The Death of the Sound Stage

I have been musically depressed lately.  Again I feel like a broken record.  Perhaps a broken record is the wrong analogy.  Maybe I should say a scratched record.  A scratch in the vinyl grooves causes your turntable's needle to get stuck repeating one particular passage of music.  Often I feel this way when criticizing America's music industry or rather lack of a music industry.  I am so out of touch with commercial music I don't know what is happening.  I have read a missive published on the world wide web that purports to tell it like it really is.  The bottom line I guess is in the internet, the MP3, and streaming music services have put record companies out of business.  I don't know if record stores still exist today.  I have not been to the mall lately to see if Fye still is there.  Rather than singing the ills of pop music again, I rather would simply explain the differences in America's music industry from past to present.  It is easier to understand why I am musically depressed.  It is tangible.  First having been born in l962, I am old enough to remember the twentieth century.  Because I have studied music at the collegiate level, something I have forgotten, I know first hand how music and its industry has changed in America.  While I assume other cultural practices also have diminished or become extinct, still I fail to understand how this has happened to music.  Looking at the film and television industries it becomes a little clearer.  Both of these mediums at one time largely used music as a major component of their product.  It was natural.  The marriage of music to drama heightened their achievement.  Only can I say that music education in America must have faltered.  At one time in my life I was involved in academia.  I have been a Graduate Teaching Assistant twice and an adjunct professor.  Also I have completed all of my course work for a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition at The Ohio State University.  This chapter of my life far is in the past.  Barely can I remember it, because I do not have things in my immediate surroundings that support it.  While I do listen to WCPE and my own recordings at times, still I am deprived of positive music reinforcement.  That huge vacuum is coming from television.  When I grew up television was rife with cutting edge commercial music.  There was a viable industry, and thus competition was high.  This created a vital musical canvass upon which our lives were drawn.  Music was like air.  It was all over Saturday morning cartoons.  It was in prime time.  It was in made-for-television movies.  Do these still exist?  I am so digusted with modern television that I am depressed.  During my life I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by high level creative music.  It was on the radio, and it was on television.  Just to name a few television shows that had REAL music, there were crime dramas.  I mean real crime dramas.  Tony Baretta, Barnaby Jones, Joe Mannix, The Rockford Files are just a few, and I almost can remember the theme music from each of these.  Highly they were influenced by jazz music and included elements of funk and soul.  Quincy Jones was a large influence on this music.  Off the top of my head I can think of two African-American shows with theme songs written and produced by Q.J.  Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and Sanford and Son.  I cannot think of one theme from modern television programming that sticks in my ear.  That is why television today is not effective.  We would be better to put our TVs in the garbage bin, just as we would be happier never logging into Facebook.  Still it is a hard habit to break.  Always I have been a late night TV junkie, but that is changing.  For several weeks there has been absolutely nothing worth watching on my 70 some cable channels.  Nothing.  Time Warner's stock shares should be at rock bottom because their programming is terrible.  At one point it was reported that the internet was responsible for the demise of television.  Possibly this is true, but it doesn't seem possible.  As Zuckerberg struggles to sell advertising to satisfy his stock holders, are others streaming television through their iPads?  I do know that the bandwidth on these newer devices allows this feature.  I have not yet delved into this practice, because I do not agree with the iPhone.  Watching Americans staring at their palms instead of interacting with one another truly is ridiculous.  With compromised eyesight from the disease kerataconus and two resultant cornea transplants,  I want my text bigger, not minute.  There are other underlying issues with music other than its absence.  Music as I have expressed before no longer possesses the sonic capabilities it once had.  That because the airwaves in America all ready are filled with noise.  Not all of it is audible.  Resultantly music that once was capable of making us feel good no longer as the same power.  While I must digress at Mr. Stravinsky's guffaw that music is not related to human emotion, it is.  It is surprising to me one of my favorite composers would think such a thing.  This traditionally has been on of the thing music offers to humanity.  In jazz terms let's say the ballad and the up tune.  In music theory let's say tension and release.  I feel ridiculous qualifying the validity of music, something that has been deemed a Liberal Art since ancient Greece.    Then again America did not have a contingency that wanted to eradicate God and change history.  It is a shite state of affairs.  Fundamentally quality of life in America now must be purchased, and it is expensive.  The people of America are miserable, at least they are in my town.  We are an exception living in the refuse of the world's largest military complex.  With its presence comes its supporting infrastructure, and that is planes, trains, and automobiles.  It is non stop, and with their noise music does not stand a chance.  Perhaps this is why music has waned so dramatically.  I feel it.  Instinctually I have absolutely no desire or motivation to pursue music.  As jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollens now says, music is pointless.  He believes he wasted his life.  I will not go so far as to say I have wasted my life, but in retrospect now I would have chosen a more needed vocation.  I am more intrigued with cooking these days, because you get to eat what make.  It used to be that music would make you feel good, and that feeling would translate over a longer period of time.  That is not happening today. The dynamic of our air is so polluted, music does not stand a chance of creating vibration anymore.  Once it did.  Unless this changes, there will be no musical renaissance.  We will continue to stare at our palms while relying upon a cyber existence.  All ready this process has taken over my life.  My waking hours are so overridden by the military industrial complex, my soul no longer possesses the will to extend my own humanity.  I have given up, because the opponent to too large.  The defense of America is my adversary, my foe, and my opponent.  With no substance or life, what are we defending?  All ready America is a shell of her former self.  We have no products, and the products we once did have been been eradicated.  Once we had music.