Talk About The (Lack Of) Passion...

Picture the scene...it is 1956 and you're sitting down to dinner with the radio on and you suddenly hear the immortal opening line "Well be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby" and the musical landscape has changed forever. I was thinking about what it must have been like to have been a teenager in '56 when Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps released one of the greatest songs ever. How life changingly exciting it must have been to hear that song coming through the tinny speakers on the transistor radio for the first time . The thought came to me yesterday as I was standing in a well known record store and "Be-Bop-A-Lula" came on the MP3 player whilst I was perusing the so called "chart".

After looking at the chart yesterday I decided to listen to some of the bands on YouTube last night as I had not heard many of them. Now I try to steer away from negativity as much as possible on Spools but, with the exception of one or two, what a vapid, soulless, passionless bunch they were. Now obviously the bands in the chart are not really meant for me, in the same way that The Jam, The Smiths etc were not meant for my parents, but for fuck sake, whatever way you try to cut the cake most of what constitutes chart music these days is just drivel. I know there is good music being made today but most of it is not in the mainstream. You would never get a track like "Ghost Town" at Number 1 in the chart today.

I know we have to look forward and that music is evolving all the time but I think, for me, what was missing above all else was PASSION. There does not seem to be much of that out there, it just seems to be music by numbers, pretty kids just making music to have hits. When I think of passion I think of Little Richard, The Who, Otis, Aretha, Strummer, Joy Division, The Smiths, Public Enemy and many, many more who made music out of necessity, not out of  desire to have a hit record.

Then just to top it all off I was reading a piece on the web about streaming being included in the charts from now on. What is that all about ?? I am now just waiting for the day that they include the amount of times a song is sung in the shower to be included. Whatever happened to queuing outside a record store for hours waiting for the new album by the likes of The Jam. I know those days are gone but surely it is not too much to ask for some good old passion to be injected back into mainstream music. Especially as the welfare state and NHS as we know it are being dismantled daily by the current lot of chancers that claim to be governing us.

Obviously music can't change the world but is it too much to ask for some music in the charts that reflects what is actually happening out there today. I think not....

Be Bop A Lula
Ghost Town