I was looking through my old music magazines from the 90's for decent images of various rock stars to use as references for paintings. I ended up getting sucked into reading several album reviews and articles, when I was struck by the most poingant sense of sad nostalgia. I miss rock stars. I miss good music. The scene was so much more exciting then. There really is no "scene" now. The artistry has been systematically removed from modern music and replaced with formulaic, mass produced, homoginized, empty sentiments designed to move units, downloads and ringtones. Utterly disposable, meant to be danced to for a night and thrown away like the crap that it is. I find myself admiting that even bands I didn't like or wasn't into were at least more interesting than the mass produced garbage that is out there now. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I can look back at the sudden demise of what was such a short musical rennaisance. It seems like over night, the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Kid Rocks, and (gag) Limp Bizkits hunted down alternative rock with pitchforks and torches and ran it out of the village, to fade away into obscurity. Sure, the bands themselves orchestrated their own demises. Egos, drugs and maybe sheer exhaustion drove many groups to early retirement. But it seems more likely to me that there were two other distinct factors that engineered the meltdown of alternative rock. First of all, I believe that the rush to sign the next big act drove the record industry to create a formula for an act's success. Bands that wanted to express themselves artistically, differently, experimentally, conceptually were left by the wayside in favor of easily created and manipulated pop acts. Welcome to the 70's part two. MTV followed suit and promoted nothing but teenie bopper crap, in 30 second clips, aimed at the new hot domographic...TWEENS! Kids with no disposable income,or attention span, but whose yuppie a-hole parents would buy their 11 year olds whatever it is that 11 year olds want. Thus the death of the music video. Remember when music videos were short films? I do. It was such a special thing to catch some new, ground breaking videos, that had a beginning, middle and end. Not neccesarily laden with special effects, but good, honest, inspired art. Now, what do we have? Some overly styled idiot, primping and preening, wearing tons of tacky jewelry in front of backup dancers and a computer generated screen, rapping about how much crap they have, how many hoes they bang. Anyway, onto my second point. The other reason that alt rock died is directly due to fairweather fans. Perfect example: When the Pumpkins released Adore. A beautiful, cinematic, contemplative experimental album that is of equal quality to any other of the Pumpkins albums. But the fans whined in unison "it doesn't rock hard enough", "it isn't Siamese Dream" and then drove to the nearest Wal Mart and picked up the new Fastball album. The Pumpkins continued to grow and evolve, as many other bands did, to break new ground, and expand the breadth of the listeners experience. But had they taken the time or effort to listen, Adore is at points viciously agressive and stunningly melodic and beautiful, just like every other Pumpkins album. The difference was, YOU had to do a little work to get it. How very indicitive of our fast food nation of instant gratification, that Europe got the album and we didn't. And by the time Adore disappointed the record label (once again, all about numbers, even though Adore at least went gold) the band was tired. Tired of each other, of us, of the climate of change that offered no room for such a succesful band to put out exactly what they wanted as an album. So then you have Machina. Machina, compared to the continuity of all the other Pumpkin's records, is a mess. But if you take it apart song by song, each one is good in it's own right.So the band walked away from it's fairweather fans, the record industry, each other most of all and signalled the final death knell of alt rock. I just remember the days of the Pumpkins on the cover of EVERY music mag at the same time, or some other band that was at least interesting. Maybe I'm just old now, at the ripe old age of 29, but have you picked up a Rolling Stone lately? The goddamm cast of the Hills was recently on the cover. Surely not only a sign of moral decline but undoubtedly of the apocalypse.

Billy is god.
but so are you.

giggle/smirk
Im a person a real person...typing to you......hi

don't worry, from one artist to another... i dig.

have a good night

*~love me

I like that, "selling out" never sounded so good. I love the pumpkins. Every where I go I hear how much they suck and are untrue to rock n' roll, because they sold some of their songs to commercials and movie soundtracks. But what people fail to realize is that is their job. I just love the music. I just wanted to present the question because thats all I hear about in music discussions.
Isn't everyone and everything a "sell out" now adays.

I am. Others are. The earth is.
thats what I live by.
Your sore and against organized religon. I am as well. I just believe there is beauty in all gods and all religon. To me they all have the same goal in mind. The same eternity. It gets ridiculous when they start fighting this battle of who is right or wrong, & condemning eachother, simply because the way we achieve our belifes is different.

ia amazing
I liked your blog too!

for your art work

*hope
all is well

do you think the pumpkins are corporate sellouts?

how all is well
and we do need a revolution of some sort

all of my love to you


Sunflower

you're funny
by the way ... wow... the painting of billy... just amazing!
did you use oilcolour?
greez from switzerland Lily

might be dying...
hopefully thats not the case. Now a days any band can get signed and put out albums that are heartless and that sound the same.
but it'll change.

your art work is amazing. your truly talented.
I'm not even shiting you.


love
sunflowerdagger

i d k if i had problems to find them...i saw some...they are very good, the colour the lights...brilliant...the most of them are here, too...or do you have more that i haven´t seen...enough questions, i´ll go there to find out...
see you there?
♥