Nirvana started one of their most violent radio unfriendly songs of all time with these ominous words, calling attention to just how surely you would never hear this song on FM Rock Radio during the prime drive time (or something, that’s a radio term, right?).
And the song really kicked ass. It’s on In Utero but I can’t remember the title right now. Add a comment to tell me if you know.
It made a very effective point about the state of typical rock radio: really truly great rock music will rarely get played on it. This has not changed as far as I know. What gets played on the radio (and by extension played in movies, and car commercials, wins Grammy’s and winds up judging “Who Wants to be a Rock Star?”) is not as good as 90% of the music that’s out there. Anyone who really cares to know about music will probably agree with this.
Why? It’s pretty simple I guess, radio doesn’t want you to turn the dial. It doesn’t want to jar its listeners too much with anything that sounds too much unlike the last songs that were popular, so they maintain a certain homogeneity. This leads to a molasses like evolution in music when so much else in the musical landscape is evolving like fire.
Typically, something breaks through. A song that blends a style that has gotten popular despite having no radio play with an already accepted rock radio style and its a hit. “Bring the Noise” – is that spelled with a “z”? – is the quickest example. Maybe “You gotta fight for your right to party” and some of that crap by Moby counts too.
Or you get Nirvana, the kind of band that shouldn’t get played, but it’s just so good it somehow does. This is why people celebrate this band so much. I don’t listen to them much anymore because it’s a bit too much for my sensibilities these days (fancy way of saying I’m becoming a wuss), but when I was into them, they devastated me – in a good way.
I think of all this now because of a recent visit to the library. (The library is the best place in the world, but more on that for a later post). I took out a slab of radio rock that I thought would be that rare stuff that is both on the radio and good. I’d heard good things and most were bands that I used to love. I got “American Idiot” by Green Day, “Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace” by The Foo Fighters, and “Era Vulgaris” by Queens of the Stone Age. I used to love both Green Day and especially Foo Fighters more; there would have been a time that I would have raced to get their albums a lot faster than a year or two later maybe picking them up at a Library. Queen of the Stone Age, not so much but I’ve always known they’re cool. A quick rank on quality: Queens is best by FAR, then Green Day then Foo is worst, also by far. The thing that determines the scale is very simply blandness. But why is it that now that The Foo Fighters have become the most oatmeal-bland of their career, they are selling the most amount of records. I’m not blaming them in the slightest. Well, maybe the slightest.
It’s no surprise American Idiot did as well as it did. It’s a perfect little piece of rock in the form of catchy pop songs. I think it might have something to do with the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a bunch of these songs before. “American Idiot” sounds like “Leader of the Pack”, about 2:25 into that big track 2 song sounds just like “Summer of ’69” and by about 6:40 it sounds like “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. This may be intentional, but it’s just frustrating to me.
The Queens album is very good. It’s genuinely groovy and hard. Also, the band played least of the three on rock radio. I have no facts to back that up, but I’m POSITIVE it’s true. So sad.
