The Earth Is A Cold Dead Place

Fresh (to death) from hanging 36 on the hoop court, Your Charles, freshly showered, pondered the TV weak and weary. Normally, Charles doesn't ponder the TV, but uses it as an anesthetic after a hard day's rocking. When Charles lives alone, sometimes he needs a talking box to substitute for a human presence, and sometimes the talking heads and reality people, for all their abhorrence, provide a simulacrum of humanity missing from the dark, messy apartment at 10pm. There's usually no need to actually WATCH the shows. To achieve the desired affect, the shows merely have to be ON. Actually paying attention to the talking box would cause cultural malaise/disgust as I just discovered and will thus explain.

So it was some Puff Daddy show. In a recording studio, these marginally hot chicks were trying to record an album. Producers with ridiculous names introduced them to "reference tracks," which are new, pre-recorded songs - the beat, the lyrics, and the vocals already in place. As these songs were played for the chicks, everyone in the room looked serious and impressed and bobbed their heads to the beat. Some of the girls had sour expressions, but still bobbed away. Then, since the songs were already written, produced, and recorded, all the chicks had to do was go in the singing booth and re-record the vocals EXACTLY as they heard them on the "reference track." They sung along with the song like the producers told them to, even though they told the camera they hated the song.

After recording a few songs not to their liking, the chicks began complaining profusely that Puff Daddy (the bigboss) was assigning them slow boring songs to sing when they envisioned "their" album to be "pop international" with a lot of "bangers." So the chicks started a defacto coup, where they had standoffish exchanges with the producers, then with the A and R dude, then with some other dudes with sunglasses on indoors, and then finally with Puff Daddy. Throughout the upheaval, the girls whined and complained to everyone, including the camera, looking for sympathy about the lame songs being chosen for them.

Your Charles wishes he didn't see this. These oblivious chicks acted desperate for songs that represent their "individuality" and their "vibe" as a group, but disregarded that the songs, whether slow or PopInternational trash, are chosen by PuffDaddy, whose self-interest is only to put out an album that will sell the most copies, not to champion their vibrant, independent souls. In this recording process, PuffDaddy is God and the girls are automatons, parroting spoonfed vocals from spoonfed tracks. If the chicks wanted to represent their true selves, they would actually WRITE songs, but since they don't/can't they are at the whim of a man making a mass consumption product. Their opinion doesn't matter. They are not artists.

These chicks are obviously a mass appeal front for the saccharine/cliche "hiphop" songs that sell millions and inspire no one. This song-choice dissension episode exposed the chicks as extremely base on the assembly line of corporatized music/ "hiphop." They are like the guy in the Ford factory bolting in car axles who now wants the car designer to design prettier, better axles for him to screw in. But what that guy incorrectly assumes is that the car designer has creative power. Really it is the CEO in the big office who manipulates designs to compete as a business. It is his decision to manufacture regular axles or pretty axles, produce a slow album or a dance album.

And so when the girls still sing the songs they dislike and Puff Daddy struts around saying he's "getting this money," and the producers are constantly tweaking the chicks' voices in the singing booth to conform perfectly to the reference track, and everyone is wearing designer clothing and adhering to timetables, know that this show is the willful transparency of making ubiquitous, bad music.

Also know that the show itself, as in "reality show," manipulates the manipulation of music. The producers put this fake music process on TV, and present it as real, authentic drama. Strangely, this is no fishbowl show where you ape in disgust at the misbehavior of idiots - where the setup dating show/competition is just a front for ogling irrational behavior. If the producers went that route, then perhaps it would be more evident that the recording process is mass-produced and the chicks were twits/cogs. However, the show is designed for you to root for the girls to make a killer album that will be hugely successful. Their recording process is portrayed as vital and necessary, not phony and contrived like it really is. So the TV show reinforces the ruse by spinning the corporate music formula as a real creative struggle between an album that is slow and boring and an awesome album full of hits.

After realizing all this, Your Charles turned off the TV and stared for a second through the silent dark.