Music Industry Should've Let It Be

                I am not a musician.  I have absolutely NO musical talent in my body.  Since I have zero musical talent, I haven’t been a failed musician, so therefor I am not qualified to be a music critic.  However, I am a big music fan, and a big time musical listener, so I feel qualified to ask this next question.  What the hell is wrong with the music industry?

                When did music become Spam?  We find a nice little package.  We throw in fake drum sounds, a whole lot of Auto-Tune, enough bass to rattle windows right out of their panes, and we stick it all inside a can and sell it.  When you open that can you still have a big loaf of crap. 

                With the onset of Auto-Tune, it seems that anyone can be a music star these days.  You don’t have to have talent when you have technology.  You do have to have a body though.  Heaven forbid if you can actually sing, but you don’t look like a “rock star.”  What happened?  It is like the music industry got really lazy.  They know they can put together a product in no time at all with the technology that they have.  They are cranking out mediocre artists so fast and with so little financial input that it is amazing.  They don’t care if their newest pop diva goes belly up because they have twenty more waiting in the wings to replace her. 

                It isn’t just the music industry either.  What happened to the listeners?  If one more person tells me how original Lady GaGa is, I am going to make them go personally apologize to David Bowie, KISS, Madonna, and all the others that did it first.  You want original, talk to GWAR.  That was original… scary… but original.  I think the issue as well is that Lady GaGa is someone with talent in there; I just can’t get past the glare of oddity in order to see it. 

                The musical times are beginning to look like the late 1980’s to me.  I am guessing that this is on my mind because of the number of articles that are coming out this week about Nirvana’s twentieth anniversary of Nevermind.  Now I am not one of those people that can remember exactly where I was when I first heard that record.  My personal favorite thing to come out of Nirvana was the Foo Fighters.  At the time it wasn’t even influential to me.  I liked it, but I didn’t see it for what it was at the time.  What it was was a nice huge smack in the mouth to the 1980’s.  It made people stand up and take notice.  It made the pendulum swing. Even more influential to me twenty years ago was the release of Pearl Jam’s Ten.  That is a record that still gives me goose bumps today and justifies their longevity.  These two bands helped pioneer a start to a new era of music.

                That time has come again.  There is a need for those bands to tip the scales and for listeners to follow.  Luckily we still have Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and others still making some of the best music of their storied careers.  But there are more lights at the end of the tunnel.  Bands like Mumford and Sons have come out pushing the boundaries.  Adele is breaking the mold of what a musician is supposed to sound and more importantly look like.  (I do feel she is in danger of being over played Hootie and the Blowfish style.)  Most importantly there are thousands of bands out there playing bars, festivals, and parks right in your own neighborhood.  They are playing their own instruments, writing their own songs, perfecting their craft.  They are playing original music and not covers.  They deserve a chance.  We owe them an audience.  Who knows, the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam who is going to usher in a new era might be in your own back yard.   

Scientific Shake Up

                Now I am not an expert on Geology or Volcanology by any means, but I do know that earthquakes are borderline impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy.  Yes, if you live near a fault line, you will at some point experience an earthquake.  That is as a good a prediction as anyone can come up with.  Here, I will add some more insight… some will be big, some will be small. 

                Plate tectonics is not an exact science.  We have thousands of potential earthquakes every day!  The plates slide on top of the lithosphere with varying degrees of energy and size of movements.  We cannot predict when a large shift will take place which yields in a large earthquake.  All this being said, why is it that there are currently seven Italian scientists who are facing MANSLAUGHTER charges for not accurately predicting an earthquake that cost the lives of 300 people. 

                The deaths of these people are a tragedy, but you can’t point fingers at scientists and blame them for not predicting the unpredictable.  This is laying the groundwork for a slippery slope of laying blame upon those who are experts in a particular field, yet still have things that occur outside of their control.  What is going to happen is you are going to scare people out of the possibility of doing pure research anymore.  If these seven people can be held accountable, how are the geologists in Japan going to start to feel with the tsunami that ravaged their country.  What student in school is going to want to be a researcher if you can be facing criminal charges for not expecting the unexpected?

                Imagine if we went after every expert for failing to predict something inside their field that is outside their control.  Can you imagine how many beatings Al Roker would be given for rained out picnics?   The thought is ridiculous and downright scary.  And sadly it is not entirely new.

 Look at education.  We are constantly holding teachers accountable for things that are outside of their control.  We use standardized testing as our basis for how well a teacher is doing their job, but what is this measuring stick we are using?  A standardized test by definition is a test in which all conditions under which it is given are equivalent for all those who take it.  But are the conditions really standard?  Sure we can have similar room conditions and questions for all students, but we can’t standardize a home life.  There is no bubble for kids to fill in when they have been beaten, or parents are divorcing, or they are hungry because there is no food in the house.  Those items are outside of a teacher’s control.  These are existing conditions that DO affect the outcome of the tests by which we are judging teachers.  There are some states that are determining teachers jobs based on scores that they see without knowing the kids.

Does that mean teachers should have no accountability in students’ learning?  They SHOULD most definitely have accountability, but it cannot be based off of standardized test scores, just as geologists shouldn’t be judged off of the number of earthquakes they are failing to predict.  The biggest issue seems to be that we as a culture want to point fingers and assign blame when things go wrong outside of our control.  We need to step back, take a deep breath, and let common sense come back to us.  Hell, make that just sense… if it were common we would all have it.

The end.

The end.

Not the best way to start one’s first ever blog, but it seems appropriate for the times.  A couple of recent events seem to mark of the end of human ingenuity. 

The first comes with the STS-135, the final flight of the space shuttle Atlantis, and the final flight of the space shuttle era.  The landing on June 21, 2011 marked the end of thirty years of flight that began on April 12, 1981.  Thirty years.  Thirty years of taking us farther into the universe than most have ever imagined.  Thirty years of giving kids the right to dream of reaching for the stars.  Thirty years of providing new technologies and thousands of jobs for Americans. 

I grew up in the shuttle generation.  I missed the sexy days of the space program, where everything was a race in a Cold War era to see who could go the farthest or the fastest.  It was one huge space race pissing contest.  By the time I was even old enough to know what space flight was, it had become so common place that it was in the back of the minds of most Americans.  Of course the world stood up and took notice during the tragedies of Challenger and Columbia, but other than that space flight was forgotten.  But for kids like me… ones who dreamed, stared at the stars, and to be completely honest were nerds… space flight meant everything. 

Where has the courage to shoot for the moon gone?  We now concern ourselves with the newest and greatest app for our phones rather than the spirit that drove us to put footprints on the moon.  Facebook has replaced the Apollo moon landings as the forethought of human ingenuity.  Having 300,000 “friends” is more important than traveling 300,000 miles.  We now boldly go where everybody else is going.  We know this for fact because it shows up in our news feed.  We know everything about everyone down to the moment they drop a deuce because they are posting it on Facebook.  Yet… space flight is canceled.  We have to resign to looking at the stars without the ability to travel amongst them. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I see the benefits of Facebook.  I have a profile.  It has done wonders for connecting people who otherwise couldn’t be connected.   But when you ask the students of this coming generation about great achievements in science, they are more willing to mention their iPod than the Hubble Space Telescope.    I am no expert on life, but I can’t be the only one who sees things this way.

The second event that disturbs me is the closing of the first ever Borders book store. 

Again… don’t get me wrong, I am one of the people who thought that the Borders chain coming to my home town was going to be the death  of the local book store, which is something I dreaded.  However, it was at least a BOOK store.  We don’t have a mall within fifty miles of my home town that has a book store any more. 

I have an eight year old daughter who has already found a refuge from the sometimes harsh world inside of books.  They provide her a place for her imagination to run wild, and a place where no one will ever judge her for who she is or who she wants to be.   Where is she going to turn ten years from now?

 Yes, I have a Kindle, and yes I understand that times are changing.  However, I also know that I am someone who still enjoys the smell of a brand new book.  I like the sound the pages make when I turn them.   I like the places the stories take me, and the dreams they give me.  I know I have passed this love on to my daughter.  I feel like an endangered species though, who is becoming that way through deforestation.  We are losing our places of refuge with nowhere else to turn.  I have to raise a toast to the local stores that keep pushing and pursuing those dreams for us.  I beg that they never surrender.

With all of this ranting and raving, which will probably cost me any readers, I must get to the point of this blog.  A layman is defined as a member of the clergy, or someone who lacks expertise in any particular area.  Well… I am definitely NOT a clergy man.  However, I know I am not an expert on anything.  All I can provide are the observations that I make.  I would like to make them in this particular spot.  At the very least it allows me to fill up some free time.