I came to a bit of a pathetic realization the other day. The current world of music is a joke.

When was the last time you heard an album, or a single song, that you could tell was written by an individual or band that set out with no premise apart from simply making the best, most artistically heightened, original piece of music? When was the last time you heard a sound that was unshaped by anything except the composer’s vision?

I can’t remember when it was for me, probably in the late nineties when I first heard Blood Sugar Sex Magic by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. An album of creation and freedom that was unparalleled by its contemporaries when it was released in 1991. I’m not going to review the album because there is only one thing that’s worse than reading music reviews, and that is reading amateur music reviews. And just like this blog I’m writing, we can all rest assured that our stupid little opinions mean absolutely nothing.

Basically, they shut themselves in a Hollywood mansion formerly owned by the arresting constable’s worst nightmare, Harry Houdini, and barely left for the whole duration of conceptualising and recording; all to maximize the reduction of interference and expectations of the outside music scene. The results are an incredible album really. Whether you like it or not, it’s unlike anything you’ll ever hear in terms of originality and going against the grain. Not to mention some of the silkiest guitar playing since Hendrix. And don’t be a prick and assume it’s shite just because their later stuff wasn’t trendy enough for you.

(There’s a good documentary about the making of the album, called Funky Monks, if you’re interested.)

That’s one example of how things have changed. Can you imagine if Mumford and Dick or the Kaiser Chiefs did that now? Firstly, I’d laugh at the pricks for being pretentious idiots, and secondly, the fruit of their collective juices would sound exactly the same as their previous albums; rendering their much-self-hyped-about isolated creative process completely pointless. We’d all know it was the same shit in a different album, apart from the average self-confessed music buff – who will write an adoring and completely subjective blog on how amazing the music is. Incidentally it’ll be the same music buffs slagging the same bands off a couple of years down the line when they’re not considered cool anymore.

And that’s my point, in a way. How many charting acts have there been over the last few years that will even be remembered in a few decades?

Robbie Williams? Jesus Christ, if he’s the only person we can show off about when we’re old then we might as well arrange a mass-suicide now. Fittingly, we could put Angels on loop as we passed the proverbial tainted punch around. Future generations would discover our mass grave and believe that Angels was a like a hymn for people of this generation. The scary thing is, it probably is to some people.

There’s nothing wrong with some good pop music. Take the Beatles. Utter populites, but they pioneered music and always tried something original, something that hadn’t been done before. I’ll bet JLS don’t even know what recording in stereo even means, but that duzn’t matter becoz Aston can do a bak-flip, yeah?

Silverchair frontwoman Daniel Johns once defended his bands later, popier tendencies by saying ‘you can still be original and get your artistic impressions across by delivering them within a refined pop structure’. But Daniel Johns also made a point of never using voice-enhancing technologies in the recording studio, so we shouldn’t expect today’s crop of talent to even understand how the likes of Silverchair operated.

What has happened to musicians such as Slash or John Frusciante who write songs a certain way because the simply have to, who search  for the perfect melody to write the perfect song just for their own satisfaction?

Before we arrived and f*cked up their social lives, our parents or grandparents could boast about how they saw the likes of the Beatles, Queen, Yes or Michael sodding Jackson in concert.

Something tells me today’s crop of Mumford and Sons, Plan B and Michael Buble won’t quite be so nice to boast about in a few years…

Anyway, I digest.* Ranting solely about music can wait for another time. Back to my original point. As the credibility of music lessens as the years go by, not all art forms follow the trend. In fact, Hollywood and video games are bucking that trend – they’re breaking artistic boundaries with their story telling and delivery.

While it’ll always be the case that mega-budget dross breaks box office records, there are still exceptions. Look at Avatar; James Cameron had a vision for this nearly twenty years ago and, despite having a massive budget and lots of studio-backed power – meaning it had to be commercially successful – it retained Cameron’s original vision. You don’t have to completely sell out to be successful. Unbelievable.

And if it isn’t a multi-million pound extravaganza, it might be a low-budget masterpiece about a homosexual, interracial love affair that leaves you spazzing on your couch because your simple little mind can’t even comprehend the emotion of what you’ve witnessed.

Cinema and video games are evolving; trying new ideas and always on the search for originality, whereas music is regressing; reusing the same old shit, again and again but employing new faces to front the familiar fuck.

Goodbye.

* This is a little joke I like where I say digest instead of digress. I think it’s funny, but the only time I used it in public I had to go on to explain it was an intentional joke as my colleagues looked at me, unsure if I was aware of my vocab slip up. The mind boggles…