A few weeks ago, I went to a local 'battle of the bands,' which for the benefit of those of you who don't know, is an event where a group of amateur bands perform in front of a panel of judges in order to determine who is the best. The place was oppressively packed, and at one point the door was broken by an influx of hopefuls desperate to get a better hearing of the music. (Incidentally, this happened when the band I went to see performed a very good cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird ). The interesting thing is that the music performed that night was the antithesis of what is in the charts today - 70s and 80s rock music vs. 90s - 00s pop.

Of course, the charts do not truly represent the actual popularity of music. Record companies buy thousands of euro/dollars/pounds worth of their own merchandise in order to make their CDs sell better. After all, if something's in the charts, it must be good, right? Not necessarily when this practice goes on - while something at the top of the charts will of course have people who like it, the results are distorted by unscrupulous record companies.

Pop music nowadays is much more generic and contains significantly less substance than it did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Nowadays, around 95% of popular music consists of generic love songs; back then, love songs only made up around 20%. Unlike old bands, modern groups (notice they're no longer called bands, but groups) don't care about the music they claim to play. I say 'claim to' because pop music is pre-recorded, enhanced, and combined with a backing soundtrack most likely performed by a small orchestra. When pop groups perform live, they merely mime the words to this pre-recorded track. When watching them perform, one can usually spot slight errors, such as moving their lips a fraction of a second after the singing starts.

Now studio enhancement has been going on for decades, but never on a scale such as this. Also, rock bands played al their own instruments and never mimed when performing live - two things you rarely if ever see nowadays. Old songs were also much more varied, with bands such as the Beetles and Pink Floyd encouraging youth to question authority, think independently, and say 'no' to war. Modern groups seem to decide what the mass market wants and give it to them. It seems we are heading for a return to the era of conformity.

Old bands looked unique and were generally not especially attractive; nowadays, looks are everything. Male pop stars must be 1.7 m tall, with blond or occasionally black hair, blue eyes, perfect skin, youthful visage, and the ability to sing suspiciously high notes. The degree to which they phsyically resemble each other is disturbing. Female stars, by contrast, are 1.8m tall, with pure blonde or jet balck hair, enhanced breasts, hourglass figure, perfect skin, and a tendency to cavort in their underwear. The careers of very few, of either sex, last far past the age of 27. Rock bands were not tremendously good-looking, and were admired and respected for their music alone.

Nowadays, pop stars use their personal lives to garner publicity. Take Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. They broke up years ago, but still seem to alternate their relationship between platonic friendship and passionate hostility, all for the sake of getting a few tabloids to glance in their direction. In my humble opinion, this shows disrespect for fans, as if their music alone is insufficient to justify attention.

However, this is not the worst example of celebrity culture. One episode of Pop Idol had an old man auditioning for a place in the group. The judges (and most of the viewers) unanimously agreed him to have been the most talented hopeful, but he was rejected because he did not fit in with the group's conceived image. The band went on to release one song which flopped critically and commercially, and have since vanished from public consciousness.

Still, even this is not the worst example of celebrity culture. The worst example is making celebrities out of people who go on shows like Big Brother . These people do nothing more than allow the public to watch their every move, which included drug and alcohol abuse. These people went on to appear in tabloids and on talk shows. Why not give some of that airspace to people like Stephen Hawking, who deserve our attention a lot more?

Modern groups frequently break up for publicity and then stage a reunion tour when the tabloids find a new flavour of the month. Old bands always broke up due to fault of their own and clash of egos; although drugs and alcohol did tend to play a part. I am not condoning the use of drugs or alcohol, but I do feel that the old break-ups were a lot more noble than what we have today.

The popularity of video games has skyrocketed in recent years, mainly thanks to Sony's massive advertisement of the PlayStation, and video gaming has gone from a somewhat nerdy pastime to a popular, socially acceptable diversion. Unfortunately, the rise in popularity has been accompanied by a loss of originality. Companies aren't making new concept; taking the list of games currently available for GameCube reveals (at the time of writing) approximately 68% sequels, 9% games based on movies, and a mere 23% completely new games. Even those games which seem to be original are often quite generic, which is unfortunately tailored to appeal to the mass market, meaning that many genuinely original and clever games do not sell nearly as well as they deserve to.

Similar things could be said about movies. First up you have 'teen movies' which tell of the lives and loves, trials and tribulations of a group of popular, attractive 14 - 17 year olds, which tend to make a big deal over trivial issues, and which may feature a member of a social minority * for comic relief. While this is not universal, different movies aimed at the same age group are few and far between. Then there are 'slasher' movies, a subset of the horror genre, in which a group of young, attractive suburb dwellers are brutally murdered by what initially appears to be a supernatural entity, but is actually just someone the protagonists offended at the start of the movie. Cop, action, and romance movies are often similarly generic.

As you can see, the music, video game, and film industries are all being suffocated by commercialism and the need to make a quick buck. Popular culture, if not dead, is certainly on its deathbed, and unless some originality is injected soon, we may find ourselves living in a world where we are all forced to listen to the same music, play the same games, and watch the same movies ad infinitum.

Pop culture is dead.