and it was pretty forgettable. The only syndicated radio I remember were a few top-10 rundowns like Kasey Keller's and Wolfman Jack.

Rush Limbaugh turned it upside down by being more amusing than the local hacks. Now, he's stale and you've got to listen to Savage to hear anything amusing but in 1989, Limbaugh was a revelation.

Nowadays, the talk radio in my area (San Francisco) it's all syndicated stuff from 9am to 7pm or so, then the local hacks come in. Most of the syndicated stuff is pretty lame but it's still better than the local stuff.

Then there's the PBS fare, featuring such stuff as in-depth interviews of Lawrence Ferlinghetti about how he used to have Ginsberg reciting poetry in his bookstore basement in the '60s. Only Pakovitz could find that amusing.

 

Re: And on the other hand

Keller had a talk radio show? Really? Did he make prank phone calls to Brad Friedel and stuff?

 

I'm 16 (17 in 3 weeks) and would have to consider myself left-wing. The same rings true for most of the people my age in Ireland, and I don't see music having too much effect here.

What you say about bands and life in general being more watered down is true and false, as poliarisation has intensified... bands like Busted (if they aren't big in America, consider yourselves TOO lucky), Avril Lavigne, etc. are watered down crap who try to be something they are now

On the other hand, bands like Slipknot and Mudvayne (whom I also am not a big fan of) are definitely a world heavier than what was goign on 30-40 years back, albeit lacking musical ability.

There is a proverbial rash or bands/acts and feels good to 'itch' (listen to) around at the moment, but since their teenage audiences utilise the internet (thank you, KaZaa) to a much higher extent than kids, these acts don't compete with the mindless pop circulating around our charts at the moment (not that MTVs showing of SIX Osbourne repeats [does ANYBODY watch that anymore?] and all pop videos helps either... and let's not forget 'Making the Band' or 'Pop Stars', either. However, bands/acts like Nas, DMX, The Coral, The Strokes, etc. leave some hope for the future.

 

True, but most kids still listen to them because the alternative is to sheepishly admit that manistream rock today sucks and go back to listening to their older cousin's CD collection and that would be too embarrassing.

The fact that you have to go back 30 to 40 years to find stuff lighter than Slipknot is pretty damning. Slipknot sure isn't any "harder" or "heavier" than Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, etc. etc. etc.

MTV's plunge into abysmal suckitude is a well-established and well-remarked phenomenon among everyone smarter and better informed than the poor muppets who regularly inhabit "Real World" or "Road Rules". In fact, it has been for about a decade now.

"They say the heart of rock and roll is still beating
And from what I've seen I believe 'em.
Now the old boy may be barely breathing
But the heart of rock and roll is still beating." - Huey Lewis & The News

Oh, the irony!