Zombie music

Imagine it: a random teenager, having been a fan of white rock music for much of his life, picks up a guitar and manages somehow to write a song. In light of the fact that record companies expect to receive a return on only 5% (sic) of their signings, it is not wholly unimaginable that some A’n’R guy somewhere decides to put the marketing department behind precisely this song and turn it into a hit. Perhaps the teenager is good looking and speaks in a northern accent, who knows? In any case: he has a hit. Now he thinks that he has a God-given talent to write popular songs. Since he has done it once, he feels that his talent will see him through in all his other artistic creations. All he has to do is sit down with his guitar and more gold will start pouring from it. Ready to assist him in perpetuating this myth is usually a battery of industry yes-men with as little grasp of the creative process as the songwriter himself. They are so in awe of his talent and the money it can make them, that they give him the impression he is a genius. Our poor songwriter will try his best to write another song, but even though he is a genius he does not understand that inspiration is the result of decades of hard work. In his fruitless wait for another masterpiece to come spontaneously rolling out of his guitar, he turns for comfort time and again to his one hit song and ends, since it is the only song that he has managed to assimilate in any useful degree, by writing it again. How many times have you bought an album by a group whose single caught your ear when it was in the charts, only to discover they were totally incapable of sustaining artistic invention for the duration of an entire album?

Aesthetic standards are now so low that bands can sustain long careers releasing albums that are essentially either a reworking of a certain musical era or just a rehash of their own back catalogue, which was in itself already a master class in treading water. I would like to point to U2, the first band to fashion a seemingly endless career out of what strikes me as a complete lack of expertise what so ever. Whereas the Beatles were marketed as a group of ordinary boys next door, lovely but unremarkable, while in real life they were a rather dysfunctional collection of deeply troubled individuals, not without a degree of genius, U2 actually are ordinary boys, with nothing to recommend them apart from the fact that they are lovely and unremarkable. They wrote one song and they have been writing it over and over ever since. Other notable examples of one-song careers are those being enjoyed by Oasis, Radiohead and Coldplay. (Gee, all English bands!) It ought to be noted that, despite the overblown hype that publications like NME and Q magazine can still generate for these bands, they cannot be viewed as anything other than Beatles tribute bands: cabaret, derivative and irrelevant. British Indie Rock is a slimy carcass that feeds on itself. When will it realise it is dead?