Pop Star John Mellencamp Blames Reagan for Lousiness of Pop Music

by Van Helsing | March 24, 2009 1:20 pm

Drab corporate pop excreter and esteemed foreign policy theorist[1] John Cougar Mellencamp is now a social economist, having figured out why his industry has produced nothing but garbage for decades: it’s Reagan’s fault. From a rant quoted at NewsBusters[2]:

Reagan’s much-vaunted trickle-down theory said that wealth tricked down [sic] to the masses from the elite at the top. Now we’ve found out that this is patently untrue — the current economic collapse reflects this self-serving folly. The same holds for music. It doesn’t trickle down; it percolates up from the artists, from word of mouth, from the streets and rises up to the general populace. Constrained by the workings of SoundScan/BDS [Broadcast Data Systems], music now came from the top and was rammed down people’s throats.…

Sadly, these days, it’s really a matter of “every man for himself.” In terms of possibilities, we are but an echo of what we once were. Of course, the artist does not want to “sell out to The Man.” Left with no real choice except that business model of greed and the bean counting mentality that Reagan propagated and the country embraced, there is only “The Man” to deal with. There is no street for the music to rise up from. There is no time for the music to develop in a natural way that we can all embrace when it ripens and matures. That’s why the general public doesn’t really care. It’s not that the people don’t still love music; of course they do. It’s just the way it is presented to them that ignores their humanity.

Presumably now that we’ve replaced trickle-down wealth with trickle-up poverty, music execs will go back to caring nothing for profits, wanting only to nurture our humanity. It will be nice to have something more interesting to listen to than Menstrualcramp, a vapid commercial hack whose career peeked during the Reagan era he decries.

Apparently Mellonhead has never heard of the Internet, which allows young musicians to go over the heads of record companies and straight to potential fans. He’s still back in the 80s, grousing about those new-fangled CDs:

The CD, it should be noted, was born out of greed. It was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased. They used to call this “planned obsolesce” [sic] in the car business. Sound quality was supposed to be one of the big selling points for CDs but, as we know, it wasn’t very good at all. It was just another con, a get-rich-quick scheme, a monumental hoax perpetrated on the music consuming public.

Curse those greedy capitalists for always coming up with new and better technology, even when aging mediocrities like Mellencan’t fail to produce new music worth hearing.

john-cougar-mellencamp.jpg
A pop dinosaur totters toward the tar pits.

On a tip from Gregory of Yardale[3]. Cross-posted at Moonbattery[4].

Endnotes:
  1. foreign policy theorist: http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2007/02/john_mellencamp.html
  2. NewsBusters: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2009/03/23/john-mellencamp-blames-ronald-reagan-ruining-music-biz
  3. Gregory of Yardale: http://tehresistance.wordpress.com/
  4. Moonbattery: http://www.moonbattery.com/

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