Tonight I was watching a little American Idol to kill time. It was the elimination episode after the usual karaoke performances from the night before. This week the Idol contestants were butchering the catalogue of Lennon-McCartney. It's really hard to take Beatles songs and make them unlistenable, but the Idol crew did their best.
I think the most noticeable thing about most Idol contestants is their overwhelming love for maudlin crooning. For that reason they almost uniformly picked the later Beatles ballads penned by McCartney instead the great pop numbers McCartney and Lennon churned out as a writing duo in the mid-60's. This meant a long and winding parade of the sap that Sir Paul specialized in over the years.
I was pleasantly surprised when the long haired rocker kid did the classic Lennon solo number Jealous Man until I began to worry this might open the door for another contestant to choose a later McCartney number like Ebony and Ivory.
To make a long story short, I started getting bored watching the show tonight and I started You Tube spelunking to kill time. Going to my front page I saw that a whole lot of old Smith's videos had been queued up for me because I had watched Morrissey's Every Day Is Like Sunday the other day.
Wow, they were a great band. I mean, really f-ing great. I watched them play early small shows on German TV and later big shows in front of tens of thousands in Madrid. Johnny Marr playing that great guitar and Morrissey doing his odd sensual geek boy dance while singing the most disarming, funny and heartbreaking lyrics.
It was about the time I was watching the lads from Manchester playing There's a Light That Never Goes Out with the audience singing so loud to almost couldn't hear Morrissey singing that I looked up and saw the Ryan Seacrest intro-ing current pop star Rihanna, She was singing her newest single Rockstar 101.
Good lord, what dreck. She comes out in a what appeared to be somewhere between a bondage outfit and a wetsuit. Then she proceeded to sing about being a rock star with lame keyboard sounds playing behind her in the background. I'm not sure what you call the kind of music the band was playing but it most certainly didn't rock.
Near the end of the song someone brought her a guitar to put on and she played a couple of chords while striking her best "Rockstar" pose. I'm not sure who she was trying to imitate but the guys in Zeppelin don't have to worry about copyright infringement. The bottom line is Rihanna may be a step up from the Idol contestants but she doesn't have the kind of unbridled energy that a great performer should have.
The fact that she is considered a star right now says a lot about the current pop landscape.
It's not that there isn't great music out there. There is.
And a lot of it is coming from the US. It's just not being promoted on TV right now in this country.
Over in Europe there are still a lot of great music shows and they broadcast live from all the big festivals. When I meet young people from Holland, France, Spain and Britain. In Europe American bands like MGMT, TV On The Radio, the Black Keys and Deerhunter play in front of large crowds in the thousands at the big festivals.
Festivals here in the US like Coachella, Bonneroo and Austin City Limits also draw large crowds. But nothing like the festivals in Europe. And these bands are almost never on TV with the rare exception of an occasional one off on Letterman or Leno.
Americans are force fed the likes of this Idol cast and Disney's latest cupie doll pop tarts like Miley Cyrus or Demi Lovato while our best bands are playing overseas.
It's sad state of affairs if you ask me.
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