High notes scarce in today’s music scene

My first ritual started on Vernon Street. I was so young at the time, it would be fair to assume I didn’t even know what a ritual was. From middle school until graduation day, at the intersection of Vernon and Dundee, I had one bus stop and one bus stop only. Every morning at 7 a.m., I walked there solemnly, looking around at the neighborhood and dew on the grass. It would be the only quiet part of my day. Burrowed in my Adidas sweatshirt, a Sony Walkman was waiting to be turned on. My walkman was circular and silver, as most CD players are (or were, depending on the level of optimism applied to the current music industry). But there was one noticeable characteristic about mine separating it from the imitators owned by my pre-teen colleagues. In the upper right-hand corner, a flashy, fluorescent panel could shine all the colors in the spectrum if angled at the sun the right way. This bit of singularity, this half-inch artistic touch to an otherwise average CD spinner, was my calling card for notoriety.

The Greg O’Neil jam wouldn’t start until the bus arrived. Good Charlotte’s The Young and the Hopeless was the quintessential album of choice during the peak of my pop punk period. Inserting it any point before stepping on big yellow would have been inappropriate. What would become the fifteen-minute preamble on the side of the road had to remain an uninterrupted moment of Zen. Once I took my seat in the middle isle of the bus, the soundtrack to my life at the time (I was young and hopeless, after all) would begin to play.

Music once had a novelty about it. Before Y2K and even for a brief time after, swelling drums and schizophrenic guitars - at least through the tastes of this listener - were their own being, trapped energy making a ruckus within a tape or disc. A new album meant a new spiritual awakening. I’m the only person I know still enthralled by the release of sound out of a CD car deck. The cushioned seats thump. The windows rattle. My body goes radioactive. It’s rad.

The Rocket Summer released a song called ‘A Song Is Not a Business Plan.’ Bryce Avery, a twenty-something go-getter writing all the material and playing every instrument, is the project’s lone gunman.  ‘Hey stop, do you hear an echo? / The same old thing we hear an hour ago / Different band, the same radio / I’m trying as hard as I can / But I’d rather write a song than a business plan / Because this is me saying words I actually mean / You got a hook, there’s no book, got no soul just a look.’ In those 60 words, Avery hits hammer to rusty nail; artists’ work isn’t selling anymore so the airwaves selectively choose which acts break through the glass ceiling. With the exception of miss cute-as-a-button, Taylor Swift, - whose songs are so catchy they should be illegal - the auto-tune bullshit enrapturing the planet is leading the charge in replacing vocal and artistic ability with sonic moans and the mistreatment of computer software. The riffs of today’s music scene are all pieces in an expensive game of chess being played by record labels. MTV is already checkmated and black knights and white bishops are overrunning the Grammys.

For years, all signs have pointed to record sales going the way of the dinosaurs. iTunes is the Napoleon of the digital downloading services and will soon, if it hasn’t already, become the most accurate indicator of chart success. I’m wiping my tears with the beautiful album-lyric booklets as this evolution is happening.  I’ve come to terms with the extinction of a pivotal variable associated with my adolescence.

I say this like it’s the end of mankind. It isn’t. I’m moving on, slowly. I do own an iPod (it’s a nifty iTouch) and love it dearly. With the right EQ settings and my Bose Noise-Canceling headphones plugged in, sex by way of the auditory canal is initiated in a cinch. All the pot and pan-banging noise this club-hopping generation listens to can be whittled down from a full album of hogwash to two songs of ear candy.   

Music used to be about something. What that something is, I’m not sure I’m qualified to say, but I’ll temporarily peg it as ‘bewitching.’ Illegal downloading has made the medium essentially free so, in theory, the only way for music to regain its mojo is for it to be free, period. Such is my reasoning.

The bus doesn’t come for me anymore.  I’m a senior citizen as far as that enterprise is concerned.  The Sony Walkman is collecting dust somewhere. Subjected to the thralls of history, what once was is no more. What have I learned? Ke$ha and Flo Rida will never dazzle me. Ever. I’ll be young and hopeless for the foreseeable future. I’ve attained ‘grandfather’ status as the only 20 year-old getting the jitters every time the wrapping of an album is peeled off.  And I have an inexplicable connection with CD players.  Take that, mp3 addicts.

Greg O’Neil can be contacted at goneil@keeneequinox.com.