Music Blog

The Gline is depressed about the way supposedly creative industries are run by corporate bean-counters.

Every time I read horror stories about Art vs. Commerce I always wonder about how anyone manages to stay productive or happy in any creative industry. I would guess there are at least some pockets of creative happiness, where people are allowed to do their thing without meddling bluenosed dickery-pokery from the guys who count the money. But they’re few and far between, and they don’t last long, because eventually the pressure rolls downhill to produce, produce, produce, and everything that was once fun and casual and footloose is turned into a meatgrinder.

It makes me wish the guys who ran the studios and the record companies and whatnot were actually a little crazier — basically, guys who had lots of money and wanted to cultivate their tastes by creating a stable of artists, the way Ahmet Ertegun did with Atlantic or Berry Gordy did (for all of his flaws) with Motown, or the way Hideo Ike’ezumi does with PSF. Basically, the executive as patron, not as creative director — a role that’s rapidly vanishing as the studios eat each other alive and sponge up all the little guys in the process like so much gravy on a plate.

Instead, we have people like Rupert Murdoch running the big electric train sets, who are vulgar in every sense of the word. They’re not interested in anything except money, and not merely because they’re businessmen. There’s nothing wrong with being a businessman in the abstract, as long as it’s tempered with other things.

Surely it’s Richard Branson who’s got the big electric train set?

But why do we need the big media companies at all? In much of the music business they don’t want actual creative talent; they’re really looking for pretty faces over whom they can exercise total control. Any real talent might get in the way; they might want some of that pesky ‘creative freedom’, and that would never do. It’s all “Do what we tell you because there are hundreds of wannabees willing to take your place”. The end result is of course sausage-factory pabulum.

The significant recent trend in music (at least in Britain) is to recognise that whenever there is actually some significant creative talent involved, the record companies are no more than middlemen. More and more bands are cutting them out of the loop and selling directly to the audience, getting fans to pre-order albums rather than getting advances from cynical record companies. Without all those record executive’s cocaine habits to pay for, many bands discover it’s possible to survive economically with relatively modest sales.

Over time I think we’ll see a bigger and bigger divide between demographic-driven corporate music and an eclectic independent scene. And with a bit of luck, the corporate sector with shrink as their more discerning customers desert them.

Glen Boyd, in what’s supposed to be a review of a Nirvana DVD, considers the longer term cultural impact of the Seattle grunge scene.

Still, as a rock and roll fan, and with the added benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure I really like what rock became after Nirvana. For awhile there, you simply could not turn on a radio without hearing the numerous knock-off bands that came in Nirvana’s wake. From Bush to Silverchair, these bands were in many ways every bit as faceless as the REO Speedwagon sort of corporate rock that Nirvana sought to destroy.

Kill Rock Stars indeed.

While guys like U2 and Springsteen tarry on and continue to wave the banner of a bygone era, your choices in music these days basically boil down to flavor-of-the-minute rappers and popsters played through the delivery systems of choice you hear on your tiny MP3 and cell phone speakers. The music business itself is run by and large from the corporate cubicles of software companies.

I’m not even sure that marvels of studio craft like Dark Side Of The Moon, Pet Sounds or Born To Run are even possible anymore.

Nirvana may well be the last of the great rock and roll bands. When Nevermind shocked the world by knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the pops, I cheered just as loud as anybody.

But looking at things as they stand today, you’ve simply gotta ask yourself. Was this the revolution? There is no doubt that Nirvana succeeded in stripping a bloated rock monster back to it’s core essentials at a time when this was sorely necessary. But in doing so, was rock ultimately stripped out altogether?

Revolutions always eat their own children.

What was true of Grunge in the US was just as true of Punk in Britain two decades earlier. The standard mythology that’s repeated ad nauseam from the likes of Tony Parsons or Paul Morley is that punk destroyed bloated corporate rock and ushered in an era of unparalleled DIY creativity.

But anyone who bothers to look beyond that blatantly revisionist narrative and examines what really happened in the late 70s and early 80s will discover that most of the bloated corporate dinosaurs survived unscathed. All punk really achieved was to make musical ability and craftsmanship unfashionable, and killed off a whole generation of hard-working non-superstar artists. In just a few years the rise of the expensively-produced music video allowed the big media conglomerates to snuff out most of that DIY creativity. By the mid 80s mainstream Britain was a musical wasteland with vacuous manufactured pop and bland demographic-driven corporate rock dominating the airwaves as if punk had never happened. Sure, there was plenty of good stuff around if you took the effort to look for it, but it was all driven underground.

Punk and grunge produced both left us with some classic rock’n'roll records. But their long term legacy has at least as many negatives as positives.

These thoughts are prompted by two things. First, Karnataka touring this year with just founder Ian Jones remaining from the original band that imploded two years ago. Second, the news that Gabriel-era Genesis tribute band The Musical Box is touring at the same time as much-hyped reunion of the Phil Collinsoid version of Genesis.

When you go to see a live concert, what are you really going to see? Is it to see the and hear artists perform on stage, or to experience the music performed live? Obviously it’s a bit of both, but which is most significant for any given band?

Tribute bands get a bad rap from a lot of quarters, and with some justification. But surely sometimes a good tribute band can be better than a bunch of has-beens going through the motions, especially when there’s only one or two original members left. It depends on the band, of course. If the main appeal of the original artist was the frontman’s charisma or virtuosity, a tribute band is pretty much pointless; it could never match the original. But when the appeal was the music itself, it’s less clear. Pink Floyd were very much four anonymous guys playing wonderful music. How is four or five different anonymous guys playing the same music that much different? On the other hand, what’s the point of someone pretending to be Jimi Hendrix, no matter how good a guitar player he might be? (Disclaimer, I know of no Hendrix tribute bands on the circuit. That doesn’t mean that no such thing exists)

The Musical Box are an odd case. Unlike a generic tribute band playing a generic greatest hits set, TMB have carefully reproduced the original 1970s shows as accurately as possible with the original staging and vintage instruments (including a real live Mellotron!). The setlist is taken exactly from the historical shows, and even the dialogue between the songs is authentic. Yes, you have got a guy in a French-Canadian accent pretending to be Peter Gabriel, but having seen them live before, they do what they do very well.

As for Karnataka, I’ll approach it with an open mind. I never got to see the original band live. They were booked as support for Blue Öyster Cult about three years ago, but pulled out at the last minute because Rachel Jones suffered a throat infection and lost her voice. Then the band imploded just before the already-announced UK tour for which I was planning on seeing the Manchester date. The new Karnataka are playing Crewe in March, and I’m quite likely to be there.

Norm has posted the results of the Normblog Musicals Poll.

I notice that none of my nominations made the top 5, and only one (Tommy) managed to get into the ’10 points or more’ section. I was the only person to vote for The Return of Captain Invincible

Perhaps this just proves that I’m not really into traditional musicals.