The Phantom agrees with wild eyed socialist!

Yes friends, it is hard for me to admit this, but I agree with Sting, the über-socialist and famous limousine liberal: music these days sucks.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Sting said contemporary rock music is so stagnant that he prefers to sing 16th century English ballads.

"Rock music has come to a standstill -- it's not going forward any more, it only bores me," Die Zeit quoted Sting as saying.

Yep, I find I must agree with the pink-underwear clad, rain forest saving British twit, which galls me to no end.  So much so that I feel a rant coming on.

Ahem.

I turn on the radio and the pop music stations suck.  The "dance" music stations (1 dance song for every 5 raps) suck even harder.  The easy listening stations go beyond the other two, sounds like somebody strangling a cat with a set of bagpipes, but crooner style.  Then there's the "Edge®" station: morons screaming unintelligibly into a microphone, accompanied by monotonous, three-chords-only instrument mangling apes. Yeah, I wanna hear that.  No, really.

This is in the Toronto listening area no less, with more radio stations playing a wider range of stuff than even New York City.  The suckage is nigh well universal. 

In the truck I have my cd player, I almost never put on the radio.  No point, I'm only going to hear boring music and ads, maybe a weather report if I'm lucky.  At home we have Phantom FM, courtesy of WinAmp and my cd collection.  Zero rap, all the time.  It'll be even better when I get my old LP collection ripped too.  Then we will have Kraftwerke, Yes and Genesis back to back with The Fabulous Poodles, techno, trance, the Chieftans and all the other crazy stuff I've collected in the last 40 years.  Yeah baby, that's RADIO!

I am pretty late to this technology.  It is widely spread out there and the revenue for Big Media reflects it.  Their profit figures are in the toilet, particularly ad revenue for radio and TV because nobody is listening.  Album sales are down, because with iTunes etc. you can buy the one popular song off the cd for a buck and avoid the10 crappy ones.  No more $24.95 for one good song at HMV.  You can rent the movie to see if it is worthy before buying, and avoid the $12 theater ticket too.  You can TiVo your TV and zap through all the commercials.  Etc.

Meanwhile, the entertainment industry whinges and cries that their sales are down because of  Internet piracy.  As if!  None of them are ready to admit that even kids won't buy their re-cycled crap these days, not even from iTunes, not even with video.  They don't seem to understand that there's a limit to the money even libidinous teenagers are willing to spend on some blondie singer shaking her assets in revealing outfits when the songs are boring.  Particularly when they can get hard core porn with boring music for free. 

Hopefully Big Media will do us all a favor, keep not getting it and go belly up.  NBC leading the way today with another round of layoffs.  They need to cut $750 million, almost a billion dollars in staffing costs so they are going to decimate their news division.  Because why?  Because nobody wants to see the crap they put on, so they may as well fire the dopes!  The invisible hand just grabbed 'em where it hurts and squeezed.  Thank God for Capitalism.

Disengage rant mode.  ~:D

The Raving, Ranting Phantom Music Critic