SnowGhost Music

I don’t have a TV, so it’s a rare moment when I find myself in front of one, forced with the mission of finding myself something to keep me entertained for a brief period of time. One such rare moment arrived just the other day. I was at the gym because the weather sucked, and I decided to watch TV as I exercised on the cross-training thing instead of listening to my iPod and watching people watch themselves. The person using the machine before me had left the TV tuned to VH1, and as I could find nothing else to intrigue me, I decided to stick around and watch 31 through 40 of the best 100 songs of the ‘90s. I remembered all of the songs, but over half of the artists were either fads or one-hit wonders. They mentioned how that song by the Goo Goo Dolls was the most played song for something like 18 weeks, and it reminded me how MTV and the radio used to make bands out of one song, essentially making brief careers of bands through repetition.

Things have changed a bit since those days. I can’t even tell you the last time I listened to anything other than NPR or XM radio, and my cardio-themed VH1 reunion was the only music TV I’ve seen on a non computer in, uh…quite some time. Which is to say that if there’s a top 100 song of the ‘00s on the airwaves right now, I’m missing out. That’s because the way I hear about music now is completely different. While I’m sure Nickelback is number one somewhere or Mariah Carey has made another video, I’m blissfully detached from such media. Their stream of hits go unnoticed, but the one-hit wonders have evolved and often still plague me. They’ve just taken different form.

Back in the day, it was usually just one song you heard. Maybe you didn’t even know who the hell sang the song. I can remember this happening relatively recently with two such songs. One was something about having the music in you, by a band I only recently discovered, through tireless research, going by the name of the New Radicals. Awesome name, awesome song, obviously. Also, there was that song about if I could just lay here, by either Arctic Monkeys or Snow Patrol. I heard both of these songs everywhere, perhaps a million times each, and I never knew a thing about either, except that I sort of did. It turns out that the Arctic Snow Monkeys are a good example. They were one of the first bands that broke mostly from internet word of mouth and one of the last that I heard consistently on the airwaves. They were, in my ears, the transition one-hit wonders. The New Radicals (Shit, I wish that name was still available!) might have been too, but I never heard about them online.

But this is the way I hear about people now. Sure, NPR had something on Bon Iver before I saw him on YouTube, but I probably just missed the bulletin that they got. And we all probably heard about Vampire Weekend before we actually heard them. Net buzz is all-powerful, and it has essentially replaced the beat-you-over-the-head repetition of top 40 airplay as the new trendsetter. Artists who can learn how to harness, control, or devise the ridiculously influential net buzz can now make themselves their own fifteen minutes, with nary a song to justify it. I end up hearing myself tell people, ‘yeah, I’ve heard of them, but I haven’t heard them’ way more frequently than I used to. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. It’s never been easier to find music you like that you never would have found before by going to places like Pandora, or reading user reviews and comments at Amazon or iTunes. It’s a great time to be a music lover.

I just find it incredibly interesting that hearing songs incessantly has been replaced, at least on my planet of fun, by incessantly hearing about bands. A great writer once remarked that video killed the radio star, and that same great writer might say that internet killed the video star, except for YouTube and its offshoots. At least it killed MTV, or the M part anyway. I would further it by saying that the internet killed the one-hit wonder, or at least badly disfigured him or her into the one-buzz wonder. So now you will you possibly hear of them first, and then actually see and hear them, and then possibly never see them again. Unless of course they have actual talent, enough to burn through the buzz and engage an audience that isn’t simply opening and closing hundreds of MP3s and WAV files a week or a day.