I'm Too Cooooool For Music

Hello assholes and she-assholes. It’s been a while hasn’t it? I’m actually considering changing the title of this thing to “Luke McGinty Drinks and Doesn’t Write All That Much.” Not only is it true it’s also pretty snappy, am I right? If I could be bothered to go into the inner workings and change things around I might actually change it. Until then you’ll just have to imagine it. From now on imagine the title at the top saying Luke McGinty Drinks instead ok? Ok. Agreed. Hmm… I seem to be typing a lot and not thinking too much at the moment and that’s usually a bad sign so let’s try and be serious for a moment.
Alright, have you heard about this bullshit Owl City? I don’t know whether it’s a band or just one guy or what but it’s like the dude decided “ok I’m gonna make this band, it’ll be EXACTLY like The Postal Service but, I don’t know, it’ll be sort of like The Postal Service for cunts…” Well bad news jackass, they already made a Postal Service for cunts. It’s called The Postal Service. The real trouble, though, is that Owl City’s fucking fan base is mostly made up of so-called rock & roll guys. I don’t just want to pick on these assholes, but they’re symptomatic of a pretty horrifying state of affairs. Man, I don’t know exactly what’s going on with music just now, I really don’t. But I’m gonna write about it anyway. Welcome to the internet, assholes.

I think a big part of the problem is a sort of confusion that seems to exist between music people like and music that’s actually good. Have you ever heard the phrase “can’t you just enjoy something and not have to over think things all the time?” You probably have, and if you’re an idiot (you probably are) then you might even have used it. The answer is yes, but you have to understand that the fact you enjoy it doesn’t make it good. For example, I really like this band The Briggs. They have all these well-written, catchy songs, their aesthetic is pretty cool and their attitude is broadly in line with mine; long story short, I like The Briggs. Also, they’re fucking shit. They’re generic, by-the-book punk bullshit, they’ll never progress their genre and they’ll never do anything that hasn’t been done before. You’re probably thinking “Luke, wtf lol, why do you like them if you think they’re shit?” The answer is that it’s alright to enjoy something that’s shit, just don’t try to soothe your pride by trying to claim that it's something it’s not. I also enjoy You've Been Framed, wanking and McDonald’s but I don’t hold any of those things up as the pinnacle of human fucking achievement.
What this all leads to (I’m trying to stay on-topic tonight) is a culture that accepts, even encourages shit music because people are idiots and seem pretty unwilling to accept that they’re idiots who listen to dogshit. That’s pretty understandable, and I’m not saying you need to stop listening to it, just be realistic and give up on the idea that Paramore are the best fucking thing ever.

Here’s another thing: I can remember a time not too long ago when not everybody listened to music. Serious, it was like there was a minority of people who would put the effort in to find their niche and research the music they liked and everyone else was happy to just listen to the radio when they were in the car and buy the occasional Will Young CD. This was a time when music was still cool, and you could tell whether someone was cool by virtue of whether they liked cool music or not, and this was possible because it wasn’t like nowadays, when everyone listens to exactly the same dogshit. Some idiots have sometimes said “just because something’s not popular doesn’t mean it’s cool you know…” These are the kind of people who think that fish and chips is good for you and that liking The Replacements better than Paramore makes a person pretentious. In fact the converse is true: being unpopular doesn’t necessarily make something cool, but being popular sure as fuck makes it uncool. That’s why it was such a dick-punch when they turned hip-hop into an advert for trainers and rock & roll into Miley Cyrus and everything you used to think was cool suddenly wasn’t all that cool anymore.
Unfortunately that’s not even the whole story. If you don’t have any integrity then music is a pretty alright business to get into, and there are plenty of guys out there who will happily jump in front of any parade if they think it’ll make them some money, get their dick sucked or make their hair look better. Whether you’re into hardcore or rock & roll or hip-hop or whatever, you’ll inevitably have come across some disneyfied version of it produced not for love of the music but solely because someone figured they could capitalise on it. The logic continues like this: “if we can make a parody of one beloved culture for fourteen-year-old girls to listen to in their bedrooms, why can’t we do the same with all of them at the same time?" *thunder-clap, maniacal laughter* This is where we get the unfortunate practice of assholes watering everything down to make idiots like it, then trying to appeal to as many fucking demographics as happen to be fashionable at the time. And the result? The awful result is assholes like this motherfucker.

Oh, and Owl City.