FRAUD

 

Fraud: A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.

On Friday mornings after I do my laundry I stop by a Big Lots to purchase junk for the weekend. They always seem to play a loop the same songs piped-in over and over again for what seems like years now. There is Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,” and we know who that person that Ms. Masterpeice really knows “all too well.”  When Swift was wearing a cowgirl outfit like in the old days nobody paid too much attention to her, but once she went “pop” and starting prancing around on stage in a baton-twirler outfit, male “Swifties” ogled her and her female fans wanted to be her. Madonna is “sex” personified; Swift is just a blonde Aryan-Nordic “super model” who sings songs about someone who sells a worthless bill of songs that if she was still doing the cowgirl bit she would be nothing more than a niche country singer. In other words, she is fraud putting a “pop” veneer on tiresome self-involvement.

Still, you can’t argue with “success.” Just ask Lauryn Hill. You remember her, right? The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Hill who won all those Grammy scam awards?  Of course the title didn’t have anything to do with the songs and was just some cute made-up pity-party sentiment. The people who were really “misdeducated” were those who actually believed that Hill was the “Next Great Thing.” Todd in the Shadows, who has done some great videos about the stories of “one-hit wonders” and what he calls “trainwreckords” tells us the rest of the story:

 

 

Of course you wonder who was really responsible for her initial success after she left the Fugees. The producer? The musicians? As Todd shows us, Hill guitar-playing on her “unplugged” live “follow-up” record of her talking and rasping (to make it “real”) and strumming mostly unfinished “songs” was strictly on the beginner level. Was she a “fraud”? You decide.

But back to Big Lots. The songs they played were apparently ones that wouldn’t drive out an older demographic, but “new” enough not to sound out of touch with the new “generation”—or at least stuff that could pass as “oldies” to people born after 1980. There were actually a couple songs I thought were pretty good; one was “You’re an Ocean” by Fastball, which I think is a pretty catchy song. It’s not exactly “contemporary”; it had some radio play in the late 1990s but never made it onto the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which tells you where people’s minds were even then—and it hasn’t improved. And then there was this other song that I couldn’t get out of head (at least for five minutes after I heard it). It was actually sung without the aid of auto-tune and helped propel the melody rather than work against it, which was also immensely aided by a “killer” synth riff.

But for the life of me I had no clue who the singer was (such how much I care about contemporary “music”), and the fact that I couldn’t make out the lyrics because the singer “purred”—or “slurred” the words. But one day I decided I was going to focus every sense I could muster to make out at least a coherent sentence and hope that Google could do the rest. I thought I heard something like “After all we’ve been through, I know we could.” Apparently there had been other searches along those lines and Google recognized that the second phrase was supposed to be “I know we’re cool,” and the accompanying YouTube video confirmed that the song was “Cool” by Gwen Stefani.

That song, to my “chagrin,” turned out to be another “oldie” from 20 years ago. But worse was to be had. “Cool” is three minutes of slight sentiment, but that was a relief from vulgarity and negativity in so much “music” these days. Just one big “if” here, however. It was a fraud. It was just Stefani doing 80s Madonna (who she slightly resembled) for kicks, which critics either praised or criticized her for. Her highest charting hit was something called “Hollaback Girl.” I mean, what the hell is that? Although it was called a “pop” song, it sounded like (and sung more like) a hip-hop song, to make it more “commercial” in this day and age, because songs about “love” with melodies does this to people (from Billy Wilder’s underrated Cold War film One, Two, Three featuring a great comic performance by James Cagney):

 

I’m not kidding. I remember working a job when I convinced someone turn the radio dial to a real “oldies” station playing late 70s and 80s stuff. After a few songs some of the “kids” were getting red in the face and another person said that was enough “love” songs and turned the dial back to the vulgar and negative stuff. “Hollaback Girl” was just more negative vulgarity, featuring this refrain:

Oooh, this my shit, this my shit
Oooh, this my shit, this my shit
Oooh, this my shit, this my shit
Oooh, this my shit, this my shit

I hope it was still in her pants. Stefani sure faked me out.

It’s amazing what impresses people these days. 1974 was my favorite year for music, with 35 songs reaching number one, just one good-to-great pop song after another. Not all of the songs that year were good, of course; I hate to think what Tom T. Hall thought was “music, when it’s good,” and I still don’t “love” slow trains, especially during peak traffic hours; and that Paul Anka song “Having My Baby” only proved that there was a residual audience still around for stuff 30 years behind the times—especially next to songs that were practically pornographic, like Fancy’s cover of “Wild Thing."

There were also songs with pretty dumb lyrics saved only by catchy production gimmicks, like America’s “Tin Man,” which was just some meaningless gibberish thrown together that sounded “cool” to whoever “wrote” it. I mean, what the hell was the “Tropic of Sir Galahad”? But fast forward to the early 2010s, and you had something like “Royals” winning the Grammy for “Song of the Year.” Voters must have been “impressed” that a 15-year-old “artist” who called herself Lorde could throw together a bunch goofball lines like this:

But every song's like
Gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin' in the bathroom
Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin' the hotel room
We don't care
We're driving Cadillacs in our dreams
But everybody's like
Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash
We don't care
We aren't caught up in your love affair

Maybe every song today. Was Lorde the next Bob Dylan? He never won a “Song of the Year” Grammy, not even for the classic “Like a Rolling Stone”; I guess Dylan had to “settle” for the Nobel Prize, which is the first time a recording artist ever won the Prize. Even John Lennon at his Beatles goofiest (“I am the Walrus”) had a kind of “sense” to it. As for Lorde, she has only recorded two albums since (admittedly more than Hill), and nothing that “matched” the “quality” of her masterwork song (actually just the lyrics, not the “music”). A “fraud”?  Well, if you are a fan, no; if not, you rolled your eyes and moved on.

But we live in fraudulent times, as exemplified with the emergence of the “mainstreaming” of fraudsters like Donald Trump who may (may not) be finally answering for their career of deception and crime. Well, I know it is, with the moral and ethical corruption of the far-right, the disregard of due process rights that “cancel culture” and the MeToo “movement” permits, the re-emergence of the mainstreaming of hate and xenophobia (see anti-immigrant and anti-DEI sentiment), the perpetuation of conspiracies and false “facts” by the right-wing media, the fact that in this divisive political climate simple disagreements of opinion become weapons of war, and that people think their lies are the truth, and truth has become “lies.”

That is the world we live in now. People don’t really believe in anything but chaos, whether they are creating it and living in it. They don’t want to “give,” they just want to “take.” They don’t believe in anything except themselves; I am speaking of the generality, of course, but too often those who speak out about the wrongs done to people in the name of culture war prejudice (like John Oliver) are becoming little more than voices in the wilderness. People don’t want to “fix” things, they just want them to continue and get worse (or pretend they are “worse”) just so they have something to complain about or to use as cannon fodder to continue the “fight,” even when the other side has given up.

The newer generation has been brought up on social media where any lie can morph into “truth,” and not from books and television documentaries (which were common in the “old days” before cable). There is so much “information” out there that is extreme (but principally from the “right”) that once latched onto, there is no convincing "believers" otherwise. Some people don’t even believe that the January 6 rioters engaged in an obstruction of an official proceeding—and that includes the far-right justices of the US Supreme Court.

Perhaps the music of today is just a reflection of the fraudulent times we live in. Many musicians in the 60s and 70s actually cared about the world outside of themselves, but those voices have all but disappeared. There is no place for “love” or “peace” anymore; you might hear a few noises here and there, but it is usually a public relations stunt and addresses problems outside one's line of sight, say in other countries. 

I ask myself, how much has the world changed since I was young. To be honest, everything “looks” the same, as this old Laugh-In skit about “beautiful downtown Burbank” seems to demonstrate:

 

 

Except for computers and cell phones, not much has changed at all, at least not on the outside; but on the inside a great deal has changed; you either don’t care—or care too much about not “fixing” the same problems we faced in the past that should have been “fixed” by now. We think we “care,” but most of us are just frauds.