A Brighter Tomorrow

When I was in middle school, popular music rocked. Grunge rock and gangsta rap were fresh new sounds that totally changed mainstream radio and MTV. I used to sit in my room late at night, recording songs off the radio onto cassette tapes to listen to the next morning with my buddies, through crackly walkmans, on our bus ride to school. I took it for granted that bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Oasis, and Pearl Jam were kings of the industry. I remember hearing Nirvana's "Unplugged in New York" album and thinking that it was the best music I'd ever heard (still is). I remember marveling at The Fugees, Tupac Shakur, Onyx, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Naughty by Nature, Warren G, The Wu-Tang Clan, TLC, and other great nineties hip-hop acts as they lit up music video television.

When I was in high school, though, popular music took a sharp turn for the worse. Boy bands and rap/core acts dominated the radio in the late nineties, and a decade that began with so much promise quickly devolved into whiny "punk" acts and mediocre rap. People talked in serious terms about bands like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, as though they were even on the same planet as the Seattle bands five years earlier. In fact, given the swill on the radio, if it wasn't for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication" album, I don't know if I would have made it though my senior year.

By the time I graduated in 2000, I'd tuned out. Music was dead to me. I entered college listening to music from the sixties and small, local groups. When I did stop to pay attention to the mainstream, some horrible group of whiners like Good Charlotte or Dashboard Confessional would shoo me away. One of the nineties' signature acts, Green Day, a beacon from middle school, transformed into middle-aged, mascara-wearing sissies, and they were bigger than ever! Portland, the largest city in Oregon, became known as a music hotbed, which should be good news, except that Portland indie rock was actually crappier than the MTV bands. Groups like Modest Mouse and The Decemberists somehow convinced people that their brand of pretentiousness was an acceptable alternative, that their jeans were skinnier, that their slouches were deeper. As for hip-hop, it adopted T-Pain's "autotune," a high-pitched computer vocal effect that essentially ruined the genre. Popular music was so incredibly bad through the aughts that I wondered what would become of the generation that I was teaching in high school. Would they ever know a world where the good music on the radio was from their decade?

(Every now and again, through insightful friends, I would get turned on to a good group that flew under the radar. This blog isn't focused on the fantastic smaller acts that will always be with us, too cool for any mainstream, ever. This blog won't worry about the Andrew Birds of the world. These people will always exist, as they did through the aughts. I speak here of the radio, of music television, of billboard charts.)

Happily, at the end of the last decade, things changed. There was a sea change some time in the last two years. Whenever it happened, I missed it: I don't watch TV or listen to music radio. Either way, it was like I woke up this past Summer and popular music was good again.

I think I realized this on the way back from Los Angeles in June, with my brother, who is eight years my junior and totally dialed-in to pop music. We were listening to his iPod and I couldn't get enough of Kid Cudi's "Pursuit of Happiness." There, in the olive orchards of California's Central Valley, it hit me. We were coming out of the darkness.

A few months earlier a student showed me Mumford & Sons. Another had told me about MGMT. A New Yorker article revealed the genius behind this generation's biggest star, Lady Gaga. But it wasn't until that California drive that I put it all together. We are now in a new decade, and music will recover. These acts are from wildly different genres, but they share qualities that I hadn't seen since my youth. The lyrics, for example, were thoughtful, with evasive meanings and subtext rather that surface-level angst or drivel. There is an emphasis on robust, powerful sounds, rather than Portland-area murmuring. Best of all, actual songwriting for the sake of songwriting seems to be foremost in these artists' minds. Say what you will about her as a person, a Lady Gaga jam has more life and energy than any pure-pop act since Michael Jackson. It feels good to live in a better era. Don't misinterpret: I don't think that we're back to a mid-nineties level yet. Katy Perry is still popular. But I think we're moving there. Can we reach the summit again? It's possible.

It's possible.