Cracking Spines

The Future of Music

from Decider: Twin Cities

The state of music is at its lowest: Record companies and record shops are closing as they deal with decreased sales, musicians are writing their songs for commercial ring tones instead of artistic merit, and a gang of renegade motorcyclists has stolen all the world’s sheet music and is holding it hostage until David Byrne promises to quit writing really great, original tunes. What lies ahead is much worse than a merely silent future—a future of talk radio. Gah!

Apparently, even some of the talk-radio pundits find it hard to swallow. Two of them—Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, the Chicago music critics who together host Sound Opinions on public radio—will discuss the ailing music industry at a town-hall-style forum tonight at The Cedar Cultural Center, which will be moderated by 89.3 FM The Current’s Barb Abney.

The event is part of an ongoing Sound Opinions College Tour series, which may or may not be a covert operation for Kot and DeRogatis to retrieve whatever sheet music they can (and bludgeoning any renegade motorcyclists in their path). Even if it is just a discussion, it’s still worth checking out. The Sound Opinions guys are veterans of music criticism and have developed an Ebert/Siskel dynamic. Despite working for rival newspapers—DeRogatis at The Sun-Times and Kot at The Chicago Tribune—the duo has developed a friendly on-air banter that mixes journalism with punditry in a manner both informative and entertaining. (The show can be heard locally on Sundays at 6 p.m. on The Current.)

At $.99 per song, music has gotten pretty cheap these days. But talk is cheaper—this event is free and open to the public.