What Ever Happened to French Bread Pizza ? I can remember growing up that we could buy it in supermarkets. It was a treat when it first came out, something interesting and novel. No idea what has happened to it.

I was feeling nostalgic. I'd been recently looking up cheesy pop videos on Youtube. In my collection I now have Meatloaf's I'd Lie for You, Dexy's Midnight Runners Come on Eileen, The Flying Pickets Only You. Beyond these classics, I have gone to the dark side. Now this admission won't go down well, but I've also got The Chicken Song and I've Never Met A Nice South African, The Macarena, Cotton Eyed Joe and I'm too Sexy. I'm not a proud man.

That got me thinking. Why haven't I got any songs from the noughties? Then I thought about noughties music. What will it be remembered for in terms of genres and stuff?

The 1950s brought in the charts and the start of Rock'n'Roll. The 1960s saw the British Invasion, Merseybeat, the R'n'B boom, Folk Rock, Soul and Psychedelic Music amongst other crazes. The 1970s gave us punk, prog, pub, post-punk, disco, metal and glam. In the 1980s we saw synth-pop on the rise along with new romantics, rap, stadium rock, and various electronic dance stuff. The 1990s saw hip-hop sprout gangsta and R'n'B, guitars were back with new and alt-metal and grunge, we saw the DJs rise to power with more forms of dance music, Manchester gave us The Baggies, then Britpop. The noughties have given us Bob the Builder and the reality stars.

Okay, that is unfair. In recent years we've had Lily Allen and the 'people who sound like Lily Allen', we've had Amy Winelake and 'the people who sound like Amy Winelake'. My Chemical Toilet were at the front of the emo tide (of tears) and both Mika and The Scissor Sisters gave us camp rock. Other than that, musically, I defy you to tell the difference between the guitar band sound of the 1990s and the 2000s. The only difference between the hip-hop of the 1990s and that of the 2000s is that the later is likely to be played out of tinny speakers from the back seat of a bus much to everybody's annoyance.

So I looked at the singles charts, at the best sellers and the no.1s and I came to a conclusion. Music in the 2000s is like the rest of 2000s culture, it isn't the content, it is how it is delivered that is important. Or not, as the case may be.

84 singles in the UK charts have sold more than 1 million copies. Only ten of these were from the noughties, making it the worst since the 1950s (where we only had half a decade of charts). To put this in perspective with the previous decade: 1994 to 1998 had 26 million sellers. We are ignoring Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl which sold a million across the two decades. The first million seller of the new decade was from Bob The Builder. We also had five from reality talent contest winners, two charity records, which leaves It Wasn't Me by Shaggy and Can't Get You Out of My Head by Kylie Minogue. Two artists who were big before the decade began.

Back in 1998, I lived with a guy who used the university computer network to swap these new music files with people around the world. They were called MP3s. I looked down on them; they were huge, 4 megabytes per song on average. What use is that when most people have dial-up connections? He had stacks of CDs on his shelves because he just couldn't fit all these files on his 2Gb PC. For his university project, he built himself a portable MP3 player three years before anybody had heard of an i-pod. He bought a spare hard-drive from me for it. The device, with 100Mb of space was the same rough size as 3 DVD cases put together! I couldn't have guessed then that this would change the face of music.

Music Marketing loons have got a hold of this pretty quickly and certainly before the news media. Sandi Thom was on all the news because she was an unknown singer songwriter who broadcasted her songs over the net from a basement. Nobody noticed until much later that most of that streaming equipment probably came from a record company that had signed her up. Nobody even bothered to comment that no self respecting punk rocker ever had a flower in their hair.

It took a few years to catch on, but eventually music delivery has gone primarily electronic. But what is it delivering? Just looking at the no. 1s, by my count we have at least 35 cover versions in there. And there has to be a reason for this. Well, two reasons for this. The first is that most of these come from pop artists who record what their management team tell them to and the thing no management team wants is their pop artist to write their own songs. The other is that record companies are well aware that all they need is a song and good marketing. It is a lot easier to use an already successful song, use already successful arrangements and just add a new voice. One good thing about this was Gareth Gates covering Spirit in the Sky. Previously, both Doctor and the Medics and Norman Greenbaum took that song to the top spot, then never had another hit. After this song, Gates managed another 2 top 10s before the song's curse got to him as well.

The charts are different too. Instead of the old days when a record entered low, got more airplay and rose up the charts, the suspense and you watched it enter the top ten and then number one before hanging around for months. These days we have the quickie charts: no foreplay, just in, out and no time for cuddling afterwards. Because of that, I think, we have finally lost Top of The Pops. Even MTV doesn't play vids that much anymore!

I could go on about reality pop for ages, the pros and cons, but I won't. Just one thing this time, they have killed the Christmas Single.

For me, the Christmas single was a great thing. Yes, I hate hearing them in ASDA in early November but from the glam genius of Mud, Slade and Wizard to Fairy Tale of New York and, of course, Sir Cliff, it was obvious that people made an effort to write a song for Christmas and there was always a mention about who it would be. Not anymore. It is virtually guaranteed that if you win X-factor, then you will have the coveted top spot. That is scroogian level humbug on Simon Cowell’s part. You have to go back to 2004 to find a crimbo chart topper that wasn’t a reality muppet, and that was Band Aid: the revenge.

Back to my videos, this is the bit that I don’t understand at all. Modern music videos. I guess that most Girls Aloud fans are young teenage girls, so why are all their videos just about them wearing a range of skimpy, tight costumes and thrusting bodyparts at either the camera or a half naked boy dancer? To me (oh, dear, here he goes again), a good music video has one of four things ...

1. a good story to it that complements the song
2. Humour
3. Invention
4. Pyrotechnics, lots of hairspray, dry ice and a wind machine

As far as I can see, these days all you need to do to have a cute girl, miming and gyrating to the song which switches both locations and skimpy costumes every 8 seconds. Even these days, I can't believe modern music fans have that short an attention span! How a video that sees our gyrating heroine zap between a disco, a beach, a warehouse and a Roman orgy in the space of one verse can complement a song, I do not know. Still, the record companies probably don't pay for it, they take it out of the artist's share!

How about, and I am suggesting this now, in an age of credit crisis and teetering on the environmental edge, that pop stars make the first move and instead of making ill informed comments on nuclear power or GM tofu, they should limit themselves to one costume change per video and staying within a one mile radius of the starting point throughout the video.

That isn't to say that that invention is not out there in noughties music. Where before, underground bands that didn't conform to the ideals of the record companies spread by sharing tapes and fanzines, today with Facebook and Myspace (or was that a bit too 2006?), this music can reach more people than ever.

I'm off to make myself a French bread pizza and dance to Whigfield. Now that is retro chic.

Love, Peace and Blues

The_Jon_M

16.11.09 Front Page

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