I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.
Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?
While I agree with you overall, this just isn’t true.
We had university radio which would play whatever the DJ was into, because it wasn’t programmed.
We had local record stores, which while stocked a lot of top 40, would also bring in albums from small and indie bands that would never get played on radio. They would play it in the store, and have listening stations with headphones so you could listen to an album before you bought it, because you would not have heard it on the radio.
We had clubs that would book bands from everywhere. The club I hung out at had a band every night of the week, and no matter when you went, you would hear someone new.
The music was out there. You just had to get your ass out of the house to find it.
Edit: Also, top 40 stations played what was selling. They were not the problem, it was the stations that were not top 40 that were playing the pablum for the masses, and when it would sell, then it would appear on a top 40 station. By definition, a top 40 station played the 40 biggest selling singles of the previous week. They didn’t pick what was sold.
I often heard great bands show up in top 40 because they somehow managed to break through to the masses. I remember when Pink Floyd released an album in the 90s, and the first single on the album got played on the top 40 station because it was selling. This being a time when groups like Ace of Bass, Salt-n-Pepa and Boyz II Men were popular and what a lot of people were listening to. Right there nestled in the hip-hop and dance music was Pink Floyd. Again, because it was selling.
Edit 2: I picked Pink Floyd because it stood out. At that time, in the 90s, it was not a band that young people listened to much of unless they were really into prog rock, classic rock or blazed all the time.
Keyword being “local”. We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.
We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.
Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.
No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.
None of it was about the music, and of course it wasn’t - it was a place for cliques to flex fashion.
If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - I’m happy for you, really, truly, and I’d like to hear more stories, but most of us didn’t, at least not those of us born after '97.
Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, there’s no one you gotta know, there’s no place you have to know to go to, there’s no subcultures you gotta be part of, there’s nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.
You’re completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether you’re in Pakistan or one of those places ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.
Even if I lived in ye olden times, there’s no way in hell I would’ve known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldn’t have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, it’s more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.