Not For Me, Thanks: Eight Things Music Could Do Without In 2014

The start of a new year is often cause for renewed optimism, but let’s not kid ourselves. There are plenty of things that we could do without in the next 12 months as well.

While it is true that last year saw the release of numerous fantastic records and plenty of brilliant gigs and festivals, there were also plenty of disappointments. Mumford & Sons headlined Glastonbury, Beady Eye released a record and almost everyone at almost every gig was either texting or taking shit pictures and videos with their phone. So here’s eight things I could do without in music this year.

Artists Continuing To Destroy Their Own Legacy

Let’s start by talking about Beady Eye, because the sooner we get it over with the sooner we can get back to pretending that they don’t exist. It was bad enough seeing Oasis slowly destroy their hard earned reputation as being better than Blur, if nothing else, towards the tail end of their career with disappointing album after disappointing album, but Liam’s post-split project Beady Eye really takes the biscuit.

But, rumour has it that Red Hot Chili Peppers will have a new album out in 2014. The evidence of the bloated ‘Stadium Arcadium’ in 2006 and the woefully Frusciante-less ‘I’m With You’ in 2011 is bad enough to suggest that 2014 might see them release something even worse than Beady Eye’s ‘BE’, which is a distressing thought given that the Chilis were once one of the most important bands in alternative music.

Ah well, at least I’ll be able to use my favourite Nick Cave quote more often: “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’, and the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

Festivals Getting Cancelled

It’s true that there are too many festivals around nowadays, but it would take a heart of ice to make me actively want any of them to get cancelled. Sonisphere is particularly relevant here as its absence from the running order in 2012 and 2013 left many fans disappointed.

The festival has a real chance to challenge the hegemony of Download and Reading & Leeds this year which, given the staggeringly uninteresting line-ups of both in recent years, is probably much needed. Then again, the Sonisphere line-up is hardly original this year.

More important perhaps than big soulless festivals getting cancelled is the demise of events close to many people’s hearts. All Tomorrow’s Parties and its revolutionary holiday camp events may have disappeared into a financial black hole, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be missed any less. May all your favourite festivals continue to have long and happy lives well into 2014 and beyond!

People Acting As Though Gigs Are Social Events/Phone Time Rather Than Performances

I vividly remember my first 65daysofstatic gig. It was about a year before the band released ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ and they packed their setlist full of unreleased tunes such as Go Complex and PX3. I was very much in my “lover of all things wistful and delaypedalful” stage at the time so I was a bit taken aback at how dance oriented the new compositions were.

Anyway, it got towards the end of the set and as they were halfway through the newly written Weak4 the power went out and we all went home. I dare say some people later tweeted about the incident or wrote about it on a MySpace journal (this was during the MySpace to Facebook migration period). What I am positive about though is that nobody live tweeted the incident because nobody was staring at their iPhone at the time. Everyone was watching the band.

A few people took some photos and one person at the side took a video of the ill-fated performance of Weak4 itself (I think I can even spot myself).The crowd spent the gig enthralled by a very special band playing very special music. Everyone had a good time but they didn’t talk to each other during the quiet bits and they didn’t jump around stupidly during the slow bits. It was the perfect gig atmosphere in many ways, and the band weren’t even playing a ‘greatest hits’ set.

Nowadays I very rarely find myself at gigs with this kind of atmosphere. Everyone seems desperate to be in touch with technology at all times and many people spend whole gigs talking until the one song they like is played. I don’t want to think that music fans have changed drastically in the last four years or so, but most of my positive crowd memories seem to be from the pre-2010 period, and at almost every gig I go to now I am routinely disappointed by the lack of engagement punters actually seem to have with the music. Maybe I’m overstating all this, but I’d like 2014 to prove that.

Wealthy Musicians Complaining About Spotify

Thom Yorke may be moody at the best of times, but in 2013 he seemed to spend a lot more time having a pop at music streaming service Spotify than he actually did promoting ‘Amok’, the new record from his Atoms for Peace project. Perhaps this was because everyone agreed that the album just sounded like a load of Radiohead demos, but it was still frustrating.

The fact is that Yorke, immensely talented though he is, played three UK shows last year for the princely sum of just under £50 a ticket and is sitting on a career that has been as commercially successful as it has been critically successful (i.e. about as successful as it possibly could be).

He is the last person that should be moaning about not getting paid for the music he creates. We all know the music business is unfair and Yorke (and his co-complainer Nigel Godrich) do have a point when it comes to the idea that streaming makes it harder for new artists, but then it’s always been nigh-on impossible for all but the luckiest to make a living out of it, so I think we can all probably do without being told the bleeding obvious by rich musicians in 2014.

The Nu Folk Revival

The fact that someone has actually coined the term ‘nu folk’ in a non-ironic way should be enough to make you run, possibly screaming, from the room. In case it isn’t, however, then here’s scene leaders Mumford & Sons performing their hit ‘I Will Wait’ (presumably in front of an audience mostly comprised of estate agents and Tory activists).

Remarkably, given the fact that all their songs sound pretty much exactly the same and are, without exception, stupendously banal, Mumford & Sons actually headlined Glastonbury last year, which is a bit like having Bargain Hunt in the primetime 9pm slot on BBC One, only more soul destroying.

None of this would matter if it wasn’t for the fact that a generation of new music fans may now grow up thinking that Mumford and their ilk’s faux-Irish pub schtick is real folk music, which, considering folk music is arguably best known for giving the world such politically significant artists as Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, is pretty depressing. In short, 2014 needs people to realise that making Coldplay sound like the Fall while doing your best impression of a Bullingdon Club jamming session isn’t what folk music should be about.

Sexism

Sexism has never gone away, but it does seem to have become a more alarming issue again recently. The biggest culprit in 2013 was, of course, Robin Thicke and his decidedly unnerving Blurred Lines.

Aside from the frankly disgusting video, which I’m not including here in protest, the song’s lyrical content makes many of gangsta rap’s most gender equality unaware artists sound like Germaine Greer launching a hip hop career.

Blurred Lines is only part of the issue though and sadly 2013 also saw some repellent behaviour at Download Festival when main stage cameramen serially focused their crowd shots on the nearest available girl on a man’s shoulders, leading to pathetic whooping from leering metalheads (if the girl revealed her breasts) or full-on booing if she refused to comply.

Tom Doyle wrote a longer article on the subject for Thrash Hits and I can only reiterate every word that he says. What I will say here and now though is that it’s the 21st century, and this kind of behaviour is completely and utterly unacceptable. Stop it in 2014 please.

Lyric Videos

Why do lyric videos exist? More alarmingly, why have they become so de rigueur in the last two years or so? If you have a song then release a song. If you do not have a music video to go alongside that song then then just carry on and release it without any video accompaniment whatsoever.

Definitely do not stick your lyrics on a vaguely funky backdrop, making them appear ‘magically’ with all the panache of someone who has just discovered the XP version of Windows Movie Maker. Lyric videos should be the preserve of people illegally uploading songs to YouTube who have far too much spare time on their hands.

You can listen to a new song without any visual accompaniment whatsoever. If you’re incapable of just listening to music without doing anything else then at least spend your time browsing Stereoboard while having tracks on in the background rather than watching awful metal lyrics exploding out of flames or slightly behind the tempo of the song they are accompanying. This NEEDS to stop.

People Acting As Though ‘Artists’ Like Miley Cyrus And One Direction Actually Matter

It’s true that offensively bad commercial ‘artists’ like One Direction do exist, but I’m astounded by the fact that most people who complain about their existence have failed to register the fact that the world would be a much better place if we pretended they didn’t. Let hordes of screaming kids flood to see Louis Tomlinson… and, erm, the ones who haven’t turned out for Doncaster Rovers, in huge arenas (unless the kids in question are your children, grandchildren, nephews or nieces, students etc).

We don’t have to acknowledge that this is happening. We’re proper music fans so let’s just go to the pub and dissect the merits of the latter half of the Sonic Youth discography while all this is going on far away. It’ll be better that way in 2014. Trust me.

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