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By Root 485 0

record industry has experienced massive sales slippage, but just maybe that's because they’re putting out records that nobody can hear. I don’t want to hear or know about songs like “Bette Davis Eyes” because their very existence makes me sick because of what it implies about the purveyors’ attitude toward the target audience, which basically boils down to the corporate assumption that everybody's a creep. Or as P. T. Barnum etc. And the image of the hook implies seduction (and betrayal?) of the listener anyhow. Believe me, the musicians and studio technicians making this stuff, not to mention the deejays who have to play it all day, have just as much contempt for it as I do, and if you buy it they have even more contempt for you.

The music business was always cynical, but the cynicism of the music business as it stands today is awesome, surreal. I know it's hardly the first time they’ve managed to work an ad onto the front cover of a magazine, but I for one sure did appreciate that recent issue of Rolling Stone where Tom Petty was holding up a dollar bill while winking at the camera, thus implying that if YOU (The Consumer, ever alert) buy HIS NEW ALBUM, which I hear he ordered the Big Boys to knock a dollar off the price of or not raise it to $9.95 for 10 li’l toons in a cardboard sleeve, if you jes up an’ buy thet sumbitch, why partner you be's cookin’ with gravy even thank the lawd. Tom Petty’ll like ya, clap ya on the shoulder, MCA will nod approvingly, Rolling Stone will love you for already having spent more than the dollar on them and dish up an even more stupefying insult in two weeks which everybody who likes to think they’re hip will claim to have ignored while secretly knowing it's at least as good as People for the bus or subway—Christ, you gotta have something!

And as Tom himself steps into Them Boots of Next Springsteen (some people still think the world never needed the first one) you have practically committed a patriotic act by going out and buying not just Rolling Advertisement but also that worthless album where it all sounds like recycled Byrds/Stones and the omnipresent SPRINGSTEEN … some of the songs being short stories Tom started but couldn’t think of a plot. Some grimy guy in a hotel room, you know the stuff, a song about transients, that stuff's big now too just like Mr. White said about the Thirties, or some girl or maybe various girls he's really pissed at but he never says why so you never can even figger out whether ‘twas one dame done him bad or a whole parade of them… Christ, is this stuff pathetic. But. Somebody somewhere thinks he got that Certain Glow. Look, he went to the trouble to screw the hooks ripped straight outa the guts of the most obvious mid-Sixties standards right into them diesel carbines ‘neath which his band be huff-puffin’ away. That was good enough to get him on the cover of Rolling Stone, so it oughta damnsure be good enough for you. Even if I still can’t get up an exclamation point about said product, you better not listen to my elitist babble and by all means keep your eye on that boy. He's gonna go places in this world. Somebody has to.

Music and Sound Output, March/April 1982

Bad Taste

Is Timeless

Some excerpts from the diary of a crank…

I would like to clarify recent statements made here and elsewhere concerning nostalgia and listening habits, because I think both I in my last column and many other folks have recently gotten into the habit of confusing/misusing the word “nostalgia.” For instance, I wrote in another publication: “What I did (in 1981) was what almost everybody else … did: listened to old music, when I listened at all.” So I get a letter from one kid berating me for listing Beck, Bogert & Appice as a listening preference over, say, X or Joy Division: “How can you be so nostalgic? Don’t you know there are all kinds of great new groups like the Fall, Fad Gadget, the Dickies, Clock DVA, and Orange Juice?” Another reader writes, “Why don’t you just break out your hookah and your Blind Faith albums and hang it up, you old fool?”

The answer