MILLER: What ever happened to songs that tell a story?
One of my favorite things about music is that each song tells a story.
Well, at least, they used to.
These days pop stations will play anything that has a catchy beat with lyrics that loop and make no sense.
“Rap” artists will make references to one of three things: how much more money they make then the rest of us, their fancy cars and (in derogatory terms) women.
Long gone are the days when rap brought to light issues of the black community and injustices of the inner city.
Take the Jay-Z and Kanye West song “Niggas in Paris” for example. Kanye West has a group of lyrics where he answers a woman saying they should get married with “Come and meet me in the bathroom stall/And show me why you deserve to have it all.”
Am I seriously the only one who finds this offensive? And it’s not censored at all. Yet when I listen to “Life in the Fast Lane” by the Eagles, the radio station bleeps out the word “damn.”
I would like to take comfort in the fact that since the birth of Jay-Z and Beyonce’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter, Jay-Z said he would stop using a certain word that begins with the letter ‘B’ and refers to women.
It won’t stop him from making more crappy albums, but it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of his songs go from here on out.
Yep, Jay-Z has 99 problems but a … ugh.
But that’s all beside the point of this column.
In this era of music, even county don’t make sense.
There used to be a time when country musicians sang of losing their wife, losing their dog and losing their truck — sometimes all in the same day.
Now, it’s just about finding the right guitar hooks, being the best-looking female or male star and using those looks to sell records.
Whatever happened to music in the vein of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams and Merle Haggard?
Never again will anything out of country sound as good as “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
The rock and metal genre has seen their music and lyrics watered down to whatever sells the most records and captures the public’s 10 second attention span.
Metallica’s “One” retold the story of the 1938 novel “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo about a man lured in by the propaganda of war.
Now the genre is plagued by bands such as Bring Me the Horizon and The Devil Wears Prada — groups of 30-year-olds who appeal to the younger generation by bending to what’s considered cool and not focusing on what rock and metal music once was: an individual’s statement.
However, I do find solace with a band I’ve been listening to for about 10 years now.
Coheed and Cambria have recorded five albums in that time and each one is not only a concept album, but also related to one another.
Telling a science-fiction epic, the story is about a young man (named after the singer) who comes to understand his role as the fictional universe’s savior and how he battles the mage who rules it with an iron first.
Nerdy, yes, but it’s the finest Progressive Rock I’ve heard in a while.
In fact, Coheed and Mastodon (who has released a quadrilogy with each album representing earth, water and air) are the best bands at producing concept albums since The Who released “Tommy.”
It’s sad that Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are the only surviving members of that group. I’m not going to compare them to Homer, but when the band told a story, people used to listen. Soon, “Tommy” will be an album on the same levels of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”
No one cares to listen to it anymore. And that’s just sad.
