Vol. I No. 20

The reader may question my assertion that in the era of digital audio, music is dead.

Popular music is always more or less a trend, a movement, a style, a feeling, an attitude. If the most impassioned and inspired artists suddenly lose that passion and inspiration, music is dead not only for them, but for their fans and their fellow artists who emulated them.

I refer first to Talking Heads in this context because in their case the contrast between their albums skirting the onset of the digital audio era is so great that you have the sense that they were aware of the significance of this change.

The group that called itself Digital Underground whose song Humpty Dance became a hit at that time seems also to have understood to some degree the significance of the new technology.

They presumably felt that the new technology did not lend itself to serious musical art, and instead saw how by creating very gimmicky music with clownish and obscene aspects they could at least profit from the new paradigm.

You don't have to agree with the left-wing politics of the Clash to see and hear the intensity of this band from their formation through 1982 or so. In 1983 the band collapsed like a tire blowing out on the interstate. Mick Jones was kicked out of the band. Joe Strummer's father died. There is a picture of the new-edition Clash circa 1985 playing unamplified instruments on the street.