The University of Idaho Argonaut

Being employed at a music store is hard work. In fact, it is so hard sometimes that schoolwork is affected as well as the budget for paying bills, purchasing new music and feeding yourself. Hazards come up every day when working anywhere.

Eavesdropping is probably one of the best tools one can pick up while working in a retail establishment, but it can also be detrimental to one’s sanity. Unfortunately, on a Thursday afternoon earlier this fall, it was the last skill that I wanted in my customer service repertoire. When I heard one young woman browsing through the music section ask her friend, “Who’s Bob Marley?” the CDs being shelved nearly fell over.

Bob Marley, for those who do not know, was a musical revolutionary who during the 1960s and 70s promoted himself, his band the Wailers and the Rastafarian movement throughout the world singing about peace, love and the pursuit of happiness. Furthermore, his album Legend, which was released posthumously is, and may continue to be, the highest selling reggae album with ten million copies sold — certifying itself 10 times platinum — better known as diamond status ­— according to Stylus Magazine.

In addition to not knowing whom Bob Marley was, the majority of the youth polled did not know who Bob Dylan was either. Furthermore Steppenwolf, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Cream also made the list of the unknown with the younger generations.

Looking at the music these youths are listening to is enough to make some people’s skin crawl. Ever wondered why the music the youth eat up now makes a lot of people want to puke? The tolerance for groups like BrokeNCYDE and Fall Out Boy are pretty low these days — well there is a reason for that.

When music was made in the past, audiophiles were used. Now, with vinyl records back on the forefront, listeners are getting the chance to hear High Fidelity again, but for almost the entire decade of the ‘90s it was lost.

In the past music was more dynamic and delivered through equipment that was designed to provide listeners with faithful sound reproduction. Today, music listened to is dynamically flat and delivered to the masses through digitally compressed MP3s via tiny headphones or computer speakers. The best sound system the average young person owns is probably in their car and even then the audio fidelity is most likely not the best — even if the stereo is top of the line. The question still remains though: why does this make the music sound horrible and who is to blame for it?

Some could say music engineers have been in “the loudness war” for quite some time. Engineers diminish the dynamic range with a compression technique which essentially destroys the range between the loudest and softest sounds of a music piece commonly called “mastering hot,” and the result is the reduction of the dynamic range but it also causes intense distortion. Typically, this is done only because the person making the music wanted it. Therefore, for example, if Owl City’s synthesizers did not sound the greatest they would just master it to make it sound better, thus producing a studio album that could not be produced during a live show.

Unfortunately, this is what is happening with all the music produced these days. We do not get the great quality of music once produced by the likes of Marley, Dylan and others because artists are working on making music quickly and for as cheap as possible in order to turn a quick profit. It seems as if a lot of great music is hard to come by now due to this process, and the youth of the world is wasted on pop and screamo hip-hop music. Pretty soon kids are going to be saying, “Who’s Kurt Cobain and Nirvana?”