This blog is called Just Great Songs, and this is most definitely a boring, boring title for a blog. It's so boring I actually watched every single ITV Agatha Christie adaptation in one sitting, just to reinvigorate myself after having to read the title. However, there is a reason for this title. Last night, whilst staring blankly at the television, an advert for a new compilation CD was shown. It's a double-disc music compilation featuring the likes of Keane, The Fray, The Calling, and many more new and exciting, chart-topping pop acts. Now, as if this wasn't boring/exciting enough, they took the decision to call the compilation (drum roll for the earth shatteringly fantastic title) - Just Great Songs. That's it. Just Great Songs.
This choice of title was so insipid, so bland, so meaningless, I actually experienced symtoms of shock. (Which is ironic, considering it has been designed to provoke no violent reactions whatsoever.)
It struck me, how could anyone appear to be so indifferent to something, yet attempt to sell that indifference on a mass scale? Is it just fashionable nonchalance? - "yeh buy this, whatever, who cares if you buy it? we certainly don't, we are completely disinterested." (The kind of sales nonchalance that makes us as consumers think, "Well I'll do what I bloody-well like, and buy the CD just to prove those record company executives wrong. Now who's laughing!?") Or, did someone in the record company realise they had 20 songs that they had been given the permission to put on a compilation, and without the mental capacity to give the compilation a name for themselves, threw the job of naming it at work experience student who was so fatigued by making cups of coffee all day long couldn't focus his/her brain for more than 3 seconds?
More likely, however, is that the record company realised that music compilations are undoubtably destined for the supermarket shelves and the car stereos of middle aged professionals throughout the land, therefore accepting a certain level of passivity in the bulk of their audience. Because compilations like Just Great Songs are just attempts to lazily pander to widespread cultural tedium. Mainstream music (or atleast, the music industry) is now so inertly ingrained into the everyday hum-drum of life that music means nothing beyond a product of simple neccesity for the purpose of filling a clearly defined 'life-department' required to justify the "normality" of each person's lifestyle. It's the sort of "if you aren't listening the Radio 1, you might as well listen to something" attitude. This is so much so that it now means nothing what music you are engaging with, so long as there is some there, lurking around in the background. We have reached a point in which popular music is now the equivalent of "lift music" (you know - the kind of music that if the lift got stuck, would eventually force your arms and legs to fall off because they'd be so bored they would just give up on being limbs.)
So, why have I named my blog after a product of "cultural tedium"? Because it is the point from which I aim to measure my writing. A constant reminder of passivity, insipidity, and bland nothingness - something I aim to avoid at all costs. Life in the 21st century is normalised. There appear at so many levels attempts to control actions, expression, movement, viewing, listening, speaking, appearance, culture (and so on), that there is forming a society of singularity and (this word has been unintentionally-ironically overused in this article) - tedium.
As soon as my writing becomes the blogging equivalent of the CD compilation I will stop writing it. Until that point, I will attempt to stay as far away from achieving such levels of beige.
