It's hard for me to listen to the radio without constantly switching from station to station. It seems to me that there was a greater variety available on radio when I was younger, and now there's less space on the mainstream airwaves for anything other than pop, especially when it comes to hip-hop as this article points out.
Though there is new music coming out that I enjoy listening to, it is harder to find it. The pop has taken over like an invasive species- like the Kudzu vine has taken over the South, turning what used to be a space filled with diversity into a uniform plot of artificiality. MTV has only gotten worse about this over time, and when they do actually play videos, you can really see this. It seems like the formula of showing off material wealth and looking like a thug are enough to make you popular. But this stuff is just the same old noise, given new beats and repackaged.
Listening to radio today is like being forced to do your grocery shopping at a(n American) convenience store. No one can deny that the products it stocks appeals to the masses, and as much as I like things with nacho cheese and food that has an infinite shelf life, being limited to a diet of those things sucks. A diet of twinkies, skttles, and slim jims gets old fast.
Artists like the Roots, Binary Star, Talib Kweli, Common, Dead Prez, and Mos Def are seldom heard, and this is a shame. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to hear artists like these on the radio. When you have to listen to independent radio, college radio, and NPR to hear what anything other than the stuff that they rotate on the commercial stations, it is really frustruating.
I'd rather listen to nothing at all, rather than having to listen to songs like "Promiscuous Girl", or anything by 50, Ludacris, or Justin Timberlake(!?). I have nothing against this music, I just want to be able to choose to listen to something else without having to pop in a cassette or cd or boot up my computer.
I'm bringing SexyBack...
As you well know, here in Osaka, we're lucky to even get 50 and Justin Timberlake on the radio. That's better than all that J-pop s***.
Haha, point taken! Living in Japan is like living in a vacuum. It was amazing to see how much I didn't know about when I finally got back here.
What gets me is that some groups of Japanese are more tapped into what's going on in underground American culture than most young Americans, or pop in general for that matter.