Talentless Is The New Talent

Editorial

I was surfing the net today having one of those I-really-should-be-working-but-gee-this-is-so-much-more-fun moments when I came across the term - talentless is the new talent. I think it might have been a t-shirt design or something like that, but it gave me a wry chuckle pondering over its slightly cynical but salient supposition of the modern age.

It also got me thinking about just how non-dangerous and overtly retrospective popular music has become in the last twenty years, the way fashion looks back three decades all the time to validate its current existence. It’s like creative evolution hit a stage where it decided enough was enough.  We’ve already contributed more than plenty to this rock ‘n’ roll thing and now it’s time to step back and pay great homage to our incredible work.

I guess the same thing has happened in cinema too. We don’t really make classic films anymore. We throw heaps of money and energy into modernising already great-as-they-were flicks of a time gone by with super-high res special effects and 7.1 surround sound trying to improve something that never needed to be, or could be improved.

It’s funny though, because I remember in the early nineties when Nirvana were doing their breakout thing and the whole grunge wave was happening, you thought just for a second that music might once again become the cultural apogee of all things social and political and lead us out of the grotesque superficial corporate hellhole the 1980s had left us in. Kids were buying guitars again and elitist music theory had decided, “stuff this – we’re going back to three dirty chords!” Punk was back. Stages were getting trashed and birds were getting flipped all around the planet.

Sadly though, it all went to shit, or should I say – back to normal. The majors had a field day signing all these really bad middle class try-hards with quiet verses and loud guitar choruses in a desperate lunge to corner the market on disillusionment, dragging us all back in to eat up the better looking, easier-on-the-ears phony-angst-ridden knockoffs instead.

The grunge movement was probably the last time anything threatened to progress in a direction other than backwards in the rock arena. Even though it borrowed it’s low-fidelity DIY manifestos from the frontiersmen of 1970s punk, the clever cross-breeding of dirty garage and melodic pop seemed ready to smash down the doors of overblown stadium rock and invite the everyday man back into the rehearsal room for a shot at the big time.

Now when you read in music news articles about these “new” grunge bands happening around the place, you start to wonder just how humdrum and predictable our lives have become. We’re done with the 80s thing, now it’s time to move on to the 90s, right? What’s next? Are we going to get to an early 2000s nu-rock revival phase next and all put on our Strokes, Jet and Vines records again because the NME reckons it’s cool?

Bah, whatever really. As long as we’re talking about music created on guitars and drum kits I’m happy to watch and see where the super-tapped-into-history nu bloods can take it. Let’s just hope the intellectual melting pot doesn’t end at flannelette shirts and torn faded jeans. Before all the wrong bands got awarded the fame, the grunge uprising actually came with a loud and discerning voice, remember?

No I can’t either. I was too busy trying to get Bush’s Glycerine out of my head.

Oh, the horror.

Dave Larkin, Citysearch

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