Cinemorphosis

Tag: new-music

  • The Curdling Effect: How Great Songs Die in Grocery Stores

    The Curdling Effect: How Great Songs Die in Grocery Stores

    There was a time—long before streaming services, algorithmic playlists, and “sonic branding agencies”—when “Dark Side of the Moon” could take you on a soul-melting trip through space, madness, and time. In high school, Pink Floyd was our sonic sacrament. The cymbals shimmered like cosmic omens, and we let the guitars dissolve our angst into astral vapor.

    Then Circuit City got its grubby corporate mitts on it.

    Some goons in a boardroom decided that Pink Floyd’s transcendent opus would make a great jingle for discount televisions. The song was diced, commodified, and stuffed into every radio and TV break until what once felt like a journey into the abyss became the soundtrack to buying a laser printer. “Dark Side: didn’t just sell out—it was dragged through the spin cycle of capitalism and emerged shriveled and stained, like a silk shirt forgotten in a laundromat dryer.

    Same thing happened to U2. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” once carried a biblical ache, a spiritual yearning that made you want to climb a desert mountain and cry. Then one fateful day in 1989, I was in a fluorescent-lit supermarket, watching the vegetable misting system descend on some limp romaine, when I heard it—Muzak’d into oblivion. Bono’s ache had been lobotomized and looped over damp eggplant. I felt like I’d witnessed a holy relic turned into a toilet brush.

    There’s a name for this: The Curdling Effect. When a song becomes so omnipresent, over-marketed, or backgrounded that it curdles—its soul separating from its sound, leaving only a sentimental sludge.

    Sometimes entire bands curdle. Take Coldplay. They’re talented, sure, but somewhere along the way they became the official band of stadium urinals and car commercials. Every note now drips with forced uplift and corporate synergy. Once they soared; now they slosh around in the shallow end of their own overexposure.

    But here’s the miracle: some songs are immune. Some endure. Some never curdle.

    Take “Fade Into You: by Mazzy Star. It drips with longing, and its beauty doesn’t spoil, even after decades. This morning, driving my twin daughters to school, I heard Victoria Bigelow’s cover. It stopped me. Time slowed. The song had lost none of its haunting gravity. It was still a velvet fog of romance and surrender.

    And then came a moment of musical resurrection. Olivia Dean’s “Touching Toes” played on the car stereo. It reminded me of Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” a song I hadn’t thought of in years. Both had that sultry, half-smile sway that drops your blood pressure and restores your faith in kindness. I let people merge in traffic. I was chill. I was enlightened.

    I’m now curating a playlist: Olivia Dean, Maria Muldaur, and any song that keeps me from flipping off fellow drivers. I call it The Chill Driver Playlist—a sonic antidote to the Curdling Effect.

  • Left Behind in a Dream: How Grunge Crushed My Jangle-Pop Heart

    Left Behind in a Dream: How Grunge Crushed My Jangle-Pop Heart

    In 1990, I was standing under the humming fluorescents of a dusty T-shirt and poster shop on Hollywood Boulevard, flipping through faded images of Morrissey, when a song hit me like a velvet brick: “Obscurity Knocks” by the Trashcan Sinatras.

    A wall of shimmering guitars spilled out of the speakers—jangly, melancholic, and so clearly descended from the holy Johnny Marr school of emotional resonance. It was as if “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” had been reincarnated in a Scottish bedroom, passed through a reverb pedal, and handed to someone just wounded enough to understand.

    That same year, I fell headfirst into The Sundays’ Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, and I’ve never quite crawled out. “You’re Not the Only One I Know” may still be my favorite song of all time—part lullaby, part confessional, sung by someone who sounded like they were trying not to wake the ghosts in the room.

    In those moments, I was sure I was witnessing the dawn of a new musical epoch—an era where introspective, literate guitar pop would inherit the emotional crown left by The Smiths. I imagined mixtapes stretching into the next decade, filled with chiming guitars and lyrics that quoted Yeats and quietly ruined you.

    But then the mood changed.

    Nirvana showed up, kicked in the door, and everyone suddenly wanted to scream into the void instead of whisper into the ache. Nevermind dropped, and within what felt like minutes, everyone moved to Seattle, grew out their hair, and baptized themselves in feedback and flannel. The dreamy pop I loved didn’t just fall out of fashion—it was buried in a landslide of Grunge.

    The prophecy had already been written in “Obscurity Knocks”—and it delivered.

    But I refused to let go. While the world air-guitared to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” I doubled down on Lloyd Cole, The Cocteau Twins, Lush, Chapterhouse, and The Go-Betweens. I curated sadness. I polished it. I stayed loyal to the bands that sounded like rain and minor chords and unspoken longing.

    Grunge? Too growly. Too aggro. Too much boot-stomping and not enough sighing into the mist.

    So what carries the flickering torch of that era for me today? What band whispers instead of roars, dreams instead of demands? One song comes to mind: “Love Yourself” by Lovejoy.

    It’s not a perfect mirror of those early ’90s tracks, but it has the same fragile DNA—the ache, the beauty, the subtle drama folded into melody. It’s as if someone reached back into my old shoebox of mixtapes, pulled out a strand of sound, and stitched it into something new.

    Call me stubborn. Call me sentimental. But I’ll be here, still thumbing through my old CDs, still worshipping at the altar of bittersweet jangle-pop, long after the amplifiers of Grunge have gone quiet.

  • Kenny G Is Not Jazz

    Kenny G Is Not Jazz

    I recently watched Listening to Kenny G, Penny Lane’s documentary on the world’s most famous saxophonist. It left me in a knot of conflicting emotions. Here’s a man, decent and diligent, who built a global empire of “smooth jazz”—a genre that, to my ears, is the musical equivalent of baby food: cloying, textureless, and aggressively inoffensive. And yet, millions worship him. The crowds at his concerts glow with unfiltered joy, their faces alight as if they’re receiving communion through the smooth, syrupy notes of his soprano sax.

    Who am I to sneer at them—or at him? I’m just a guy recovering from influenza, after all, with no musical empire to my name. But damn if I didn’t feel the urge to reach for some cultural antacid to settle my aesthetic nausea while judging him and his fans.

    And judge, I did. Kenny G, with his chirpy demeanor and ornithological cheer, seems blissfully detached from the rich, complex history of jazz that his music pretends to embody. He comes across as a musical solipsist, spinning out saccharine, Cliff Notes versions of jazz—an imitation so shallow it feels like he’s never ventured beyond the surface. His long, flowing hair and darting, eager eyes bring to mind a medieval court musician, strumming cloying pavane tunes to lull a bloated king into a post-feast stupor. Listening to Kenny G isn’t an artistic experience; it’s being spoon-fed emotional mush, a cheap confection disguised as depth. This is jazz devoid of soul, grit, or struggle—a hollow desecration of the genre’s essence, delivered with a smile so unrelenting it borders on the surreal.

    And yet, the guilt creeps in. Kenny G himself is disarmingly likable, a man seemingly immune to the venom of critics. He’s successful, and so are many of his fans, who are undoubtedly smart and decent people. Does that make their taste in music immune to critique? Hardly. Popularity is not an arbiter of artistic merit, and Kenny G’s music remains, to me, a vulgarity—saccharine and soulless, a betrayal of jazz’s improvisational brilliance. But the fact that his audience finds bliss in his syrupy melodies leaves me grappling with a larger question: Is artistic taste a bastion of universal truth, or just another playground for our pretensions?

    Am I so obsessed with Kenny G that I feel the need to join the ranks of his detractors, delivering a fiery diatribe like Pat Metheny’s infamous takedown? Not quite. But am I endlessly fascinated that something so blatantly saccharine, so clearly an abomination of music, can bring others to the brink of elation and transcendence? Absolutely. Kenny G’s music strikes me as the sonic equivalent of New Age spirituality: the kind where you pay for a weekend retreat only to be serenaded by a guru with Kenny G’s hair, who doles out self-help clichés like they’re sacred mantras. It’s the auditory version of being flattered into blissful mediocrity, a soothing appeal to one’s narcissism wrapped in smooth sax tones. And let’s face it: the appetite for such cloying bromides is insatiable—and always has been.

    I can’t help but feel a twinge of guilt for roasting Kenny G. I’m clearly afflicted with Sax Shamer’s Syndrome—the nagging unease of mocking a man whose soprano sax has brought legions of fans genuine joy, even if it makes me wince. I try to rationalize my disdain, reminding myself that I, too, have been guilty of infantile pleasures. As a child, I devoured Cap’n Crunch like it was manna from heaven, exalting its sugary crunch as the pinnacle of culinary achievement. The difference? I outgrew Cap’n Crunch. Meanwhile, Kenny G fans seem eternally devoted, treating his smooth jazz like the apotheosis of music. Does that make me a snob for pointing this out, or am I just calling it as I see it?

    The guilt gnaws at me. By deriding Kenny G, I’m effectively sneering at millions of perfectly decent, hard-working people who find solace in his musical equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup. But who am I to judge? I have my own guilty pleasures. I still scroll Instagram for black-and-white photos of 70s bodybuilders, sighing nostalgically for a golden age that was never mine. I still revel in childhood comfort foods—pigs-in-a-blanket dunked in mustard and barbecue sauce, as if I’m at a suburban soirée circa 1982.

    So really, what separates me from the Kenny G crowd? Not much. Scorning his fans isn’t a declaration of superior taste; it’s an act of hubris. We’re all creatures of indulgence, clinging to the things that soothe us. The real sin isn’t enjoying Kenny G or Cap’n Crunch—it’s forgetting that, at the end of the day, we’re all just looking for something to hum along to as we float through life.