Why is it that some fans, or worse, some reviewers, seem incapable of praising a record or a live performance purely on it’s own terms? I can understand comparisons with an artist’s previous work, that’s perfectly valid to put things in context. But exactly what do they think they achieve by bad-mouthing a band’s peers, often artists with whom they share a significant number of fans?
I just don’t get this. Especially when the band themselves appear endorse the the review.
I do wonder how much my position on the so-called “copyright wars” in the music industry is coloured by the way abuse of patent laws is wrecking the software industry, where I earn a living.
While I don’t know enough about the specifics of the recent patent lawsuit between Apple and Samsung to comment on that specific case, I know much this sort of thing can stifle innovation and competition. When you have so-called “patent trolls”, companies whose entire business is to buy up obscure patents from defunct companies, then raise money from patent lawsuits, you know something is badly broken.
There’s a strong element of land-grabbing and rent-seeking about the whole thing, and the way parts of the music industry behave has a similar smell. Not that I don’t believe creative artists are entitled for fair compensation for their work. But a lot of the draconian copyright enforcement legislation written by lobbyists employed by big media companies will have much the same effect as the broken patent laws in protecting established monopolies. It’s not in the interest of consumers, and I don’t believe it’s ultimately in the interests of the artists either.
So Dave Mustaine of Megadeth has gone off the deep end yet again, and claims the terrible recent massacres in Aurora and Milwakee weren’t the work of deranged nutters or domestic terrorists, but false-flag operations by the Obama adminstration to justify taking away everybody’s guns. And he’s already on record as being a “Birther”, spouting the brain-dead racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama is not a natural-born American and his presidency is therefore not legitimate.
Which doesn’t leave me feeling like listening to any Megadeth records any time soon.
Which in turn begs the question: How unsavoury does someone’s political views or personal behaviour have to be before their music becomes unplayable? Ted Nugent is an obvious example; I’ve never been a particular fan of his music anyway, but the fact that he’s a nastily racist, homophobic bell-end doesn’t exactly help his cause. Likewise many, many people refuse to listen to Chris Brown because of his violence against women. Again, that’s far easier to do since his actual music is by all accounts pretty terrible. And let’s not even start on Gary Glitter.
How much can you separate the art from the artist? Are there people you can’t listen to because their opinions or behaviour are well beyond the pale? Or is there music you can enjoy despite of the artist?
“Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974, it’s a scientific fact.”
– Homer Simpson
Everyone of a certain age is going to be nostalgic for the music of their youth. But even so, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that mainstream pop and rock has devolved significantly in the past 20-30 years. Can anyone honestly say that Nickleback are as good as Led Zeppelin, or Justin Beiber is in the same league as Abba?
Now a team of scientists gave gone and proved it.
The combination of turning up the volume when recording the songs mixing with fewer varieties of notes and chords makes today’s musical appetite for creativity a shrinking lot. Joan Serra, who headed up the team of researchers at the Spanish National Research Council, told Reuters that you could call this trend a “homogenization†of today’s popular music. “In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations — roughly speaking, chords plus melodies — have consistently diminished in the last 50 years.â€
To further this sameness, our timbre — the term used to explain the same note sounding different on varying instruments — palette has also shrunk substantially, giving us an even greater reduction in the variety of sounds (and instruments) we hear, according to the evaluation released in the journal Scientific Reports.
Yes, it just proves what we’ve known all along. It’s the obvious end result of the focus-group driven approach taken by the corporate end of the music industry. Anything that a substantial minority of potential buyers might not like has to be removed. Any kind of instrumental solo? Throw them out! Interesting chord progressions? Debbie won’t like it! And don’t even suggest time signatures that can’t be danced to.
Debbie, by the way, is “The Archetypical Imaginary Pop Music Consumer & Ultimate Arbiter of Musical Taste for the Entire Nation“, as described by the late, great Frank Zappa way back in 1984. And things have got far worse since then.
It’s pure sausage factory. Yes, there is an enormous variety of vastly superior and more adventurous music out there, but almost all of it is completely off the radar screen of those who take all their cues from the mass media.
I suppose you could say that those who are willing to be spoon-fed rather than seek out good music for themselves deserve the thin gruel they get. But I can help feel that we all suffer from such an impoverished mainstream cultural landscape, where almost everyone who actually cares about music has opted out of the mainstream altogether.
What do you think?
Denizens of the corporate music industry bubble don’t half get aggressive when you dare to question the amount they claim it costs to record an album.
If you’re Nightwish, you have got a quarter of a million to spend, and want choirs and a full orchestra on your album, fine. In their case, the end results were well worth it. But if you don’t have a six-figure major label advance you can still record a great-sounding record for a fraction of that. I’ve heard records this year by bands who, given the size of their audience, are most unlikely to have anything remotely like a quarter of a million to spend. Yet some of those records still sound superb.
I’m getting sick of the way the corporate astroturfers love to rubbish the cottage industry sector. It’s not just lo-fi bedroom electronica, but can produce ambitious full-blown rock albums. Perhaps they recognise this as a threat?
This is a real pet hate of mine. Bands who clearly have progressive rock as a significant element in their musical palette of influences, but try to deny they have anything to do with “prog”.
Of course, it’s up to them how they choose to market themselves, but it does artists no favours to get precious about what genre labels fans or reviewers use to describe their music. As one well-known magazine editor once said “If you don’t want to be labelled Prog, stop making music that sounds Prog”. If a sizeable proportion of a band’s audience are big fans of a specific genre, exactly what does aggressively denying being a part of that genre achieve? It’s only going to alienate a proportion of the fanbase. At worst, it gives fans who don’t care for that genre a licence to behave badly towards fellow-fans, and even to actively try to drive people away on the grounds their presence somehow “taints” the artist. I’ve seen that happen.
In this day and age any band with a diverse mixture of influences ought to be able to keep feet in multiple camps rather than restrict themselves to one self-imposed ghetto. To take a non-random example, there is no reason why sharing a bill with a prog band should prevent you playing something like a blues festival.
Denial of any connection with “prog” was something quite common from bands who formed in the mid-90s when there was still a stigma associated with the genre. Even Marillion tried to pretend they weren’t prog around that time. But in 2012, if you’re making technically complex and grown-up music, anyone who’s still in thrall to the punk-era style music journalism almost certainly isn’t part of your potential audience anyway. So you have little or nothing to lose by not pandering to them. This penny has dropped for many of those artists. Steve Wilson for example has now fully embraced the Prog. But there are still a few who have yet to get the memo.
Surely if people are arguing over whether your music is “prog” or not, then it means you’re actually doing something right? It probably means you’re doing something interesting enough to attract the attention of those who like their music more sophisticated and challenging than typical three-chord chart fodder, but neither are you making formulaic prog-by-numbers.
Since it’s Jubilee year again, people of a certain age are getting nostalgic about punk.
To hear some of them it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that a couple of years in the late 70s must have been their one moment of excitement in what subsequently became drab and unfulfilled lives.
Yes, punk produced some great rock’n'roll records, and that ought to be it’s legacy. Not the pseudo-intellectual hogwash from certain sections of the music press that went along with it. All those usual tired clichés are being trotted out yet again, and some of the historical revisionism approaches David Irving levels. The idea that punk completely invalidated prog-rock ignores inconvenient facts like Johnny Rotten being a big fan of Van der Graaf Generator, or some of The Damned liking Pink Floyd. Isn’t there something inherently fascistic about anything that tries to define itself purely by what it hates?
I’ve heard one person on Twitter respond to the question of why you can’t listen to both prog and punk with the patronising “If it has to be explained, you just don’t get it”. These people give every impression that they, like the revisionist punk-era music journalists, don’t actually like music for music’s sake. It’s all about socio-political posturing, tribal identity, image and attitude.
If punk was a reaction to anything, surely it was the parlous state top-40 pop in the second half of the 70s after glam-rock had run out of steam. Unlike Pink Floyd or King Crimson, whose music remains influential to this day, enjoyed by people who weren’t even born in the 1970s, the dross that filled the charts back then hasn’t stood the test of time, full of names nobody can remember thirty years later.
So, can we put the oft-repeated lie that “Punk was necessary to save the world from prog-rock” into the dustbin of history where it belongs, and just appreciate the music itself for what it is?
Turning life’s lemons into lemonade is part of a songwriter’s job description.
If you’re aggrieved about something, the last thing you should do is start washing dirty linen in public on social networks or on blogs. That does nothing but reflect badly on you, and risks dragging your fans into a dispute they didn’t ask to be part of. If you really can’t stay silent, do what every other musician I know has done. Go and and write a song about it.
A link to a press release for a new band it might be better not to name turned up in my Twitter feed.
A band who struck a chord with each other and found a common ground in the love they have for the same music – bands with identities and guitars!
Wow! Guitars! Whatever will they think of next? Will they actually learn to play them?
The guys are armed with a strong identity and craft for song writing. They brim with a confidence not seen since the Britpop days with songs that reach to grab you from the intro and don’t let you go till the last note is viciously struck in a punk vein.
What can I say? With a press release as clichéd as that, can we assume the music is equally formulaic? And it’s the second time you’re used the word “identity” too. Does this perhaps imply an emphasis on style at the expense of content?
Lyrically they offer an insight into the social commentary and satire of contemporary suburban British life, with choruses to get you singing along and po-going the night away to your hearts content.
Let me guess. Songs about fights outside kebab shops on a Friday night. I bet nobody’s done that before…
They put on a captivating live show and are often described as a musical blend of Blur, Bloc Party and Wire. A juggernaut of a sound!
As a metal fan, I have trouble using the word “juggernaut” when it’s abundantly clear by now that we’re talking three-chord indie. Other vehicle descriptors might be more appropriate. How about “moped”?
I did listen to their promo on YouTube. Well, about 45 seconds of it, which was as much as I could stomach. It was every bit as bad as I feared; tedious, tuneless landfill indie-by-numbers. The breathless Nathan Barley style PR guff had inadvertently described it very well, but just not the way the author had intended.
People accuse progressive rock of being a conservative and backward-looking genre, and a lot of it is probably guilty as changed. But in my mind 90s Britpop was a far worse offender with its insular parochialism and extremely limited palette of musical influences. Much of it came over as a pastiche of the same second-division guitar pop that represented the “stagnant musical forms” Steve Hackett famously wanted to get away from back in 1970, combined with a bit of watered-down punk shorn of the visceral energy that was really the whole point of punk.
It was bad enough in the 1990s. Making the same sort of music in 2012 is a pastiche of a pastiche. That ship has not so much already sailed as been consigned to the breaker’s yard.
So, where does the news that Adele’s “21″ has now outsold Pink Floyd’s legendary “Dark Side of the Moon” leave the idea that downloading is killing music?
It’s increasingly looking like a big lie.
While I have no figures in front of me (and distrust any numbers quoted by Big Music), there is a lot of evidence that overall music sales aren’t declining at all. What has really been happening is that the major labels have been losing market share. During the boom years they made huge profits selling overpriced CDs, and eventually grew lazy and complacent. Too much of the music they released was formulaic cookie-cutter “product” that took few risks, aimed at people who buy all their music in supermarkets, and by controlling access to the mass media they prevented anything else from being heard. The coming of broadband internet radically changed the way people discovered and consumed music, and the majors were very slow in adapting their business models to take advantage of new methods of distribution. The lost out to those that did, and the likes of iTunes ate their lunch.
Rather than develop newer business models, they screamed “piracy!” and lobbied corrupt politicians to pass draconian protectionist legislation.
I’m now starting to believe that laws like America’s Stop Internet Piracy Act and Britain’s Digital Economy Act were never really about “piracy” at all. The way such laws have the potential to cripple parts of the net used by independent musicians to promote and distributed their work wasn’t just an unfortunate side effect, it was the whole point. “Piracy” was never more than a smokescreen, a lie spun to people like Peter Mandelson.
Just think about it. Which of these two activities hurts the major labels more?
I rest my case