No fidelity

NFI why the autoblogfeedthing didn't pick up this morning's craptastic rant about Marcos Ambrose and his barbequing habits. Possibly because it was controversial, even libellious. Possibly because it was shit. Anyhoo here it is.

Did something out of the ordinary the other day. I went into a shop and bought some music CDs. At this point I'd usually spiral off into one of our once-regular New Music Reviews but suffice to say all three albums - Wolfmother's Cosmic Egg, Jet's Shaka Rock and the self-titled debut album (feeling very Triple M back-announce all of a sudden) from stellar rock bastard supergroup Them Crooked Vultures - are decent. Cosmic Egg takes one look at Sophomore Album Theory (i.e. second albums are always rubbish) and does a big poo on it, as it's the equal if not better than Wolfmother's debut, broadening their Zep-Purple-Sabbath influences to stuff like Muse and the White Stripes. Them Crooked Vultures is as FUCKING AWESOME as you'd expect a group made up of JPJ, Super Dave Grohl and the ranga from Queens of the Stone Age to be, and then some - there's stuff in there that sounds like Cream doing Disraeli Gears (eg Scumbag Blues), other stuff sounds like the WORLD IS COMING TO AN END. Often in the same song (to wit, Noone Loves Me & Neither Do I). And Shaka Rock... is a'ight. Undercover Music News were banging on about this album being the death of Jet because it took so long to come out. It's probably more because it's not as good as their last two. That said, it's comfortably in the top three albums I've bought this year. And that's saying a lot. About my music buying habits mostly.

However, going into a shop and buying some CDs is not only a bit out of the ordinary for me, it seems, but for everyone in the entire world, judging by the last two music stores I've set foot in - a Sanity in Australia and a Marbecks (pretty much the same except they do books too) in NZ. Each had The Most Pathetic Range of new music CDs you could possibly imagine - basically one wall - outnumbered at least three to one by their DVD shelving. For some bands there were more T-shirts on sale than CDs. Point of sale advertising was non-existent. This, children, is the post-iTunes music store: all the range of an Austereo playlist, with equally as much listening pleasure.

For that, Mr Jobs, fuck ya. For iTunes has killed the music store stone fucking dead. Not the torrent sites, because the majority of people pay for music, and didn't move their music purchasing online until iTunes did it for them. And I, for one, loved the music store. Even the crap, commercial ones. They usually had more listening posts, for starters. I suspect - and I bloody well hope - that the specialist places, the Rocking Horses and Red Eyes and Utopias of the world which took from me much of my late teens' and early twenties' disposable income and exchanged it for hundreds of CDs full of untrammelled win - will still have a market, even if it comes to be in second-hand discs and vinyl. And iTunes is most certainly convenient. But to paraphrase the Dead Kennedys, while we have been given convenience, the record store has been given death.

The other great victim of iTunes has been the radio station, as discussed in previous media commitments here and elsewhere around the Hottest 100 Of All Time - which brings us to Triple J. Although Triple J has more of a cultural development element to their corporate mission - as set by their governmental paylords - than the commercial networks (eg Austereo's which, mostly deservedly, are haemorrhaging) and can sidestep some of the need for out-and-out ratings, if noone's listening, questions still get asked. Add to that the degree to which the tail is wagging the dog at Triple J in terms of playlist selection, or even minor stuff like which out of the thousands of tracks they play each year get shortlisted onto their list of 'all the major tracks we've played this year' (potential for subjective rortage much?) around Hottest 100 time. Or maybe it's just me cracking the shits with the muppets who drive the bus at the Jays because this '80s electropop revival should have started and ended in about 2004 with the Dandy Warhols' We Used To Be Friends off that shit album with the banana on it. It was shit in the '80s, it's shit now. What next? Bringing back '80s poodle metal with drummers in rotating cages and more powder than a northern hemisphere ski season? Nothing about the '80s was worth keeping, retaining, or revisiting. Not the fashions, not the movies, not the cars, and definitely not the music. It. Was. Shit. I know. Unlike most of these tweenie fucks who are buying the stuff, I Was There.

Anyway, fuck 'em. Voted for a bunch of Wolfmother and Them Crooked Vultures tracks. The '80s were shit. The '70s, though...

The Doctor is OUT.