reading all this makes me long for the days when a person could find variety in music by merely stepping away from the sameness of the Corporate music seen. Radio stations actually had 10 song playlists!
It was after the birth of punk and within the sprawling alternative scene that it had bred. Back then, alternative refered to music you couldn't find anywhere except by word of mouth. Radio stations wouldn't touch it. Music companies hadn't quite merged into the mega-conglomerates you see today, but they yearned to control this counter-culture which grew like a flash fire.
Menudo, Motley Crew, Rat, Madonna, Bon Jovi, Wham!, New Kids on the Block, Tiffany, the list goes on and on of music that saturated the airwaves with a sameness that was astounding.
There were some standouts in the 80s for sure. Pink Floyd and AC/DC to name a couple. But it was primarily the boy, hair, and corporate bands that ruled the day.
However, if you knew someone who knew someone who had a third generation copy of that Violent Femmes tape, they just might be willing to make a copy of it for you. And that same friend just mentioned that Black Flag is coming to town, and it's $5 to get in! Not the next town over, YOUR TOWN! You've got five bucks, so you go and meet people who have even more copies of tapes to share, if anyone can find a blank tape!
The Cure, Souixse and the Banshees, Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Depeche Mode, Echo & The Bunnymen, XTC, The Smiths, Joy Division/New Order, Bong Water, argh, I couldn't begin to remember them all. There were so many.
Some you may have heard of. That's because of me and the countless kids who listened wouldn't adhere to the corporate muisc strategy of maximizing profits by playing to the lowest common denominator. Back then, you would NEVER hear this stuff on the radio in the US.
The corporate music borg attempted to break into this scene, but it's key was that it was flourishing in a way that was contradictory to the business model of the corporations. It was local to regional. We had 2 record small record companies in my hometown of 200 thousand. They sprang up like mushrooms throughout the land. Corporate music finally broke into the scene by offering obscene sums of money to gobble up these myriad little companies. To get an idea of just how much money they spent, look at the list of companies in the
riaa. Most of these companies live under one of a few corporate entities. So they gobbled up the local companies and either brought these local alternative bands under their control, of fired them. There was nowhere else to get a label, the corporations were busy absorbing them all.
What the corporate music culture labels as alternative today spang from that local scene though, and there are still standouts. Tool, Disturbed
and NIN to name a couple. The sheer variety however, is sadly gone as is the type of artistic integrity and free experimentation that coincides with not being controlled.
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