Musical Discovery - 9mm Parabellum Bullet

As harsh as I am about pop music, there are glimmers of hope in the muddled trash.  While not perfectly analogous, the Japanese pop scene also has its own particular tropes and crap that is followed which I find marginally more enjoyable.  But this isn't really about pop music.  It's about rock.  More importantly, this is about the band 9mm Parabellum Bullet.

As a band, 9mm Parabellum Bullet was formed in 2004 and so have been around a decent amount of time now.  However, throughout what's amazed me about them is not their sound, but their ability to experiment and improve.  In the past 10 years they've released 5 albums which is not too bad.  Not nearly as prolific as Alstroemeria Records who I posted about last month, but 5 albums in 10 years isn't too shabby at all.  More importantly, like Alstroemeria Records, each album is different from the last whether that's good or bad.  Since there are only 5, I'll talk about each of them just because.

Rant Corner: Pop music

New month, new rant corner.  Gotta vent my anger some way right?  This time around, it's pop music.  You might like pop music, you might hate it.  Personally, I find it bland, boring, and quite frankly kinda sad.  For as much money and effort is put into pop music, it's so...generic and so...homogeneous.  What I find even worse or perhaps disturbing is that artists that create really unique and textural complete songs seem to lose that edge when they become famous in the US.  It's like the status of being a pop music star makes artists completely pedestrian and unable to experiment musically.  Although unable to experiment might not be completely accurate.  More accurately I would say that being in the pop music limelight makes people so reticent to experimentation and failure that they churn out shitty music that all sounds the same.

But let's not just take my word for it.  Let's dive into some examples.  At the point of this post, Katy Perry is a famous singer who sings pretty shitty formulaic party pop music.  From "Hot n Cold" to "California Gurls", you get overly simple and repetitive messes of music.  While it's true they're dance worthy, so's this song by UK band Belleruche.  Almost annoyingly so though, her first few songs, namely "I Kissed a Girl" and "Ur so Gay", look them up if you don't know them, which made her famous are full of little tidbits of interesting things.  There's textural contrast and an almost out of place electronic sound in the latter.

But let's even get away from simply shitty overly simple pop music.  I think the real root to my anger towards pop music is the idolatry surrounding vocalists.  For whatever reason, no matter how famous of a guitarist or cellist or drummer you are, you are never going to be more famous than an arguably shitty singer.  However, this didn't used to be the case.  In days past we had the Jimi Hendrixes, the Pablo Casals and Jacqueline Du Pres, the Louis Armstrongs, and Scott Joplins of the world.  Nowadays, ask anyone for a famous musician that's active.  I can almost guarantee you that they'll pick a singer or a group focused on a singer like the way Maroon 5 is focused around Adam Levine.  Yea, sure you might get the odd answer from an electronic music buff who'll say Deadmau5 or Avicii or Pretty Lights, but for the greater populace, the only musicians are singers.  Where and when did we stop caring for the instrumentals that truly make music special?

I understand that the human voice is special to us.  After all, with a little practice anyone and everyone can sing.  The barrier to entry is so very low in comparison to playing an instrument.  What is it though that makes us revere and look up to singers the way we do?  I find myself enthralled in music more often when the background to a song is more engaging.  Pop music just sounds so stale and almost robotic in its cleanliness and distinction between vocals and background.  In the end, a human voice is just another vessel, another canvas with which we can paint music with.  This ridiculous fixation and obsession with individual singers needs to end.  When it does I think that pop music can make a step forward and stop being the shallow mess of overly used tropes where it currently festers like a pus filled boil popping disgusting slop over our ears.  Sorry if you like pop music, there are hidden gems but honestly they're almost not worth it.

--CsMiREK