MusicDesk: Unknown is the new Superstar

The days of sitting waiting next to your radio/CD/cassette player for your favourite song are over, nobody does that anymore; music sharing, radio, MTV and VH1 have killed that excitement. We hear too few tracks too many times forcing those in clubs, bars and pretty much everyone else to cringe when the current number one plays. Luckily, this decade of 00's has past and the unknown is the new superstar.

Music is categorized, for whatever reason, into decades, and by the time 00's came and went a collective sigh of relief was felt by music lovers everywhere, because the current was always boring and overplayed. Respect was lost instantly for tracks after they were heard 12 times in a day; it even got to a point where radio stations were promising that they would only play songs once every twelve hours (why even say that!). The best new songs and musicians became those who were new, for however long that lasted.

As decades of music will be remembered, there will be mixed feelings; the advancements in production, recording and sharing were groundbreaking with ipod's, itunes, mastering and recording dominating the core of the behind the scenes industry but it still does not create. The widely respected Rolling Stone magazine recently listed what they thought were the "100 Best Songs of the Decade" and put Gnarlz Barkley's ,"Crazy", at number 1: what the hell? It was catchy, but not even in the same league as "My City of Ruins" by Bruce Springsteen which came in on the list at 91, behind Pink, Britney and Christina. Who judges what we hear? Kanye placed twice ahead of the Killers and Coldplay even after he admits to making tracks off GarageBand; I don't mind Kanye, but that arrogant self proclaimed "saviour of music" is far off the pace set in the 60's and 70's: the real music era, a time when the Stones, Beatles, Zeppellin, Dylan, Joplin, Elton, and the boys from Queen were driving cars into restaurants and camping in hotel foyers, coked up and ready to burn. There must be a reason why the Rolling Stones are still the biggest live act of all time - they had music, leather jackets, good dealers, proper groupies and not a care in the world, a far cry from studio-publicist-packaged world that the teenagers obsess over today.

If there is a decade that is going to bring parity back to modern music it is the 10's. Like our adored musical forefathers, our world is in an uncertain place and as they ranted about war and peace we can too. A world that is dying before our eyes, problems exist today that the Beatles could only dream of on LSD. For once the material is there and again the young have the passion to talk about it. The frontier has been reached and what an exciting time it is.