WHERE'S THE BASS?

 

The Radio is a place where we can engage our brains if we chose to or flex our imagination muscles. Conversation, education and elucidation are all there freely accessible  It's also a place to listen to music. Chose the right station and you can hear great music both old and new. 

Then there is the sort of radio that seeps into ones earholes via shops and other public places. The sort of radio that seems to consist of high pitched caterwauling and so called rappers of limited talent on top of a compressed musical backdrop that can be created at home on the above average laptop. It's produced for those awful iPhone headphones, Laptop speakers and the speakers on Samsung mobile phones.

The likes of Robbie Shakespeare, Bernard Edwards, Jah Wobble, Chris Squire, Patrice Rushen, John Entwistle, Mick Karn, Fred Thomas, Peter Hook, Mark King and Gail Ann Dorsey would be surplus to requirement in this new music landscape as Bass seems to have been made redundant.

High frequency is the new god of popular music it seems. Electronically altered vocalists rule the roost and deep tones have been banished. The bleed from cheap headphones is a buzzing wasp. The cars that blare music loudly (and it seems a self evident rule the volume of said music is commensurate with the lack in quality) produce the sound of a factory lathe at 78 rpm and Bass is the casualty of modern popular music.

Pop music is and has always been important and is in no way the poor man of music; look at its contribution to all sorts of things from politics to racism. It's just that now Popular music  lacks depth both musically and metaphorically it seems less important than it has ever been, and it is like those pesky wasps in the summer; irritating and pointless