The whiners are circling the corpse of pop music.
The radio goes on, inevitably. Too short a drive to bother with aural curation.
What is this shite? Is that a man’s voice? I can’t be sure.
Oh…it is.
It’s…got a *kind* of grit, for sure. But the wet kind, like you have before clearing mucous from your throat. A sobbing kind.
Change the station.
Strange. That can’t be the same guy? No, it’s not.
But it *could* be.
Remember Damien Rice? Everyone lost their minds over that Cannonball.
I always thought he was a mopey cunt.
Change the station.
Was this Westlife or Boyzone? Your man’s voice was actually pretty good.
Ah, here comes the whiney one. He always gets the bridge.
Fuck, now they’re *all* the whiney one. Did this trend start with boybands? Is that the template?
Surely not. But patient zero is hard to locate.
It’s not exactly about *power* though is it? Your man Capaldi fairly belts it but it’s still whiney as shit. Really leaning into the mope like his life depends on it.
It’s more like gravitas. There’s no *gravitas*. And yet also no playfulness. Just the same quivering, pained affectation.
Capaldi is pretty much a comedian. He’s a ‘cheeky boy’, so why does he sing such fucking mopey songs?
There’s the women too of course.
Remember that recent asinine trend of *sad* piano covers of famous ‘belters’?
‘Yeah’, a little Birdy told me.
Is this what popular music becomes in a declining civilisation? Is this a kind of smoking gun? It’s not just the industry propping this corpse up. People actually want to hear it, right? They pay to see this shit. That has to mean the masses are implicated at some level.
The soundtrack to nowhere land.
It’s like The Blues but for Universal Man. The swan song of the spiritually displaced.
The whiners are the sombre foghorn on a ship of lost souls.
Of course it took a long while to get here, and yet no time at all.
But I do miss when only recently there was still a touch of rage, some vestige of fight left. Give me the edgy masculine angst of Linkin Park over the new whiners any day. Nu-Metal was still pop, remember. But the game was already up then, I guess.
We tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter.
I’m not even old! Here I am getting misty-eyed about bloody Linkin Park.
And remember when top female pop stars were more…aquatic? Witchy. Enchanting. More feminine. Galadriels, not Bratz™.
That’s another matter entirely.
Maybe I’m out of touch. Maybe things aren’t worse, but just ‘different’.
Nope. Can’t help it. Seems worse to me.
Oh well, maybe I’ll write a song about it.
At any rate,
I should probably stop whining.
WL