Jeff Buckley: Taken too Early

Music, at its current state, is in a very peculiar position. A lot of cultural and social concepts evolved with modernization and globalization; thus, bringing with it an arguably pernicious one: the concept of consumerism. The repercussions of it finding its way into music, making it an industry in the process, have proven to be very potent. Music started being grouped and ranked into charts, one of which is called The Billboard Hot 100, which is updated by the magazine Billboard, and the barometer of entry and position being based on “radio airplay and song sales” (Molanphy) as well as online streaming. We find that there is a “decreasing number of performers who have gained access” (Ordinani and Nunes 311) to such charts, which is something of note. This setup is what is found in the consumer industry where there are a few reliable sources for a certain product and one does not venture to attain said product from outside of them in fear of arriving upon a suboptimal version of the product required. So, what exactly moves a certain artist into a status where their music is viewed as a reliable source for enjoyment? What exactly is needed for an artist to be propelled into the status of “superstardom” that Ordanini and Nunes refer to? This much has been addressed in previous research, however, the question of whether or not music charts have profoundly and significantly changed our musical experience and moved music to the worse side of the spectrum of music quality is a question that I will try to answer in this research.

A big component of the music industry right now is mainstream music. This type of music simply connotes music that stays at top of the charts for months or more and is the popular music that is generally accepted as good music in most settings. A powerful aspect of mainstream music is that everyone is familiar with it, even if it hasn’t actively been listened to. Such music is always played in shopping malls, commercials, restaurants and during parties to name a few appropriate settings. Given the settings in which such music thrives, it could be argued that the content of such music is largely devoid of lyrical content and/or repetitive. Halnon describes the gratification derived from mainstream music as being “pseudo” in nature (Halnon, 2005). Justin Patch, in his 2017 study, inspected the 2016 U.S. presidential race as far as the candidate’s soundtracks for their campaigns. Given that the intensity of music is compelling both latently and manifestly (Salimpoor 2009), one might say that Trump’s utilization of personal favorites in his campaign soundtrack as opposed to Clinton’s utilization of mainstream music may have given him an ever so slight edge over his adversary. Where Clinton falls short could be that her music soundtrack was put together “with commercial purposes in mind” (Pruett 2011) and that her campaign manager was the one who accumulated the soundtrack to mirror the candidate’s goals, motivations and values. Trump’s soundtrack, on the other hand, contained music that he himself enjoys and it did not necessarily convey his campaign goals or aspirations but rather his identity. The way that they were an individual profile on Trump himself instead of his political campaign reverberated heavily with his following and ostensibly expanded it and such is the weight of the grievances held commonly by most people regarding this issue. Further, the commercialization of music could arguably be “the most pressing social problem” for youth (Halnon 2005); or in other words, mainstream music has become so excessively generic. Some groups of people who hold this frustration or at least realize it exists, Halnon suggests, have created a consumer culture within themselves that rejects its wider counterpart. Youth want to have a personal relationship with their music but to that end have led to the creation of a large subculture that artists could masquerade in as what Pruett has called the “fabrication of authenticity” (Pruett 2011). It is also important to note that there is a mainstream within the mainstream with the top 10 in the The Hot 100 where it is exclusively and evenly held by hip-hop and pop artists. One might think that this could mainly be the result of the simplicity of creating songs in this genre coupled with the “change in recording technology [that] has accelerated faster than ever” (Ordanini and Nunes, 2016) and one would be justified in thinking this.