Mon Oct 25/04
I would love to go to the Evanescence concert with you!

I had a bit of an epiphany on the way into work this morning. Stabbing helplessly at my FM radio presets, I for some reason lingered a while at 94.9 The Rock, Oshawa's home of killer classics and the new rock you need. (This was the "Al Joynes and Beer for Breakfast" morning show, I have subsequently determined.) As I tuned in, the topic was turning to tonight's Radio Music Awards, which celebrate the music that gets played on the radio. Al was quizzing his female co-host on who she thought might have been nominated for Rock Artist of the Year. Turns out it's Audioslave, Godsmack, Jet, Linkin Park and Nickelback. Then she took a stab at the nominees for Rock Alternative Artist of the Year and had some difficulty in choosing correctly, which was quite understandable — with the exception of Three Days Grace subbing in for Nickelback, it's the same bands.

I gave birth to some not-very-clever insights about the corruption of the word "alternative," momentarily almost forgetting that all the bands mentioned above — with the exceptions, I think, of Jet, who are harmless thieves, and Audioslave, whose singles I find inoffensive — are among the very worst in history to have ever gained an audience. The real slap-in-the-face moment, though, came when Al asked his co-host who her pick was for Rock Alternative Song of the Year. No word of a lie, this is what she said: "If Hoobastank isn't on there, I'll slit my wrists."

Hoobastank. Pride of whichever town the lab was in where Universal A&R execs concocted it out of four weak young men and some old Alice in Chains CDs. There are people who are passionate about Hoobastank — this was my epiphany — and indeed, the female co-host subsequently went on at some length about how badly she wanted to see Three Days Grace win as well. She said something like "This is the music we like."

The common refrain among people who like good music is that the gulf between the popular and the meritorious has never been so wide. I've said that myself, on occasion. But Oshawa's biggest Hoobastank fan has led me to re-examine and at least partially dismiss that theory. What we have, in fact, is two almost entirely separate streams of music: the Nickelback Stream, which produces commercially viable product that scores highly on the Polyphonic HMI machine (or with its human equivalents), and what I'll call the Wilco Stream, which produces commercially viable product that record companies for some reason don't want to hear.

The Wilco Stream is commercially viable, make no mistake. Jeff Tweedy & Co. were famously dropped from Reprise when they delivered Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album that was deemed devoid of a radio-ready single. (It had two: "Kamera" and "I'm the Man Who Loves You.") The key point about that album, and about many other albums released in the Internet Age, is that they became very, very popular — not popular like record company executives think they're popular (i.e., talked about in dorm rooms, perhaps featured on the soundtrack of a slacker-related romantic comedy), but millions-of-dollars-making, commercially-viable-in-every-sense-of-the-term popular. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sold 50,000 units in its first week, despite never being played on the radio and the fact that it had been "out" (i.e., downloaded by millions) for months by the time you could get it encased in a jewel pack.

It is damn near impossible to find record sales statistics on the internet, which is not surprising at all, but if you want to feel good about humanity, check out Amazon's music best-seller list: Elliott Smith, the Garden State soundtrack (featuring Iron & Wine, for heaven's sake), Björk, Franz Ferdinand and Modest Mouse (two rare examples of real music on the radio), Leonard Cohen, Interpol, The Shins' Oh, Inverted World (still at #79 forty months after its release!), The Arcade Fire, and Wilco, just to name a few, are all in the top 100. Try telling them that "file sharing hurts artists."

Look, if people actually take pleasure in Hoobastank, far be it from me to deny it to them. What is unarguably true, however, is that a massive proportion of the good music being produced today is never played on the radio or television. I peg it at somewhere around 99 percent. Hoobastank fans might well disagree with me, but if their only source of music is the radio, then they are unqualified to comment. These people are limiting themselves needlessly, and if the combination of Rock Radio and Rock Alternative Radio leaves them feeling unfulfilled, they have only themselves to blame.

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