The Truth About Popular Music

[jhar26]

[moe]

Great piece! This stated clearly, although it was perhaps a bit melodramatic, my various scattered instinctual feelings regarding what the hell is going on with popular music.  The "four producer" aspect really makes sense.  There is one thing I didn't know:  I always thought that autotune could be used in real time-apparently this isn't true.  Loved seeing Frank Zappa and wholeheartedly agree that the sixties weren't that great-the seventies were a different story-I think a lot of excellent music coalesced around that time.  I liked the analogy to junk food and conditioning to the lowest common denominator.  I would like to add, however, that what was missed was the effect of the medium on the message. I-pods, MP3 players and all such brethren,  bear some responsibility for degrading tastes. Music is consumed, as a wise lady pointed out in a bit of a different context, in elevators and lavatories. Paradoxically this ease of access has changed the enjoyment of music from the main show to the side show and the quality of the product, I believe, belies this downgrading.  Finally I would like to point out that, as people in the forum know, there is good new music out there but you really have to search because you sure as hell ain't going to hear it on popular radio.

[jhar26]

I think that the 1960's WERE great actually, but I agree with everything else that's being said here.

[moe]

Feb 26, 2016 14:59:25 GMT -5 jhar26 said:

I think that the 1960's WERE great actually, but I agree with everything else that's being said here.

Jahr, you're right and I'll back-off my assertion some and say musically and culturally the sixties were a little bit schizophrenic.  The early part was a continuation of the fifties, then in '64 or so the Beatles and the British invasion hit but even that consisted of a lot of recycled R&B that (white) Americans ignored originally because it was "race music"  In the later sixties things really took off (about the time the Vietnam war also took off) again led by the Beatles and other innovative folks.  But I still think the whole thing hit its peak in the seventies and began to decline in the eighties with the advent of disco.

[Deleted]

I had to listen to the whole rant, as painful as it was, because it was so true...

[erik]

I for one can say that the 1960s and the 1970s were great decades for music (and I also can't and won't say bad things about disco). But the advent in 1981 of MTV, where the emphasis became increasingly about the image and the flash, and progressively less about the substance, began the long, slow decline to where we stand now. While there have been some standout moments, there have been far too few of them (IMHO).

And in terms of finding new music, yes, you do have to get it from word of mouth from those of us on this forum and/or do your own research on the Internet. It was cescpa, I believe, who alerted both Robert and myself to Tift Merritt back in 2002; and since then, Robert has touted Regina Spektor, while I have done likewise for Caitlin Rose and Lindi Ortega. Those are the big examples. But it's true that listening to the radio isn't going to do it like it once did. Those days are probably over for good (IMHO).

[goldie]

Not so sure I agree with everything here. For one thing in the 1960's we had a similar thing with the Wrecking Crew basically making everyone's (almost) recording hits for them as those kids couldn't play worth a crap. It wasn't until the 70's when you had band members able to play their own music and sound like the Wrecking Crew themselves where music stepped up a notch. Things did start getting crappy in the 80's but there was still a lot of variation and originality. The 90's seemed to be more like the 70's but something happened after 2000 to homogenize music into an "out souling" competition which is just awful. Mariah Carey tried to outsoul the queen Aretha and those that followed stood on Mariah's shoulders going extreme.  TV music shows made it worse, even more exaggerated. Somewhere along the line just singing a song "straight, clear and with a built in emotion" like Linda Ronstadt stopped. And the subtle souling of say an Eva Cassidy died with Eva Cassidy.  I do however think there are islands of great music out there you just have to look for it and some individual songs by the artists this guy is crapping on aren't all that bad either.  I think we are just inundated by technology and don't appreciate or even know how nice silence can be.

[erik]

Quote by Goldie:

For one thing in the 1960's we had a similar thing with the Wrecking Crew basically making everyone's (almost) recording hits for them as those kids couldn't play worth a crap. It wasn't until the 70's when you had band members able to play their own music and sound like the Wrecking Crew themselves where music stepped up a notch.

Well, you have to remember that the Wrecking Crew was on the imprint of at least half of all the pop and rock recordings made here in Los Angeles between 1960 and 1975, and that they worked with some pretty big heavyweights, including the Beach Boys (and Glen Campbell, then a member of the Wrecking Crew, even subbed for Brian Wilson in late 1964 and early 1965) and, whenever he was in town, The King (especially for the man's 1968 NBC Special). And recently, Wrecking Crew member Don Randi recounted his career in the book You've Heard These Hands, where, in one section, he recalls doing the session with Linda and the Stone Poneys at the Capitol Records studios that yielded Linda's career-establishing hit "Different Drum".

If we only had that kind of studio expertise these days.....

[jhar26]

Feb 26, 2016 19:58:57 GMT -5 moe said:

Feb 26, 2016 14:59:25 GMT -5 jhar26 said:

I think that the 1960's WERE great actually, but I agree with everything else that's being said here.

Jahr, you're right and I'll back-off my assertion some and say musically and culturally the sixties were a little bit schizophrenic.  The early part was a continuation of the fifties, then in '64 or so the Beatles and the British invasion hit but even that consisted of a lot of recycled R&B that (white) Americans ignored originally because it was "race music"  In the later sixties things really took off (about the time the Vietnam war also took off) again led by the Beatles and other innovative folks.  But I still think the whole thing hit its peak in the seventies and began to decline in the eighties with the advent of disco.

I would trade one year (ANY year) of music from the 60's or 70's for an entire decade of what we got from the mid-80's onwards.

[jhar26]

Feb 26, 2016 21:58:39 GMT -5 goldie said:

Not so sure I agree with everything here. For one thing in the 1960's we had a similar thing with the Wrecking Crew basically making everyone's (almost) recording hits for them as those kids couldn't play worth a crap. It wasn't until the 70's when you had band members able to play their own music and sound like the Wrecking Crew themselves where music stepped up a notch. Things did start getting crappy in the 80's but there was still a lot of variation and originality. The 90's seemed to be more like the 70's but something happened after 2000 to homogenize music into an "out souling" competition which is just awful. Mariah Carey tried to outsoul the queen Aretha and those that followed stood on Mariah's shoulders going extreme.  TV music shows made it worse, even more exaggerated. Somewhere along the line just singing a song "straight, clear and with a built in emotion" like Linda Ronstadt stopped. And the subtle souling of say an Eva Cassidy died with Eva Cassidy.  I do however think there are islands of great music out there you just have to look for it and some individual songs by the artists this guy is crapping on aren't all that bad either.  I think we are just inundated by technology and don't appreciate or even know how nice silence can be.

Yes, but here's a short summation of what the 1960's had to offer:
-Jazz continued it's staggering 1950's peak with classic hard bop and post bop recordings from the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, Duke Ellington and many others.
-Vocal jazz and traditional pop also continued it's artistic peak for at least the first half of that decade with people like Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney and many others.
-The 1960's gave us the folk revival with people like Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary, Judy Collins and of course the incredible Bob Dylan and the early Joni Mitchell. Later on this morphed into folk rock under the leadership of (again) Dylan and the Byrds.
-The 1960's introduced the blues in a big way to a white audience thanks to the Brits (Stones, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Yardbirds, etc) as a result of which many of the old black blues guys got the opportunity to record proper albums under much more professional conditions than before.
-Phil Spector!
-SOUL. Virtually EVERY Motown single was a classic. Although this (and the Spector stuff) was also music mostly produced by the same people, the difference with the Babyface's of the world is that these guys were like Mozart and Beethoven in comparison.
-SOUL. Stax, Atantic! Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, the incredible Aretha Franklin and many others! Even the flops of these labels are unmentionably superior to any hits we get today.
-The birth of funk with James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone.
The British invasion. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, Dusty Springfield!!!!!!!!!
-The hippie/psychedelic rock movement. Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors!

Some of these categories produced more great music on their own than all the music combined of any decade from the mid1980's put together imo.

[Belle]

I blame MTV. It's all about model looks, although it always was, but not to the extent it is now. Talent is just a side-note.

Music has gone the way of everything else in this country. The populous has been told what it likes, and it's being shipped to them in mass-produced quantities. There is not much art to it, now that it has been bastardized by Capitalism.

But I have been a fan of Coldplay since the beginning. So I guess I'm a wanker on some level too!

[moe]

Feb 26, 2016 21:58:39 GMT -5 goldie said:

Not so sure I agree with everything here. For one thing in the 1960's we had a similar thing with the Wrecking Crew basically making everyone's (almost) recording hits for them as those kids couldn't play worth a crap. It wasn't until the 70's when you had band members able to play their own music and sound like the Wrecking Crew themselves where music stepped up a notch. Things did start getting crappy in the 80's but there was still a lot of variation and originality. The 90's seemed to be more like the 70's but something happened after 2000 to homogenize music into an "out souling" competition which is just awful. Mariah Carey tried to outsoul the queen Aretha and those that followed stood on Mariah's shoulders going extreme.  TV music shows made it worse, even more exaggerated. Somewhere along the line just singing a song "straight, clear and with a built in emotion" like Linda Ronstadt stopped. And the subtle souling of say an Eva Cassidy died with Eva Cassidy.  I do however think there are islands of great music out there you just have to look for it and some individual songs by the artists this guy is crapping on aren't all that bad either.  I think we are just inundated by technology and don't appreciate or even know how nice silence can be.

I don't think the wrecking crew was as bad as what was described in the video.  Yes they played on a lot of recordings as Goldie described mostly because the true band members couldn't play.  However they were more like hired guns tasked to implement the vision of the artist or producer.  That was one of the things that was remarkable about the crew-they could absorb the wishes of the principal (mostly without scores,charts or even lead sheets) and translate that into a coherent sound.  There job was not as much creation as execution.

[jhar26]

Another video from the same guy where he interviews a singer/songwriter about the slutification of pop.

[sliderocker]

Feb 26, 2016 21:58:39 GMT -5 goldie said:

Not so sure I agree with everything here. For one thing in the 1960's we had a similar thing with the Wrecking Crew basically making everyone's (almost) recording hits for them as those kids couldn't play worth a crap. It wasn't until the 70's when you had band members able to play their own music and sound like the Wrecking Crew themselves where music stepped up a notch. Things did start getting crappy in the 80's but there was still a lot of variation and originality. The 90's seemed to be more like the 70's but something happened after 2000 to homogenize music into an "out souling" competition which is just awful. Mariah Carey tried to outsoul the queen Aretha and those that followed stood on Mariah's shoulders going extreme.  TV music shows made it worse, even more exaggerated. Somewhere along the line just singing a song "straight, clear and with a built in emotion" like Linda Ronstadt stopped. And the subtle souling of say an Eva Cassidy died with Eva Cassidy.  I do however think there are islands of great music out there you just have to look for it and some individual songs by the artists this guy is crapping on aren't all that bad either.  I think we are just inundated by technology and don't appreciate or even know how nice silence can be.

It wasn't that those kids couldn't play worth a crap, it was the fact they didn't have artistic control over their own recordings. The record companies had the control and they didn't want to let the acts they sign have any control over their records, even down to playing on their own records. Elvis Presley paid for his own sessions but even there, he was pressured into not playing his guitar or playing piano or bass or whatever else he could play. He never totally stopped playing. But, he was limited by the powers that were because they wanted a sure thing, even though a sure thing couldn't be guaranteed.

As for the Wrecking Crew playing on almost everyone's hits, why do critics give a thumbs down to the artists who employed them but never say one word about the fact that almost every Motown record was made the same way: with seasoned session musicians playing on the records? The artists were never expected to play on their records and almost every critic regards the Motown records as miracles? What an exaggeration! They were good pop records as were the recordings that featured the Wrecking Crew. Motown artists and groups were never expected to play on their records but white artists and bands were knocked if they didn't play an instrument and the music was dismissed as being inferior. It was a hypocritical double standard used to justify one's dislike of certain acts and it was total b*llsh*t.

The artists and bands who followed in the 70s were able to play on their records, not because they were great musicians but because the record companies pulled back enough on their tight production reins to allow the musicians they signed to be musicians, for good or bad. But,there were still recordings that featured session musicians and remain so to this day. Even today, you almost can't buy any country artist's recording that features them or their own band playing on the songs. Nashville's hottest session players play on almost every album - for every 100 country albums you would buy, only one or two may feature the artist and their band playing. Everything else is played by the session players and there's that sameness of sound showing up. But, does anyone give a damn or is the expectation of playing only held for rock acts?

That same expectation applies to songwriting. Critics expect rock artists to write their own songs and those who don't write or write very little are likewise dismissed because their talent doesn't include the gift of writing songs. Rock is the only musical genre where that standard is held against the singers and musicians who don't write. Artists in no other musical genre are expected to write, even though some of them do. And it's still a load of rubbish by the critics, self-important asses who think they get to make the rules by which everyone must play. If they insist on writing the rules, then the assclowns need to put their money where their mouths are and let them have at it. They'd fall flat on their faces and they know it. If any artist's music makes you feel good to you, makes you feel something, just enjoy what you're feeling and never mind if they didn't write the song or play on it. That's inconsequential.