Why I don’t like the radio
Music, ah sweet music.
Perhaps the most substantial differentiation between humans and animals is our appreciation of music.
It has been said that music is a higher revelation than all philosophy and wisdom, and I have to agree.
The day I discovered Nirvana, my life changed.
I took up guitar lessons, started to grow my hair and spent afternoons at school doodling fierce tattoos in ballpoint pen on my arms and legs.
I even thought about swallowing a box of drawing pins for that real gritty rock voice.
Fortunately my mother stepped in and I all I got was a skull T-shirt and a lousy bowl cut.
How much has music grown since the ’90s? Massively.
New genres have sub genres and the sub genres of those genres have sub genres.
Have a go and tell me what kind of music genres these subgenres belong to: Electroswing. Mathcore. Lowercase. Jawaiian. Horrorcore and Chiptune. Yep, I thought so.
Here it is in order from right to left – dance, rock, ambient, reggae, hip hop and chiptune use the same instruments from old TV games like Super Mario Bros., to make high-pitched music with more bleeps and bloops than a 56k modem. The world of music has never been this diverse.
That’s why I don’t like the radio.
I don’t want to let a DJ I’ve never heard of torment my musical soul with the same songs 10 times a day.
It’s reached a point where I can’t stomach most pop music.
It’s like a cheap-thrill, musical sugar rush.
As diverse as other genres have become, pop music hasn’t evolved much at all. It just isn’t dangerous or controversial enough, like good music should be.
The day I choose The Lumineers over Die Antwoord will be the day you get to call me a DJ, because, if you say my surname really slowly, you might be forgiven for assuming I carry a lot of compact discs.
I wish everyone found it easy to broaden their musical horizons.
Have you felt your neck hairs stand up at the precise moment the DJ drops a hot track at a rave in a disused London underground station?
Or stood arm-in-arm with a friend at Oppikoppi, feeling patriotic chills as Bok van Blerk belts out De la Rey?
Do you ever think that Skrillex sounds like a musical dentist, or heard Goldfish nimbly slap out a bass line?
Have you experienced Eminem’s eloquent excellence as he expels his rhymes on you?
So many incredible musical encounters await us and they can’t be done on radio music alone.
Speaking of radio music, I would like to throw something out there. I think One Direction fans are a bit like the bunnies at the Bunny Park.
There are hundreds of them, evident in a huge queue I saw outside Checkers to buy 1D concert tickets last month.
Well kids, you can always blame your youth when your choice of music comes under scrutiny. It’s the non-music stuff that’s annoying.
Take one of Harry Style’s stukkies, who was waxing lyrical on the Internet recently about Harry’s talent in the bedroom. I can believe it – by now the little lad must’ve put more people to sleep than warm milk.
The problem with bands like 1D is that they aren’t the product of awkward pubescent years in a friend’s garage with a couple guitars, shocking haircuts and a grubby notepad.
Louis Tomlinson didn’t find his bandmates on a handwritten “Clooking 4 muso” note hanging up in a dusty corner café.
Instead, 1D is the brainchild of the talentless record executive Simon Cowell. He discovered the boys at the X Factor show. Does 1D write their own music? Unlikely.
They are the product of a suit whose main talent is balancing the books.
I don’t think that’s One Direction. That’s just the wrong direction.
