Monday, April 13, 2009

Blender's most overrated

Blender is ceasing publication, but at least they're going out with a few interesting lists! I'm sure you're thinking, "no, not another boring best/worst list", but this one is pretty cool -- Blender's 33 most overrated in rock.

Choices like "texting from concerts to say 'I'M AT A CONCERT!!1!1!'" and "winning American Idol" haven't been around long enough to become boring and/or overrated and/or hopelessly cliche. It's annoying when people who used to be into music as a teenager (but not now, or simply buy new music from the same bands they liked as teenagers) claim that music just isn't as good these days, but those people are fairly easily dismissed because even they know that they're ignorant about what's being recorded these days and are therefore not well suited to properly contextualize (although they probably won't admit that). But "the music from before you were born" might be the most overrated, because not only has this practice been around forever, but it's hardcore music fans who are most guilty of this (and I'm not exonerating myself by any means). Being hardcore fans, we're easily obsessed with the bands and scenes that we never had the chance to experience, and we try to make up for it by immersing ourselves in that band/scene to the extent that we convince ourselves that we know what it was like to have really been there, and proceed to bore/annoy all our friends with our enthusiasm for this.

I'm even getting bored with all the endless reissues from random proto-[fill in genre name] bands, because isn't this just another type of "before our birth" fetishism?

The Steve Angello-Paris Hilton fiasco seems both underrated and overrated. This sort of thing almost never happens, at least not this spectacularly, and certainly not involving someone as stupid and dislikeable as Paris, so in that sense it's underrated. But turning it into a running joke and elevating Angello to deity-DJ status feels like a bit much.

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