John Tesh’s enduring legacy

The article What Our World Sounds Like Now by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet) discusses how the grinding progress of the market toward maximizing margins by delivering the minimum amount of value that satisfies—sometimes by adjusting value delivered but mostly now by adjusting people’s expectations downward of what is satisfactory—affects music and how AI-produced music is a natural progression from blandly mediocre musical blasphemers of the past—who produced “lite” versions of everything: easy listening and muzak, which have dominated our lives, and continue to do so.

“I imagine the encore medley must have been at a John Tesh concert at Disneyland on a hot August night in 1991. We see now in fact that Tesh was a great visionary, or auditionary — he was making the sounds of the future, not as the late-20th-century rivetheads imagined it, with a Front 242 CD playing on a Discman plugged into their mom’s Volvo’s cassette-deck via one of those adapters that were such a hot sales item at Radio Shack that same summer of ‘91 (don’t pretend you don’t remember, Aaron), but how it really is — where Disneyland is at the center of a pagan cult, and everything predigital is prehistoric, beyond the limit of the known past.”

Tracey Morgan eating popcornWhile on vacation in the U.S., staying with my in-laws, where WKTV News is on in the morning as we slurp our morning coffee and watch the bluejays swooping in to pick peanuts off of the bannister of the backyard terrace, there is literally a commercial on all the time in the summer of 2025, 34 years after that August concert, where Tracy Morgan smashes popcorn into his face while purportedly watching John Tesh crash a few chords of a sport-show’s intro theme on a concert grand piano and says,

“John Tesh still got it.”

Jesus wept.