THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

By now you've probably realized that I am obsessed with the topic of emotion. I don't understand them and I don't know what to do with them. But there is one place where I absolutely MUST have emotion - the arts.

I'm going to reserve this post for music and movies in particular which are two of my real passions in life. What in the world has happened?! Don't we have anything meaningful to say anymore? It's like we have become a bad combination of the 60's and 80's. On one hand we have plenty of issues to talk about but in the end "we just wanna have fun." Where is the passion?

Grunge died with Kurt Cobain, which I have to say was rather appropriate. But I'm still waiting for something to take its place. Pop music doesn't do it. Half these sissies don't even play their own instruments. Cobain used the stage as his personal asylum. It was like when you were a teenager and you'd push your face deep into your pillow and scream out all the aggression, hoping your parents wouldn't hear. Only in his case there was no pillow and he didn't give a fuck who heard. Actually, that's not true, he did give a fuck who heard. The problem was that all the lunatics jumping around in front of him stopped listening at some point and it killed him. Kurt needed people to listen and understand, but when they stopped understanding - or at least caring - he didn't see a point in it anymore.

After Cobain died everybody started screaming into the microphone like a crazed monkey. Like that was what made Cobain so powerful. What they didn't understand was that Cobain HAD to scream. It wasn't a marketing scheme. There was no other way for him to communicate his pain. It was a reflex. Try listening to a song by Nirvana and not FEELING it. You can't. Now try listening to today's popular music and see if you can feel anything other than your hips gyrating slightly to an electronic backbeat.

Even rap music which at one point was dripping in emotion became stale. After 2Pac died the posers came out. Was EVERY rapper a street thug looking to murder anyone in their way? Hell no! But they thought that was the secret to rap success (some still do). Truth is when 2Pac delivered his lyrics you could hear them bursting out of every pore in his body. He had to speak his truth or he would die. Which he did. It wasn't until the great white hope named Eminem came along that there was a revival in real rap emotion. Many argue that Eminem was only popular because he was white but, again, listen to any song from Eminem's first few albums and see if you can't FEEL his message. Eminem's last album was so lame that he decided to hang it up for a bit. He had run out of meaningful things to say and he knew it. He knew he couldn't fake it. Because he never had before.

I could make a list right now of artists in the 60's, 70's (skip the 80's) and early 90's that used music as their soul's medication. It would be a pretty lengthy list altogether. If I tried to make the same list with today's artists, I'm not sure I'd get very far.

We are living in some of the most interesting times in the history of the world. Seriously. And no one has anything they HAVE to say or they feel like they might die? Do we have it THAT good? Are we afraid of something? Are we content with the money, the sex, the fame? Does that trump our heart and turn our eyes blind to everything else? I know the answer to that, I just don't want to believe it.

Movies have always been another expressive art form provoking an emotion that laid hidden between scenes. Many movies are good at creating an emotion in the audience but very few tell you why that emotion was important. I've read several reviews about this years Sundance film festival which have called it, "an unusually boring and dull year for Sundance." I would argue that the past handful of years at Sundance have been boring and dull. The movies today seem more preoccupied with looking cool or being unique rather than its content. I'm all for being unique but if your goal is to be unique you will never make a good film. Ever. It's not about the process. It always comes back to the message. Clint Eastwood is one of the few directors today making movies because he HAS to say something. If he doesn't say it he will die. Or at least want to. I can't think of one other director today that makes movies because the message means everything to him. Unfortunately Eastwood isn't a 24 year old prodigy. He is an old man trying to remind us of what being an artist means. I hope some talented individual is listening.