When can Ashley Parker Angel and Saving Jane make it to #1?

Well, when their songs are on newest edition of the NOW: That's What I Call Music compilation, of course. The 22nd volume of our favorite technological-aged-lollipop-tool for pedophiles peaked at number one on the Billboard 200 and is resting easy at number two in its third week.

The saddest part in all of this is that if Angel and Jane made it to #1 it wouldn't thrust any of us into shock. There are a lot of implications that arise from NOW's uber-popularity, and we heard them all before. Obviously, the MP3 revolution is the most pronounced factor in this sad state. I don't try to convince myself that music is as vital to the rest of the country as it is with me. I like albums, and listening to the whole thing. Straight through! But it would be clownish of me to pretend that most people didn't just want to buy an album for their new favorite song of the month. You know, the CD that soon after gathers dust on their undulating Ikea rack. The MP3 has now opened up the opportunity to scrap their CD-as-furniture stance and get that cherry-wood bookshelf they always wanted to store their absent-of-the-jacket-first-editions of James Patterson and Danielle Steel novels that they "haven't gotten around to reading yet".

To be honest with you, I could care less. It's only hurting the record companies, and who really cares about them? Right? Maybe? Music listeners have always been sub-categorized by the avid music listener and the casual one. The casual one just so happens to be the more common one, as well. So maybe NOW aint so bad if it just reflects the popular taste in music. For all of you senseless haters, you might remember a certain little band called Radiohead who ended up on the first NOW compilation. It was Karma Police, if you're interested. Anyway, NOW don't see it so much as an ignitor as just a mirror for the state of artificial pop songs as Xeroxed copies of each other.

In any case, though, I sneeze at the record exec who doesn't take a chance on something different and then whines about how record sales go down. No matter what, as long as the MP3 stays alive, sales will remain low. We need a much more attractive package with the album. If people cared about every song on a record and every word in the liner notes, perhaps more people would buy records. Most of the artists who make it to the top of the chart these days feed into this cycle of single-frenzy, but it's difficult to say whether or not this is engineered to give into most people's instinctual desire for the one hit song or if its a problem that can be erradicated by popularizing a great album instead of a song that happens to be on a smegma-smelling album.


And instead of people like your humble commentator complaining so much, maybe we need to blame ourselves as a part of the music community. I love experimental music, blah blah blah, but couldn't some of us also make irresistable pop songs that could actually carry with it some respectable songwriting? Who knows, though? Maybe no matter what, that money-sweating record exec would ignore it because he'd be taking too much a risk.

All I want to know is, where's our Beatles!? Time will tell, I guess.