The Corporate Music Press, April 2002
By: Spencer McCloud
There's a chance that key media-publications are all going to develop an inverse-midas touch, i.e. - everything they touch turns to shit. Already, the time between a band being built up and then knocked down has accelerated to roughly two weeks - unless you're The Strokes...
Two weeks? Bands slave away for years and then get their fortnight in the spotlight. Trust me - it's going to literally be the fifteen minutes of fame soon, except Warhol-esque merges into cynic-esque and extortionate cover-prices loom on the horizon. Buy a piece of the future, buy a piece of the past. Who cares when it's only music? I do. And so do a million others. Music is perhaps the most perfect art-form for the 21st Century: sped up, slowed down, confused and contradictory. Everything you could want. There's even room for The Coral. However - there is no need to label everything and package it nicely for the lovely consumers to eat out of your hands. There is no need for post-modern names for scenes. No NEED.
Fast forward twenty years time. Who will be remembered? Madonna maybe. I can't think of any other sustained, innovative careers in music. Possibly DJ Shadow and Missy Elliot. Guitar-music, though? It shall be remembered as the genre that the corporate press killed. Slaughtered and hanged by its own locks of lank, brown, greasy hair. Carcasses of overblown, overfed, and over-hyped six-stringers and singers with sexy hips but little substance... Really, is there any way to describe ourselves better?