CHAPTER 20

PACKAGING AND THE DIMINISHING MEANING OF THE GROUP

Rock ’n’ roll—and particularly punk and underground music—has been, for the last forty years, considered to be laden with meaning. During this period, record covers, liner notes, picture sleeves, and lyric sheets were studied by the impressionable tot for long hours instead of his or her homework.

These accoutrements to the music, which were not intrinsic to the sound, but were in fact dressing designed to lure the prospective buyer, served to explain the aesthetics of the groups and their affiliated “movements” not only to the square or uninitiated world, but to the very scene of people involved. It was a reciprocation. This unintended consequence of commercial packaging resulted in subcultural movements based around groups and styles of music—until the Internet was invented by the military-industrial complex to destroy this very phenomenon.

Now that a group’s music is carried on digital files called MP3s, groups are stripped of their packaging, robbed of identity, and reduced to being a few squeals leaking from an iPod. Meaning has therefore been diminished—not due to the fact that the bands have nothing to say, but because their pageants and their costumes have been taken away. This is self-evidently a conspiracy by the Fascist elite to demolish one of the last tolerated forms of expression in the country.

Excitement that revolved around records wasn’t only due to their covers. On a “vinyl” record, the grooves become smaller as the record progresses. The frequency range changes and the amount of information per revolution is compressed, with less bass frequency available. Therefore, the end of a record sounds more shrill, more confused, more “exciting” to the listener, which enhances the experience of the record, unbeknownst to the average ear. It succeeds in creating a crescendo at the end of a song, along with the dramatic crashing of cymbals and song structure becoming unhinged as it goes into its repetitive mantra, the ad nausea “coda.”