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Newest - Highway to Hell - DREEEEEEW!
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Weekly Dose of Thunder #2: Music Television
Rich Cerow
There’s just no easy way to kick this off: It seems to me that music birthed from TV shows is almost universally
denigrated (except, of course, when it is being appreciated ironically, as in the Partridge Family seems to exist
exclusively on an ironic plane at this point. Oh, and by the way, that is so not cool anymore. I don’t think
slyly laughing at “I Think I Love You” has been cool since Reality Bites was in theaters. And that movie
sucked, too). I find this odd because, in many ways, when I listen to music manufactured in connection to a
TV show, I tend to think that it is the apotheosis of what we expect and desire from pop music.
Pictured above: the California Dreams with a surfboard. I hope at some point they are
all surfing on that board at the same time with their arms extended.
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For example, the Saturday morning TNBC show California Dreams. Now, this was a show that centered
around shoehorning vacuous pop tunes into contrived sitcom formulas, rehashed from Saved by the Bell
(minus Mr. Belding). For those of you who don’t remember what any of the music sounds like, imagine if you took
a robot from 1986 and asked it to write a pop song. As long as that robot isn’t RoboCop. First of all, RoboCop
is a cyborg, not a robot, and second of all, I suspect RoboCop would totally shred. I mean, he fights evil
corporations such as OCP, he’s from Detroit like the MC5 and the Stooges, and he’s got that huge metal spike
coming out of his hand which would totally destroy his guitar. He’s kind of a punk, when you think about it.
Anyway, robots from 1986, while not that sophisticated (hey, what can you expect? They were all raised by
Speak-N-Spells), would probably turn out the same tunes as the California Dreams – totally mechanized pop tunes
with every slick 80’s production trick laid on top just in case anyone might have possibly thought an actual
human being was involved at some point in the recording process. The lyrics, while pretty much irrelevant,
concern love and boys chasing girls and things falling apart and relying on your best friends to pull you
through those rough patches and everything will be all right tomorrow. There’s also a song about tolerance
(with a rap break on the middle!). But isn’t this what we want from pop songs? Do people ever care about
the words (which usually cover the same topics here, plus sex. Obviously, this show was made for the pre-teen
set, so some things were taboo at 10:00 AM on a Saturday. Actually, I kind of want to hear the California
Dreams write a song about sex. It’d probably be about making babes and taking responsibility and the cabbage
patch and how your mom picked out the perfect diamond to grow into you. That sounds pretty rocking) to their
favorite pop hits? Does anybody care that every Neptunes song sounds like it came off an assembly line?
The answer to all three questions here is no.
This picture came up while I image searched Google for "RoboCop." Apparently, the future of
law enforcement knows how to get funky on a Friday night. His club name is...Murphy.
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So, why then, is this music derided as “manufactured” (as though this is some kind of an insult)? I think what
it all boils down to is authenticity. Not that people want actual authenticity from their pop musicians, they
just want the illusion of authenticity (which, yes, is contradictory), and these shows are too brazenly contrived
for the general public. That’s why Britney Spears has to have songwriter credits, even for songs like “Dear Diary”
that no rational person would ever want to take credit for (I don’t mean to bash Britney too much here. Crossroads
was absolutely fantastic, and I hope she eventually gets to make that movie where she’s a NASCAR driver.
I suspect that she’ll have a rough life and need to work twice as hard to prove herself in a man’s sport.
The main villain will be totally sexist and say deliberately outrageous things like “Girls can’t race cars!” He
will be proven totally wrong); people want to think the artist they’ve placed their faith and trust in is actually
an artist, and not some empty-headed receptacle for whatever lame and thinly veiled sexual innuendo the producer of
the minute decides to use her as a vehicle for. And since everyone in America’s in show business, we know that
no one who’s on a TV show is the real thing. Actors are, for a living, fakes, and we all know how rigorous the
screening process was to bring this “group” (who usually do none of their own performing) together. So the
contrivance bothers us. And we want to think the person on the cover of the album is producing all the content
on the CD. Which is why Milli Vanilli failed and that one guy killed himself. I hope you’re all happy, pop
audience. We’ll never hear that comically German-accented singing style again.
If you want to sign up for the “Get RoboCop a Record Deal” mailing list, zip me a line over at
rich@xtremewailing.com. I mean, we already know that Peter Weller
can totally rock; he was Buckaroo Banzai, the world’s greatest rock star/ neurosurgeon / quantum physicist / sexy
mofo. He and Doc Emmet Brown should form a band. They could turn their amps up to 1.21 gigawatts and blow the
roof off this joint. Opening act: the California Dreams.
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