What's Eating Pop? Notes From The Underground

Searching for informed opinions on the state of music, Crimson Arts plunges into the netherworld of the MBTA (a.k.a. the Pit) to catch a train to cultural nirvana.

Remember last week when we wrote about how the Backstreet Boys still make us cry? This week, we talk to the people who think they should die. While many of our population stay in counting our Dave Matthews T-shirts and WBCN buttons, a gang of subterranean music-lovers is stoically, imperceptibly up in arms over the death of real music. The existential angst of today's sell-out music industry is visited on their bodies in rings, rags and tattoos. They congregate daily at the underground hub of the hub of the universe, and sling albums, gig times and rap loops at one another. Keeping it alive are they-while we shuffle by them in haste looking at our feet. At last, they inscribe their disappointment and displeasure in our pages, narrate to us the history of pop music as they understand it, and offer advice for rescuing our souls.

Gerald, 21, lives in the underground music scene. When he is not riding, he is putting together a band that is a mix of old-school hardcore, thrash, metal, punk, dub, ska, some reggae, rockabilly--just the stuff he listens to. When he was six, his babysitter took him to a hardcore Bad Rings house party and hid him with earmuffs under the stage, and he has been a punk all the way ever since.

THC: What is wrong with music now?

G: It's pasteurized crap. Simple as that. You get five numbskulls with seven-string guitars and fake dread-locks, and you know what, you've got a band? You put some goofy white boy in big baggy pants and take him out to the tattoo shop, you've got another band. You take two lazy fat-ass pieces of white trash from [lousy] Detroit and put clown makeup on them and you've got another band. It's not [really] music. I'm sorry, but you know what--I can get a seven string guitar, I can tune it down two steps and play with some bass guitar effects, I can get some numbskull to [mess] with their turntable and you know what--I too can be Limp Bizkit, I too can be Korn. I can run around in reverse Black Face; I can paint my face white and put on stupid little dark circles and go "Yo, I'm the juggalo" and talk about drinking Faygo and I can be Insane Clown Posse. You know, it's not music. I give more credit to someone like Eminem who just doesn't give a shit and who's like, you know, I've been slugging this out for seven years, yeah I may rhyme about the same [stuff]. He may have an entire album about being pissed off about his life, eating acid and smoking pot and eating shrooms and [sundry items], but it's the most original thing I've heard come out of hip-hop in a while.

THC: What is all the stuff that's been missing?

G: Fun! It's no longer about having fun. It's all about having an image of either "Yo, I've got a big [male genitalia] and I'm the world's biggest player," it's "Yo, [my friend], I got the biggest gun" or "I can handle all my drugs, I can be the biggest freaks"...It should be about you know what? I got 400 of you all out in the audience, five of us on stage, we've got enough weed and beer to keep this motha going all night...Let's have a good time! I miss the days of girls just running up...no one says "Show me your [breasts] anymore." There's no more unnecessary excess of women and booze backstage. It pisses me off, because that's what I though being a rock star was about, not "We got tofu on the deli tray." I want to hear somebody bitch and whine because they lost an eight-ball of coke behind their couch, not "Who drank the last bottle of spring water?"

Brad, 23, is not, to be exacting, a resident of the Pit. He does, however, pass through it several times a week between his workplace in the square and his pad. There, he makes self-confessed terrible music with similarly soft-spoken, sensitively-slanted friends. Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe" was the first song to make a dent in his consciousness, but the Backstreet Boys haunt him now as the curdle of the pop crop. He won't admit it, but Brad knows.

Ludwig, 33, probably does not know what the Pit is. He happened to drop in from Austria, and was idling over an ice-cream before gunning it back to Logan to catch his plane. Jazz and classical are his realm, but he will venture a thought on pop when forced to do so. Ludwig is reserved in his opinions, but is almost certainly a man of good taste, as inferred from his revulsion at our interrogative assault. At the least, his point of view possesses the advantage of maturity as well as continentality.

THC: What do you think of pop music?

L: Well, it's nice music, very commercialized.

THC: Who do you perceive as the big movers and shakers in the music industry now?

L: Well certainly Prince. Well it was Prince, and probably Michael Jackson. Now I'm not into that stuff.

THC: Because it doesn't move you, doesn't speak to you?

L: Well it's so short-lived. It's lacking the depth, the sense of the whole thing.

THC: So what's wrong with pop music?

L: I wouldn't say what's gone wrong, it's just that everything sped up, to be an instant success, and then you can see many, many groups dissappear; they only have one song.

Ali, 15, is into all sorts of music from jazz to hip-hop, encapsulating hardcore, rock 'n roll, classical, oldies and folk. James Brown is her reason for dancing. The names flow like water when she starts listing who she likes, but her ultimate favorites are Led Zeppelin and the Beatles because when she listens to their music, she falls in love. If she were to make everyone in the world listen to one person, it would be Bob Marley, because Bob Marley brings the world together... everyone can get it.

THC: Who's the biggest tool in the music industry?

A: Umm, the Backstreet Boys. And 'N Sync too, because they're totally ripping off the New Kids on the Block.

THC: Did you like the New Kids on the Block?

A: Oh, I did like them. I thought they were cool.

THC: Me too!

A: And I don't really think they're in it for the music; I think they're in it to make money and be on MTV. Yeah, once people started selling out and doing it for the money that's where everything went wrong. Because I still travel with my friend's band...it was all about friendship, and travelling, and having lots of fun. But then it started getting into money...and then it was all about money and not the music.

Alexandra, 17, almost a musical puritan, started hanging out with her grandmother when she realized that everything on the radio was no good. Her grandmother, besides being her best friend, gives her her grandfather's old Chuck Berry records. Consequently, Alexandra rues the day that rock 'n roll died, and wishes everybody had at least four Chuck Berry albums. Until modern music stops sucking, until it stops sampling old music and starts being original, it can do without her patronage.

THC: Do you like anyone from today?

A: I listen to Liz Phair; she's my favorite female artist in the whole entire world; and Mudhoney and Hole, and that's about it. If there's some new chick, I don't think I'd like her at all, because she's just some actress.

THC: What do you hate most about music now?

A: With music now, everything is mushing together like a melting pot. It's like we need to bring back segregation in music. Rock 'n roll ended up just being mixed in with rap, techno is being mixed with rock 'n roll. It's really depressing, all this electronic bullshit, with rap this and rap that and pop this and Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, all with no artistic ability to create their own music. They're like made up by business people in a room somewhere.