The L.A. (after recently leaving San Fran) electro-metal quirkmasters Hard Place open up their latest self-titled release with the song demographic, singing in prog-geek syncopation, “Music is a product and we need a way to sell it / Where’s the information on our consumer target? / Market domination is the only way to profit.”

This could easily be Clear Channel Entertainment’s theme song. The biggest corporate supervillain in the music industry (which is a pretty massive feat in itself!) is almost single-handedly homogenizing the radio and music landscape. They own more than 1,200 radio stations, dominating 60 percent of the rock programming. They have a hold in all but two of the 250 top radio markets. But this monopoly is backed by big guns.

Company execs have donated $42,000 to Bush’s re-election campaign. Clear Channel stations have also been criticized as of late for sponsoring a multitude of pro-war rallies, under the alter ego Rally for America. And riding the crest of the wave of post-Janet nipple-phobia, the staunchly anti-Bush Howard Stern Show was dropped from six major Clear Channel stations. Stern has yelled about “McCarthyism,” but the nation should be more worried about more Huxleyan possibilities, where art could be suppressed by an impossible bombast of trite and true entertainment crap.

Another major player in the kill-expression-dead campaign is the Secretary of State’s son, Michael Powell, the charmingly child-like evil mastermind and kingpin of the Federal Communications Commission. His genius resides in his plans for world domination not for himself, but for his corporate counterparts. His plans (supposedly in tandem with the hopes and desires of the other two Republicans heading the FCC — there are also two Democrats that oppose this majority) call for fewer restrictions on media ownership. Powell and his minions want to let major media companies own an even larger percentage of media outlets. This would mean the average Joe would be getting his music, news, sports and whatever else one could want from one or two sources. These media companies’ reliance upon “expert sources” skews (intentionally or unintentionally) the news and viewpoints that a large majority of the country uses as its only news source.

I quoted a figure in a journalism paper recently that found 90 percent of all Fox News viewers (these were people who relied upon the Fox Network singularly, as their only source of news) were misinformed about at least one of three major issues concerning President Bush and the war in Iraq. The misinformation mainly regarded the reasoning behind the involvement, and a significant portion of these people thought we had found “weapons of mass destruction” (which we didn’t).

The main question is why let anyone decide what you should be listening to? The radio sucks enough as it is and it’s the most neglected form of media anyway. Listening to hard-rock radio (which is the only kind of rock radio station not pumped out by a college or playing something called “Adult Contemporary” or some other euphemism for monstrosity of suck) sounds more like listening to a bunch of high-school sophomores prank call people while listening to Godsmack. It is not entertaining. Going underground will, however, save your soul, and hopefully underground radio might take off like it did in England (where the BBC stifled the life out of “mainstream” art with every chance it got). But even in England the mainstream eventually engulfed the underground and hired up all of its once-illegal talent.

So what else is there to do to find decent tunes in a cutthroat capitalist country? Go super-duper illegal and download the music for free. Oh, but this will get you sued into oblivion, even after a thorough Harvard study concluded (pretty convincingly) that record sales have had no correlation with illegal music downloading. If music downloading was actually affecting record sales (which have been down recently and are now finally back on the rise), then increased downloading would herald fewer CD sales and vice versa. The study found no correlation, and to keep up their stellar image, the RIAA quickly denounced the study’s findings, opting to sue more of its customers. And empty rhetoric is filling the corporate airwaves (like Korn’s “Y’all Want a Single”), like so many President Reagans-misunderstanding-Bruce Springsteen songs. It’s an ironic deal where an artist thinks that smashing a CD (of which he/she has sold millions through big corporations) will make kids aware of a corrupt industry. Fat chance.

Soon enough, the RIAA, the FCC and Clear Channel will find themselves knee deep in what they thought was a generation of inactive slacker-types. Our reputation is preceding us, and big-box corporate censors (like the people who decide what does and doesn’t get sold to kids at Wal-mart and Target) and the Secretary of State’s offspring assume that we kids, raised on Kurt Cobain and New Kids on the Block, are all bubblegum and zero ass-kicking. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to prove them wrong.