Of course, it's the public's fault the pundits tell us. Everybody has such a short attention span these days, that they won't stay interested in anything for more then a nanosecond. Have they ever stopped to think that the problem might be that it's only by offering people real choices that they pay attention to anything? If everything sounds the same, what is there to listen to after awhile?
If variety is the spice of life, then corporate music needs someone to pass them the salt — if not some basil, and maybe even some cumin. Their idea of variety is…well to be honest, I don't know if they even know what it means. Making sure that the flavour of the month has a different cup size this month, or that their hair is peroxided a different shade of blonde doesn't quite make it in my book.
I mean there is only so long you can look at a pretty young thing before you realize just how damned annoying her voice is. It doesn't matter how many topless or bottomless photos of them show up on the Internet – they all just start to blur into one bimbo who can't sing after awhile. If people start to lose interest, or to flip channels over time, who can really blame them?
The book publishing industry is just as bad as it's counterpart in music. Thinking that they're onto something that the market loves, they pay millions of dollars in advances for true confession, daytime talk show style books without bothering with something as simple as fact checking. When that crashes and burns, instead of thinking about chickens and baskets, they sink even more money into the next big thing.
I could almost understand the first part of the approach — the monkeys and their search for Hamlet — if they weren't only so singularly focused on finding the next big thing, only to be ground into oblivion in a year or two. Would it be so bad if when they found somebody or some group that resonated with people, they invested only what was needed to allow the original to continue its development — rather than spending a fortune trying to clone them?
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