London (AFP) – MTV kick-started a new era of music and pop culture in 1981, when it went on air for the first time, emblematically playing “Video Killed the Radio Star” as its debut music video.
More than four decades later, the channel, now owned by US media giant Paramount Skydance, will wind down its international music broadcasting by the end of the year as it struggles to compete with online streaming and social media.
So long.
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” Don Henley sang of guests at the Hotel California, that strange establishment on a dark, desert highway, which gave the Eagles their greatest hit.
The same was not apparently true of the yellow legal pads on which Don Henley drafted those lyrics, however. Those left Henley’s home in Malibu in the late 1970s and found their way to New York, eventually ending up in the hands of a memorabilia collector and a curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now Henley, 76, who wrote the song about the lure and trap of Hollywood, wants them back.
On the weekend of June 17 2021, in the midst of an airborne disease, live music returned to the UK in something like a recognisable form. As a compliment of British bands entertained an audience of 10,000 vaccinated revellers, over three days and nights this section of the concert-going community helped plot a hesitant course back to normality. Never mind that the Download “Pilot” festival was a mere one-tenth of its normal size – the volume was operating at full-whack. Because when it came to duking it out with a global pandemic, rightly and inevitably, there was only one kind of music up to the job. Metal.
On warm summer nights, the park across the street from my house is filled with people playing dribbling soccer balls, playing volleyball, or engaging in aggressive games of Spikeball.
Nearly all of them will have music playing through Bluetooth speakers, usually from the Spotify Top 100. And if I’m honest, none of this music is any good. All I hear is mumbled lyrics tunelessly rendered (well, except for the overuse of Auto-Tune) and beats so quantized that they could be substituted for an atomic clock.
