Taste in Absentia

Taste in Absentia.

Television and popular culture are based on one infallible truth: the average person is excessively stupid and accepting. Each year millions of people spend inordinate sums of money on entertainment. They buy music, videos, video games and other things produced under the banner of entertainment. They take in movies, and they sit glued to television or computer monitors, or in-home theaters. All of this occurs with a continual increase in the number of items purchased and the number of performances attended. Still, every year the average person complains about the dearth of quality in entertainment options.

Even more, the ‘pushing of the envelope’ has increased the hype and lowered the quality of most entertainment productions. Creativity has been abandoned; quick fixes wrapped in sleaze and tastelessness can more than compensate for poor style, content, and skill. Want to lower production values? The answer is simple; forgo scriptwriters, actors, and anything even remotely artistic. Instead, recruit ‘real people,’ place them in ‘unreal’ scenarios, and through the wonders of editing, audio enhancement, and cutting edge camera work, create the illusion of drama under the pretense of reality TV.

So why do I like music, TV, films, and games? Simply put, when good artistic expression rears its head, I am just as rapt as the next guy.

Let’s take a case in point – popular music. I defy you or anyone you know to go to the music store and purchase an original music CD or tape that has more than three great songs on it. The rules state that the options must be limited to music released in the past year, and compilations and film soundtracks don’t count.
What do you find? You discover that 99% of the offerings have a maximum of three well-produced and well-conceived songs. The others are filler material hastily thrown together to get the CD on the market as quickly as possible. And studio execs don’t care that the play life is limited. They’ll repackage three songs they held back from the last CD, polish them up, throw in some more filler garbage, and people will continue to buy them.

I listen to the radio pretty regularly, and I hear some good songs there everyday. But, when I listen to the CD’s my wife or kids buy, I am ashamed at the trash I’ve allowed into my home. Of course, I can’t be so hard on my wife and kids; based on radio exposure, they’ve been duped into believing the entire album, tape, or CD is similar in quality to the radio songs.

I have not listened widely to rap artists, but I suspect they are the worst offenders, primarily because rap music is so popular now, as it has been for the past few years. My kids bought two rap artist’s efforts in the past year. Three good songs are on each disc, and a cesspool of tasteless, distorted, virulent slime has been added to the recipe.

The story is the same for most movies and TV shows. When people complain about the poor quality of television, I have mixed feelings. Having grown up in the 70’s, I can conclude that some of the best television ever made is being produced today. The problem is that so many of the offerings are horribly bad. Lost, the CSI enterprise, The Office, and a number of other shows are excellent programs, even if they are not all programs that I will go out of my way to catch, and given that I don’t have to with the wonders of DVR and On Demand. Yet the industry must be lucrative and cost efficient, so many of the better shows are placed into head-to-head battles. The public doesn’t stop watching TV at other times, when the crappy shows are on. The general public is stupid. They have been trained to watch TV, and, dammit, they’re gonna do it. How else does one account for the existence of Jon and Kate Plus 8, The Real World and Survivor idiocy, the various rip-offs of the ‘talent’ programs from Britain, whether they focus on dancing, singing, or other abilities. These shows turn life into a competition, and Americans are especially keen on competition. However, my wife and millions of others are rabid fans of shows where the competition is fabricated, and the outcome is predetermined.

Now I know that fans, executives, and players will strongly maintain that the shows aren’t rigged, but while the outcomes may not be 100% predetermined, the voters are led to vote for the contestants that stand to maintain the highest buzz after the intolerable finale episode. Moreover, the shows themselves are edited, modified, and cut into parts so that the smallest amount of footage can be stretched over the highest number of episodes. How do I know this, you may ask, if the shows are insults to my intelligence? Well, unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to dissuade my wife and kids from turning them on. I fought with them for a few years, left the room during the most insipid programs, but eventually had to learn to tolerate the program being on the air while I worked on the computer or read a book. The only alternative was to spend less time with my family, and I wasn’t willing to do that.

So what do I want? I want the general public to hurry up and lose patience with ALL the reality, faux competition programs. I’d like them to realize just how infantile and manipulative the programs are. I’d like them to stop being duped into believing that these programs present anything even remotely akin to true drama.
Have I been ranting? Quite possibly so, but I believe I have reason to rant. With a bit of time for TV watching, radio listening, and movie reviewing, I could probably find cause to work up to a serious rave to go along with my rant.