Feb 02

Hollywood Undead & Dierks Bentley: Bad Music

Usually people who love music want to like to write about music they love (in my case that would be bands like The Velvet Underground, The Band, & The Flaming Lips.) But sometimes it’s fun to talk about bad music. In fact in some ways it’s more fun. And it’s certainly much easier to find. Just check out MySpace music to see what I mean. It’s most annoying for me that most of the worst “artists” I’ve listened to on MySpace is also among the most popular.

Hollywood Undead has to be the worst example of this. They are incredibly bad and even more incredibly popular. I mean I know it’s normal for “the kids” to be into awful music, but isn’t this just taking it a bit too far? At least most of the awful music of the past had at least some redeeming value. Sure Milli Vanilli was cheesy but their songs were catchy and had some good production values. But with Hollywood Undead there is not even a hint of quality to be found.

But they certainly are not all alone in the universe of crap music.

How about country pop singer Dierks Bentley? Have you heard this guy? He’s amazingly awful. I had heard his name before but had never checked out his music before as I have no interest in country pop but one day I came across his latest single “Feel That Fire” and I was just floored because it was so much worse than I thought it would be. And that really is saying a lot because I thought it would be flat out horrendous. But no, it’s much worse than that.

It’s no big deal that people are releasing bad music. There’s nothing new about that. The big deal to me is that so many people actually think this is good music. Why is that? How can people be so amazingly clueless about music?

American Idol is the easy to blame culprit. And I’m sure that does have a part to play. Now millions of people think that having a pretty voice is the only thing that matters. This means these are people who have no way of understanding music with any depth or any real artistic value.

But really it must go much deeper than that. After all, it’s not like people liking bad music is an entirely new thing. The masses are always attracted to the easy to swallow garbage that usually fills the top forty every week. And it’s the true music that real music lovers listen to and that lasts for years.

Obviously there will be no one listening to anyone from American Idol or Dierks Bentley in 50 years (except out of pure nostalgia or as a joke) while people will still be getting into the music of true musical geniuses like The Beatles & Wilco.

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