Tokio Hotel
Moonsoon

This is not intended to be a review of the Tokio Hotel album. I want to start from the Tokio Hotel phenomenon to introduce a general discussion on how pop music is being configured, intended as a product diffusely broadcast, in this decade and try to find a common thread, providing an interpretation of what is happening in the musical field.

A few days ago, I came across a magazine that included an interview with Tokio Hotel, the group that recently seems to have launched a real craze as far as the teen generation is concerned (and apparently brought home a lot of money) by selling something like 3 million copies.

3 million copies.

In short, this German group, although selling a decidedly inferior product, has established itself in the market, at least as far as the European one is concerned, with a speed and ease that are nothing short of incredible. Or at least this is the first time I've witnessed such a phenomenon as I am quite young.

The credit (or the blame) for all this is the work of producers who were perceptive in proposing a product that knew how to amalgamate the feelings of this generation of teenagers and synthesize it in the form of a musical group. Let's start with the look. If you notice, the group does not present a heterogeneous style but each element represents a category of music consumers so that fans can identify with at least one of them.

The singer is the most carefully crafted character since he appears the most, and his look has been given a decidedly emo cut: sexual ambiguity, obsessive attention to appearance, and from what he says in interviews, also a more sensitive psychological character compared to the others, meaning he claims to believe in soulmates and various other trite ideas. The twin who plays the role of the guitarist (coincidentally) is characterized by a rock look and in interviews, he plays the fool and claims to have many flings.

The bassist and the guitarist instead represent other types of fans, etc. Everyone considers teenagers, the frenzied girls who swoon over these commercial music idols, to be fools (or at least immature people). Whether they are Finley, Tokio Hotel, or the next meteoric band. But the question one should ask is not so much: "what the heck is on these teenagers’ minds to follow these crappy groups?"

Instead, it's more like: "What does it feel like to be a teenager today and not have a shred of your own musical culture to identify with?" I mean, every decade has had more or less a new phenomenon in which teenagers could identify and create their own culture: obviously leaving aside the '70s which were decisive, but just think of the '80s with metal, punk, the '90s with grunge, rap, and even dance, the rave people, etc.

And the "2000s '10s"? What real cultural movement can they boast? Some of you will say indie music... but it is more an approach related to the music business than a real musical phenomenon... meaning a musical phenomenon as a cultural movement related to music that originates underground and only after spreading on a large scale is embraced by the market...

The last was hip hop, but even this has now been completely commercialized, in Italy just recently. In short, it's understandable that spoon-feeding crap to today's teenagers is very easy... just provide them with something to identify with.

Perhaps it is also the climate of these times that influences... people lately have more concrete concerns (finding a job, paying off a mortgage, etc.) so adolescents perceive the future as a great unknown and desperately seek a reference model.

And non-commercial bands? None are proposing a completely new genre; I've heard of crossover, a bunch of stuff, even progressive-punk, but they're all blends of already existing genres, apart from Radiohead and very few others, there are no significant innovations, at least in rock. And in turn, most of today's groups are too busy trying to survive by playing and thus being bought, tailored an image, and resold, making it difficult for us to take them just as they appear.

Transparency has become rare.

We can only wait for a new drug to break through changing the perception among young people, or for some of them to realize that it is now useless to take both the exemplars of yesterday and today's fakes as points of reference and start not just to walk on their own legs, but use them to jump over this invisible wall that is banality.