Music Blog

The Observer Music Magazine’s top Twenty Tracks of 2008 just makes me want to beat my head against the table. They claim to cover everything “From Abba to Zappa”, but the reality is they’re hopelessly biased towards ‘Landfill indie’ and ‘ASDA-Pop’. Just read their list and weep. And watch it get shredded in the comments.

A few commentators tried to defend the list, with comments like this.

..shock horror mainly contains tracks that most people..the ones with lives, will actually have heard.

So to him, ‘having a life’ equates to spending your time listening to daytime Radio 1. Bah!

While I don’t expect them to acknowledge the existence of the independently-released prog-rock releases that have defined my year, I pointed out that bands like Metallica, AC/DC and even Guns’n'Roses have all released critically-acclaimed and massively-selling albums this year, yet are conspicuous by their absence on a list which still finds space for the lumpen indie-rock of Oasis. You really have to have been living under a rock not to have heard of those bands. Yet they’re not even on OMM’s radar screen.

Another commentator wondered what age group this list is aimed at. But I don’t think there’s anything like the generation gap in music that existed 20 or 30 years ago – when I find myself liking some of the same bands as my 13-year old niece, the generation gap is as good as dead, at least as far as music is concerned.

While there’s always going to be acts heavily marketed to a particular generation (usually those too young to have developed a musical taste of their own), any band with a degree of musical substance is going to have cross-generational appeal nowadays. You can tell by the mix of ages you see at gigs by bands like Opeth or Porcupine Tree; they appeal to both grizzled 40-something rockers and emo teens in significant numbers. I’ve even seen teenagers at a Uriah Heep gig this year!

Anyway, I think the target audience of this list is people who neither know nor care about music, but want to know the right names to drop at dinner parties in order to appear cool and sophisticated. And people like that probably get the music they deserve.

My own top 20 (or more probably top ten) list will appear on this blog in due course.

There have been threads on various forums about Christmas music, and what are people’s favourites.

As an unrepentant prog-rock fan, I have a definite soft spot for Greg Lake’s “I Believe in Father Christmas”. I don’t think it’s as dark and depressing as some people make it out to be; the ultimate message is positive; we only get out of Christmas (or anything else) what we’re prepared to put in. Think of it as an antidote to the over-sentimental or crassly commercial.

A lot of my favourite are traditional carols.

• Silent Night, especially sung in five-part harmony.
• O Come All Ye Faithful, although you’ve got to do it properly and have somebody singing the descants for the “Sing Choirs of Angels” verse. Still think it works best with just four verses – just because a lot of hymnbooks print two extra verses doesn’t mean you have to sing them.
• Hark the Herald Angels Sing – when you have words by Charles Wesley and music by Felix Mendlesson, you really can’t go wrong.

But for every Christmas gem, there’s some Christmas cheese which has passed it’s sell-by date. Now I’m going to risk coming over like a grumpy old man, and cast a vote against any of this lot:

• John Lennon’s “Merry Xmas (War is Over)” – Tiresome hippy platitudes set to an annoyingly twee tune. How is it that Lennon gets a free pass with sentimental mush like this when you only have to mention Paul McCartney’s name and everyone starts shouting “Frog Chorus?”
• Away in a Manger – go look up the Monophysite Heresy.
• The Little Drummer Boy. This one is just plain annoying. There’s something about the par-ap-a-pum-pum that just drives me up the wall.
• That Slade song. OK, it was great fun in 1973, but it’s been played to death, and has suffered badly from over-exposure.

So what are your favourites?

Interesting interview with Bethany Klein of the University of Leeds on the future of the music business.

Klein: (Another sigh.) It’s a really difficult question because I guess I just don’t really care. I mean you’re right to say they employ thousands of people, but I think the music industry as it’s structured might be better off to raze it and start all over again and think about completely different systems of production and distribution, in which those thousands of people can still participate but in a slightly different way. It’s hard for me to think about how to fix an industry that, long before piracy, long before the digital revolution, was already failing in a lot of ways, in terms of cultural explorations.

M-M: How, exactly, were labels falling short?

Klein: Major labels function with the assumption that 90 percent of artists they sign are going to fail — that should have been a red flag for everybody. I mean that’s a bizarre business model in any arena. But particularly in the cultural arena, the idea that the system through which culture is transmitted is dictated entirely by profit should concern us, because that’s going to narrow the types of culture that are transmitted. And then, on top of that, the alternative venues of distribution are stuck in the shadows of these major labels. So it’s not like there’s a viable alternative, necessarily, for artists who don’t fit into this very narrow range that can become the 10 percent that are profitable and popular.

More or less what I’ve been saying for years – just about all the music I love falls in the 90% that the major record companies class as “failure”. The majors have been run by accountants for years; their idea of a ‘success’ has devolved into talent show contestants singing covers. The sooner they’re consigned to the dustbin of history the better.

What I don’t think we’ll see is a ‘one-size fits all’ business model for all kinds of music. We’ll see more artists outside of the sausage-factory market following the pre-order model pioneered by Marillion. We’ll certainly see some bands deciding to give their recordings away for free, making their money on touring. And some business models will fail.

As for the record company’s role as ‘gatekeepers’:

MySpace is basically music being distributed filter-free; well, what that means is that you get a million bands that are kind of awful and a few gems in there. But it’s a lot of work for consumers, and I’m not sure it’s more productive, or even more liberating, than other models like independent labels that clearly have a type of music they’re going to promote or a fanzine culture that also starts to filter things for you. Do people write fanzines anymore? I don’t know; I guess they blog. Maybe that’s the problem with the many-to-many communication style of the Internet — it becomes more difficult to find gatekeepers or filters you find trustworthy.

I think the many-to-many communication style is certainly no worse than the top-down model of the old music biz. Yes, it many be a lot of work to find bloggers who’s views you find trustworthy, but is really no better than the agenda-driven herd-instinct groupthink of the mainstream music press?

This is a bit of a rant, I’m afraid.

Why is the mainstream media so biased against rock? The mainstream press and television seems only seems to acknowledge the existence of two genres of popular music: r’n'b-derived production-line pop masterminded by the likes of Simon Cowell, and largely tuneless ‘indie’ made by people who can’t sing or play, which is presented as the so-called intelligent alternative. This is despite the fact that unfashionable melodic rock acts frequently outsell many of the media darlings of the month.

Look at BBC2′s Later With Jools Holland. This is supposed to showcase the sort of bands who excel at playing live. But I’ve been to 70+ gigs in the last 3 years, while I don’t expect the BBC to cater solely to my taste, not one of the bands I’ve gone to see are bands I could even imagine appearing on the show. Week after week it’s yet more bands with four chords and stupid haircuts all of which sound the same. Put a rock band like The Reasoning or Mostly Autumn or Porcupine Tree on that show and they’d blow that rubbish away. The one band I have seen at a festival who have appeared on the show was Andy Fairweather Low, in the ‘token 60s has-been slot’. And he was the most tediously dull act I’ve seen for years.

And then there’s Metro, the dreadful free newspaper distributed at railway stations in major cities. Every issue has a ‘what’s on’ guide for the city in which they’re distributed. And their featured gigs are always selected by the same person that chooses acts for Later. For example, on Tuesday night, Extreme were playing Manchester Academy 1, Uriah Heep was playing the smaller Academy 2 (the gig I went to), and Fish was playing just up the road at the Albert Hall in Bolton.

So what did Metro list as their featured gigs?

You’ve guessed it – the two obscure indie/’alternative’ bands playing in the smaller Academy 3 and Club Academy. That’s not just a carefully chosen example – they never feature any gigs I go to, whether it’s Porcupine Tree or Marillion playing Academy 1 or even Journey playing the Apollo. I’d love to be wrong, but I bet they won’t mention Mostly Autumn in February either.

The second half of November goes gig-mad, with five gigs in fifteen days.

Tomorrow night it’s Marillion at Manchester Academy 1. I’ve had their new double album “Happiness is the Road” on almost continuous play for the past three weeks; it blows away the slightly disappointing “Somewhere Else”, and may even ending up topping “Marbles”. So I can’t wait to hear a big chunk of it live. I can’t think of the last time I’ve looked forward to a gig this much.

Then two days later I travel down to London to see Fish, supported by none other than The Reasoning. He’s announced he’s taking an extended break from touring after this UK leg, so this is the last chance to see him for a while. Last year’s Manchester gig was an absolute barnstormer, and I have high hopes for this one. And as you should know from reading this blog, The Reasoning rock.

And two days after that it’s back to Manchester again for the mighty Uriah Heep, well into their fourth decade on the road. It’s a long time since I’ve seen the Heep. They’ve come up with their first album for almost a decade, and it’s a good one.

Five days later it’s Manchester Academy again for a night of cookie-monster death metal from Sweden’s Opeth.   The latest album “Watershed”, mixing swirling metal guitars with mellotrons is a candidate for album of the year.  I last saw them in 2006, and they can indeed reproduce all that complexity live.

And another five days after than, what better way to end a sequence of gigs that Mostly Autumn at the Grand Opera House in York?