Pop Music News Bytes

David Tanny Unhip? It's Really The Other Way Around, Kids! (Jan 2002)

The article says that "suddenly, the hip, happening people are the people you don't recognize." I can agree with that sentence, but let me expand it further from a fluffball piece into a meaty piece. Just what qualifies these cookie-cutter no-personality young adults as hip? What quality work are they doing that makes them deserve fame? Answer: nothing that anyone with a college diploma would care about.

What do they call hip? Anyone who raps instead of singing, people who wear pants too low, girls who look like pre-puberscent boys with short hair and boy clothes (I'm not a sicko so I won't bother to go near them or a cop would think I'm a pedophile and put me in the slammer), "stars" like Drew Barrymore who make strings of forgettable chick flicks (sure she's somewhat cute, but she hasn't done any quality work since E.T.), rappers like P. Diddy and Ja Rule who make up stupid embarrassing names as stage names instead of being man enough to use their real names, young Gen-Y radio programmers who program nothing but new slow music most everywhere on the dial (Alicia Keys can't hold a candle to Samantha Fox in my book!), and so forth.

This crap is what the youngsters call entertainment? If I were a teenager today, I would too think the same way and never get into TV, movies, or music, if all the programmers and producers made and promote were basically mediocre quality stuff such as the stuff they're calling "hip."

Here is the truth straight from the horse's mouth: "It's not hip, it's bullshit!"

No wonder today's teenagers and young adults are getting mushy brains in their heads being exposed to all this crap without anyone intervening and telling them that better TV, music, and movies that is not hogging the media all the time exists for them to explore and to enrich their mental states and provide stimulation to develop a well-rounded personality with a better sense of what entertainment culture is all about.

You keep reading here about how bad Diana Laird of Channel 933 and Bryan Schock of 91X are programming their respective "Cheap" Channel stations. Just listen to their ideas of top 40 and alternative rock and you'll get a good idea about how narrow and ignorat these stations are covering their genres and formats. Why all the hard rock and sleppy slow songs? No wonder the males over 25 don't listen to these stations: they're for kids and young women! That's why they're both unhip and uncool; neither one cares about what goes into the products they're spewing out to the public! It's the same theory that applies to these stations: GIGO - Garbage In? Garbage Out!

We're geezer-like for not liking their idea of hip? No way! We just don't like crap quality like talk-pop, fraternity-level sitcoms, and cookie-cutter flicks. Today's kids absorbing this "hip" junk will surely grow up with a completely warped idea of the entertainment culture by being exposed to nothing but junk.

Not too long ago, for example, Dick Clark hosted an annual New Year's Eve special with the top acts of the pop scene that happened to have quality work; this past year, the special features just the top acts of the pop scene, most of which were putting out sub-par quality "music" that was so awful that I turned the thing off for the first time in my 28 year history of watching that thing.

No wonder the boomers aren't recognizing the newer performers: the boomers perception of what makes a star a "Star" is very sharp, weeding out the stars who prove nothing but how bad they sing or perform to them, and forgetting the no-talents and moving on to something else. We boomers grew up with real culture back in the 50's through the 70's, watching quality sitcoms from I Love Lucy to Three's Company, great cartoons, PG-rated movies that were a bit nasty at times but not embarrassing to watch, music that were principally made for people of all age groups and the product was more or less evenly distributed instead of tipping too young like it is today, moral values established from our parents, heroes that were really heroes, teen acts who could really perform (even the syrupy Marie Osmond could still beat Mandy Moore in a singing comparison), and so forth.

Where we boomers were teenagers and kids, we were exposed to people who deserved to be stars by way of using actual talent. I remember how great a lot of the people on TV, movies, music, and radio were back then, compared to the Gen-Y's idea of talent today 30-40 years later. Where's the talent? Where's the originality? Where's the charisma? Where's the personality? Where's the uniqueness? Where's the singing, acting, or performing?

Where do this wave of zombie "hip" stars come from? Some other planet? This is getting to feel like Body Snatchers where aliens kill the people who have actual talent and reproduce clones of them without any talent to replace them or something. I wonder if all these "hip" acts, which are not really hip, are really space aliens from some culture-less planet like the Taliban or whatever!

What is really hip? Just watch quality old movies through the 70's, listen to great old music from swing to 80's synth pop, and watch TV classics through the early 80's, then compare to the "hip" stuff full of "stars", and compare. You'll notice that the comedians were funnier, actors acted better, musicians played real music and could really sing, movie plots were more creative, and people were more recognizable for doing something so high in quality to the watcher that they made themselves stand out better in a crowd of many thousand other persons and acts exposing themselves to the media.

Hipness? The real hip belong to those who can be easily picked out from a cookie-cutter assembly line manufactured from the corporate media factories by being talented in the first place, or are today's youngsters really setting their goals that low for confusing hip for good looks alone.

As for low-rise jeans: if you're not a woman and with an hourglass figure, wear high-rise pants or it makes you look like a pot-bellied porker. I myself prefer women in high-rise pants or skirts, big long hair, cute feminine voices, fully-covered tops with little cleavage showing, taller than 5 foot 10, sense of humor, cute, over 25, listens to adult alternative rock and dance and novelty music, watches movies and TV shows that are actually fun to watch, can take me out on Saturday nights, watches what I watch, refuses to go on dangerous rides, is rich, has a six-figure salary, owns a fast car and a big house, lives in Temecula, is curvy, and is a liberal Christian leaning on pro-choice and recognition of people of mixed genders and other religions.

Now that's what I call a hip chick!

"Unhip" Billboard Chart

-----> BILLBOARD CHART ----->
For the week ending January 20th, according to SOUNDSCAN
1/ New ALAN JACKSON Drive [Arista Nashville - 1 - 423k]
2/   1 CREED Weathered [Wind-Up - 9 - 128k]
3/   2 LINKIN PARK Hybrid Theory [WB - 4 - 93k]
4/   4 NICKLEBACK Silver Side Up [Roadrunner - 19 - 78k]
5/   3 LUDACRIS Word of Mouf [Def Jam - 8 - 76k]
6/   7 JA RULE Pain Is Love [Def Jam - 16 - 66k]
7/   5 NAS Stillmatic [Columbia - 5 - 63.775k]
8/  12 USHER: 8701 [Arista - 24 - 63.75k]
9/   6 PINK Missundaztood [Arista - 9 - 63.5k]
10/ 10 ENYA A Day Without Rain [Reprise - 61 - 62.8k]