Occasionally I like to peep into the world of mainstream music to check out what teenagers and secretaries are listening to lately. This could be seen as a waste of time (and I won’t argue too strongly that it’s not) but I do think it’s a decent idea to keep a bit of perspective on things.

It’s easy for those of us who are really into music and who listen to a lot of bands that teenagers and secretaries have never heard of to get into this weird mentality where we think that these popular indie bands are much “bigger” than they actually are in the “real world.” In the indie hipster world you can’t get much bigger than Animal Collective but their last album only reached #13 on Billboard (the one before that only reached #72!) and none of their albums has even been certified Gold (500,000 copies sold in the US.) In the mainstream world they are a small player.

I saw this name “Drake” popping up a lot so I decided I should look into what this guy is all about. I see on Billboard he’s got the #2 album this week (behind Eminem) and that he reached #1 (three weeks ago.) So this guy is a pretty big star. He’s selling boatloads of shiny discs.

I then went to YouTube and listened to the first song of his I could find which is called “Over.” I listened about half way through. I think I’ve heard enough. It’s really weird when you’re in this world where you’re listening to all of this creative interesting music and then you go back to the BS that gets played on the radio. It just sounds so absurd to me, like I just can’t believe that people listen to this garbage. I know that sounds pompous, but that’s just the thing – I don’t even really mean it to. It just really is absurd sounding to me. It’s just silly. How can people take it seriously?

But then I remember, it’s all part of a cycle. The commercial music machine keeps pumping out forgettable dreck like Drake and people who don’t really like music (and people who are too young to know any better) just keep eating it up. At least for awhile, until they move onto to the “next big thing.” And then it goes on to define that era but in a really dumb sort of way. Like New Kids on the Block in the late ’80s The Backstreet Boys in the late ’90s.

The kids who are listening to Drake now will look back at him as a way of defining their childhood and they may even listen to it in a nostalgic way someday just as people listen back to “Hangin’ Tough” by NKOTB and “Everybody” by The Backstreet Boys now. Just for a giggle. It’s not anything more than that. But that’s OK. Right? This is just a thing that kids have to go through.

See, I can dig that. Kids don’t know any better. It’s when I see adults taking this stuff seriously that it really kind of irritates me. I think it irritates me because there’s so much great music that isn’t getting the exposure that it deserves because crap like this is taking up all of the space. People who make great music deserve more sales and corporate creations like Drake deserve to be stuck on silly TV shows, not selling millions of albums.