Remakes...

Radio has made a drastic comeback in my life. It makes me think of when I was 12 and I would lock into some random Red Deer station with my $100 Amway CD/Tape/Radio "blaster". Only a perfectly mellifluous alignment of body, antenna and radio waves would yield a signal discernible to the human ear. Like that episode of the X-files where the alignment of the planets for 24 hrs gave two girls born on the ame day supernatural powers, which they naively use to exact revenge the boys who spurn their advances and the popular girls in their high school. I digress...
When the signal would come through my fingers would fly to the 'play/record' buttons and I would begin my mix tape of Central Alberta's Top Ten hippest songs. The tape would invariably be played and replayed over during the course of the week until the process would be repeated the following weekend. Such was the life of the pre-teen Hannanite.
Although my tastes have matured a tad since those days, occasionally I catch what's playing on Vibe, Amp and the other stations that try to make 14 to 30 somethings in Calgary feel like they are plugged into the heart of pop culture (I'd love to see how many of the artists they play could find Calgary on a map... or Canada). Is it just me, or has there be an inordinate amount of remakes lately? All you need to know how to do is add a thicker baseline and some auto-tuning to Debbie Gibson and Wham and you have a lucrative career in 2011? And it's not just the music industry that's to blame - look at the film industry. This trend has morphed from a pleasent exercise meant to pay homage to creativity into what seems to be an ever growing apathy towards ingenuity.
But who is to blame? Sadly... not the entertainment industries who are so easy to target. It's us. It's the people who lap it up like mindless Pavlovian dogs and beg for more. In the words of Edward Rooney... I weep for the future.