Mark’s Rants: Play that funky Music

Mark’s Rants #1 7-26-95

Hey everyone, welcome to Mark’s Rants. If you’re new here…of course you’re new here, this is the first one of these I have ever done.

In these posts I will go off on some topic or other that I find interesting. Will you find it interesting? I hope so. Will I continue to use the tired rhetorical device of asking myself easy questions from a hypothetical person in order to convey information? That’s….that’s not what we discussed as a follow up question!

Chase what you want…

So I’ve got a big beef with the Billboard people. Well, I suppose more accurately, I have a beef with the people who buy records.

TLC is great, don’t get me wrong, and Waterfalls is awesome. Though, to be honest, I don’t appreciate you telling me what to chase and what to “stick to”. That seems like my business not yours.

The point is, Waterfalls is the number one song right now and it’s been in the top ten for like two months now, but there’s another song out there that’s barely getting any recognition. And it’s good. No, sorry, it’s called “Good” by Better than Ezra.

It currently sits at number thirty right now, but I absolutely LOVE this song. Have you heard it?

Looking around the house…

If’ you’ve head it tell me that isn’t stuck in your head now.

Better than TLC?

I’m not trying to make this a war between TLC and Better than Ezra. I mean, I guess I kind of am. I suppose my point is more than R&B and contemporary pop seem to dominate Billboard’s charts while alternative songs have a harder time cracking through.

If this was just because of merit, I wouldn’t care. I’d save my rant for some other inane thing that I won’t even care about in two weeks.

No, I think the reason that this happens is because of the biased way the media covers music in this country. The media rarely tries to market to teenagers and young adults. They know that the parents are buying records for their children and that they control the purse-strings. They also know that the older generation still reminisces for the days of bands using so much hairspray they make the ozone layer look like swiss cheese.

Let’s Rap this up!

The biggest victim of this media coverage isn’t alternative bands, though, it’s rap groups.

How many of you have heard of:

Skee-Lo?

Method Man and Redman?

Old Dirty Bastard?

DJ Quik?

Notorious B.I.G

Scho0lly D?

2Pac?

MC Breed?

I mean I could go on, but you get the point.

2Pac released “Me Against the World” in March and I don’t hear a peep about it on the news. Hell, even MTV barely covers this stuff.

In the music business (any business really) you need two things to be really successful. The first is talent. You cannot do anything without that. If you make a terrible song then it doesn’t matter how many people hear it, you’re not going anywhere.

The second thing is exposure. People need to be aware that your stuff is out there. Maybe we writing about 2Pac on the web will help his career. It seems like, now that I think about it, the information superhighway might be a great way to spread the word about things. It cuts out the middleman (television and radio) and brings the message straight from the creators to the fans.

I wonder if anyone will ever pick up on that.

Anyway, a lot of great rappers out there struggle, not because they aren’t making music (they are killing it) but because no one really knows they’re out there.

Take them to Schooll(y)

Schoolly D (who I mentioned earlier) came out of Philadelphia, but he’s nothing like Will Smith. Schoolly broke out onto the scene in the mid-80s and he changed the way people rapped almost instantly. From P.S.K. to How a Black Man Feels, this guy didn’t just perform songs, he owned them.

Schoolly D brought a hard-edge to a genre that was always about fun, and sometimes about social issues, but rarely delved into the seedier nature of life before he came along.

Yet, you’re not going to see Schoolly D brought up on the news. You aren’t going to see people writing about him in the trade papers. They don’t want to talk about him, or his music because it doesn’t fit with their little sanitized version of life they want to cling to.

Sorry to go off on a tangent. This is Mark’s Rants after all!

What to do?

To be honest, I don’t know. Carol and I talk about movies and television shows on our tapes. We cover some of the news of the day, but we don’t touch on music a lot. Certainly not in this deep of a way. I suppose I could cover it a little more on the show, but honestly I think that writing about it is better.

It’s easier to get all the thoughts in your head out when you’re writing them down and it’s a more effective way to communicate, I believe.

As our generation grows in age we will also grow in power. That’s the way the world works. The older you get, the more money you get, the more stuff they put you in charge of and the more power you wield.

As that begins to happen we can’t turn our backs on these artists who we care passionately about. These legends need to be immortalized and given the recognition they deserve, even if it does occur long after they should have gotten it.

After all, my parents loved the Beach Boys when they were younger, and that group was often derided as America’s Barbershop Quartet. It’s only now that people fully recognize the genius of Brian Wilson and the awesome masterwork that is Pet Sounds.

We need to do the same with our heroes. So while I’m not telling you to chase Waterfalls off the chart (or to do anything with waterfalls at all) I am asking you to spare some love for the forgotten artists. good? Sorry, I mean Good?

 

Thanks for reading and be sure to come back for more Mark’s Rants.