+++ Mediocrity in the Media +++ By: Jason Swett If I want to listen to some good music, I look through my CDs and pick something out. If I want to be overwhelmed by a flood of painfully cheesy ripoffs, all I need to do is turn on the radio or TV. For some reason, people seem to love this regurgitated, generic garbage we call mainstream music. Let me deal first with mainstream rap. It sucks. Almost all of it. It all started a couple years ago when Nelly spawned a generation of uncreative booty music. His beats sound like they came with a keyboard from Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, other rappers noticed how popular Nelly's cheesy beats were and tried their best to copy them. Now I hear the same sound in a lot of today's rappers. Copies of copies of copies. There are some original artists out there, though, like Chingy. It's refreshing to hear a song like "Right Thurr" that doesn't remind me at all of "Hot in Herre." That's some creative thinking. Mainstream rock, my pet peeve. A similar tragedy occurred here. It's pretty simple. Creed tried to rip off Pearl Jam but got it horribly wrong. Creed managed to steal Pearl Jam's overall sound but injected their own poor taste into a really good style. The result: crap. Since Creed was so successful, someone naturally had to rip them off. This someone was Nickelback. You know how if you make a photocopy and then copy that copy, it looks all messed up? That's what happened here, too. A cool sound got passed down from ripoff to ripoff until it just sounded awful. Oh yeah, and there's one more thing I wanted to mention: Hoobastank. Seriously, what's their deal? You just can't do that. And if you don't know exactly what I'm talking about, you don't deserve to. This is just a small sample of a huge cycle of ripoffs that is perpetually occurring in popular music. It's sad but, as long as people remain satisfied with a ridiculously low level of quality in music, it will continue. It would be nice if music fans would try to find something original on their own, rather than saying, "Hey, this band kind of sounds like another band everybody likes!" Don't settle for mediocrity. There's more out there than what's being crammed down your throat. Click here to read about other issues we've featured in the past

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