Yesterday’s post about Protools not being so easy to master leads me to another question: does the apocryphal ease of studio apps suggest a more widespread prejudice against music production generally?
It seems something has happened down the years for producer types to have lost credibility. They seem to have been sucked into the trashed reputation of the corporate record business and become tarnished by it’s excesses. After all, the successful ones did share in the vast spoils able to take a percentage chunk of an artist’s income. All the while they are barely considered to be artists themselves. At best they’re catalysts, at worst knob-twiddling parasites who ProTools the life out of otherwise sparky and talented performers.
Of course producers are invariably as much artists as anyone else worthy of the name. A well crafted production is a high value thing. Producers have often been virtual band members whose contribution to a work is essential sometimes definitive. Some write songs, do arrangements and perform on tracks. Others, like me, are in at the inception of a project with a hand at every stage the same way a film director might be.
The exemplary work of greats like Quincy Jones, Trevor Horn and Brian Eno puts them in a category of creative artists as outstanding as in any field. Contrast their production values to those on most contemporary records and the current crop doesn’t come close. Many modern works sound almost amateurish by comparison, like demos. They are so devoid of production that being that way is almost considered a virtue. Obviously I’m not suggesting that high production is a requirement for good work. Just that it shouldn’t be disparaged.
I think that the devaluing of the producer’s art has been compounded by the availability of cheap software tools for music, making it seem as if production is no longer necessary, no longer valid, no longer artful. Surely that’s a nonsense. The assumption that production is easy and irrelevant because the kit is cheap is ignorant. It makes about as much sense as saying that because guitars are affordable anyone can be Hendrix. Plainly ridiculous.
Those who comment on these things and who shape the zeitgeist need to be better informed. They have a responsibility I’d say to be initiated and not allow their lack of knowledge and experience to dictate a prejudice especially when that prejudice is detrimental to the craft. Until then perhaps they might comment less. The producer’s art in its myriad forms is a precious thing and one very much worth preserving.
The Producer's Art
ProTools
It’s annoying to hear commentators talk about music production software as if using it was a doddle. Like my remarks about Auto-tune recently such comments belie ignorance. It took me forever to command ProTools. It was a while before I didn’t have to stop every five minutes to ask why the damn thing wasn’t complying. Constantly the flow was broken. Many hours were lost sometimes just trying to complete one small innocuous task. And then there were the compatibility issues i.e. getting everything in the system to talk to everything else. Just recently we spent three days trying to hook ProTools up with a digital mixer before giving up. Maybe we’ll come back to it. Maybe not. The will to live soon drains from your soul. At that point I want to kill these people, the designers who didn’t try hard enough, the ones who weren’t Steve Jobs enough to push for a higher resolution in order to arrive at that promised land, the place where stuff “just works”.
It’s true that increasingly there are software tools where first base can be achieved more easily. Apple’s Garageband is one such. But to go to any level of complexity, to be able to use these programmes like musical instruments in a full-spec professional way, is a whole other thing. First base isn’t enough. You need complete command just as you do with any musical instrument. The instrument itself needs to be transparent. Thousands of hours of dedication are required to achieve that no matter how fast you are on the pick-up.
And just to be clear, I’m talking thousands of hours AFTER you’ve struggled with the bullshit from bad design. By that I mean everything from hellish configuration trials to the obtuseness of the operational aspects. ProTools particularly is full of eccentric nonsense that should’ve been long since fixed. The company are also monumentally slow at bringing in crucial features that lesser applications had going a decade ago. I suppose having the biggest market share affords that kind of complacency.
I read some guy the other day telling about the amazing things his four year-old was doing with Garageband. While that is interesting in itself, it creates a false impression. The fact is that studio instruments, traditional and contemporary, are tough to master. The idea that you buy a rig, press a few buttons and like magic have a beautifully produced album is ridiculous. ProTools, once tamed, is an incredible instrument but achieving mastery over it is no mean feat.
Auto-tune
I wish they would stop saying that using Auto-tune somehow slights your artistry. The idea is uninformed and only shows the ignorance of those who propound it. There are even some who will choose not to like a singer’s work any longer should they learn the despicable tuning software was used on a recording.
I’m sorry to have to bust their bunny-rabbit world but studio people have been fixing the intonation of performers for decades. The process was called editing. Initially it was done by cutting tape, by choosing from multiple takes and splicing the best of them together. When multi-tracking appeared it was “dropping in” that took care of it - i.e. dubbing over offending lines with improved ones. Sometimes several takes of a vocal were recorded on separate tracks and the best ones chosen from the many to form a composite. This process survived into the digital age and became known as “comping”, easily done with ProTools and the likes.
Tuning software, appropriately used, further assists that rather mundane process of fixing intonation. It is only a different and more effective way of doing what has long since been a common-place procedure. Using software to perform the task means less fussing at the voice recording stage in favour of the more important aspects of performance. Pitch problems can be identified by ear in the time honoured way and the software used simply to make the correction, painlessly and undetectable even by the singer. It is a perfectly legitimate practice with nothing necessarily fake about it, at least no more fake than music recording has ever been.
If there is a contentious issue it is overuse. It is tempting when using the eye rather than the ear - when being able to actually see on the screen that a note is off centre - to correct everything. I think that is to be avoided. A vocal too perfectly pitched feels unnatural. I suppose the worst culprit is “auto” mode when the corrections are quite audible. Of course the artificiality of “auto” may well be the effect that does it for you in which case artistic license presides. At that point the two finger gesture is the appropriate one towards critics.
Yes, there is an awful lot of rubbish talked about how studio tech is used, as if the recording techniques themselves conferred a legitimacy on a work. I don’t agree with that at all. The beginning and end of artistry is connection. It doesn’t matter how music is recorded: using a laptop or an SSL console, one microphone or fifty, digital or analogue, professional or amateur, it is impact that counts, whether listeners are touched or not. The tools and instruments employed to get there are of no consequence to anyone other than the train-spotters.
Auto-tune when used skilfully is transparent and undetectable. It is therefore legitimate. Overused, then like any badly executed technique it can be called out. To condemn its usage absolutely is unhelpful and uninformed. It is time for those who do to shut up and let a useful tool have its place.
Amy Winehouse
It’s not the thing to vilify someone just after they’ve passed. But against that grain I’m going to be critical here of Amy Winehouse who died last week. It’s not her music I’m condemning but her demeanour which I think undermined her credibility. She was diminished as an artist in my view because she didn’t hack it. She didn’t have the grit to face down her addictions and really push through when it mattered however bad she felt. She didn’t keep the show on the road.
It’s an old ethic in the business that anything less than comatose, the gig goes on. It goes on especially if you’ve been given enormous rewards for little more than cobbling together a small collection of pop tunes. Real artists really do the work. They do it even when the going’s tough - especially when the going’s tough.
Winehouse was too much the waster. Clearly she had a musical spark and could come up with back-of-the-envelope song sketches. But a crafter she was not. She depended on the talents of Mark Ronson types, guys who have the staying power for artistry. Mariah and Britney were constantly marked down for needing substantial input from others. There’s nothing wrong with that and let’s not forget Amy Winehouse was not a self-contained artist either. Like Lily Allen she caught an early break and became part of a successful team. Any talent can have a hit record with some luck but having the mettle to build a career against the trials and pitfalls, to take the knocks and scrapes, to endure the meltdowns and failures, to live with the attendant emotional problems, the difficult relationships, to endure all that and still perform, still produce, still be able to bring the house down, that’s the real deal, that’s the true artist.
Amy fell short. She couldn’t match the moment, couldn’t be bigger than her problems and just do the work. She came apart in a spaced-out haze cancelling a tour and leaving thousands disappointed. That’s not an artist. That’s a casualty. There are creatives whose personal lives are totally shot who will still get up there and give flawless performances and you would never know their troubles. Lennon was depressive throughout much of The Beatles. When he was tripping out at home on the couch indulging a plethora of addictions he still got off his arse when it mattered, even just to save face, to match McCartney song for song. Laurence Olivier went through crippling stage terror, night after night on the brink. But the show went on as it does in the theatre where the ethics of professionalism are deeply hewed like military discipline.
Such is the artist’s integrity. Such is the gallantry at the heart of the performer. You do it despite everything. You do it no matter what even when no one wants it which is the hardest do of all. Winehouse was lucky that way. Early in the game she became very much wanted and had a captive audience, a luxury afforded only to the few. She wasted it. Had she rallied, had she battled through, had she kept her edge, kept doing work that befitted her considerable vocal talent then that would have made her heroic. That would have made her an artist worthy of the title.
Imagine
John Lennon gets criticised for Imagine like it’s some trite little ditty. I don’t think so. The message of the song is as grounded as it is utopian. It is bluntly existentialist: there is no heaven! Lennon was asking us to imagine no heaven, no hell, no country, no possessions. For him they were abstractions, part of invented belief systems, often corrupt.
Given that people hold their abstractions dear then asking that they be given up is a big ask. Living without illusion sails perilously close to nihilism. Indeed, Imagine is as much rooted in Lennon’s disillusionment as it is in his idealism.
Yet in the face of scepticism about other worlds and associated fictions there still remains the real possibility that humans might learn to live better with each other. Actually they might get along better if they discarded the nonsense they believe about their own existence. That’s the spirit in which John Lennon wrote his song. The guy was no believer.
It’s a tough call though, the idea that you might live absent of belief. Maybe it’s not possible given the way minds are constructed. But that there is an easy disposition toward belief doesn’t mean it can be gorged on free of consequence. Believing stuff that is factually contradicted borders on mental illness. It is reasonable to believe the sun will rise tomorrow but questionable to think the sun god will make it so.
So, the philosophy that informs Imagine is far from trite and lays down a challenge. It demands we deal with the world based on its actuality, that we embrace its facts; and from that place we might for once be able to live peacefully with each other thus maximising potential rather than compromising it as is so often the case.
You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.
Rock Gods
For about five minutes when I was a kid I fancied being a rock star. The moment passed. Much as I loved music and was determined to make it my life somehow, the rock pose always felt a bit dumb. It seemed to take itself over-seriously, hedonistic appearances aside. Rock people were immature, too big on their own importance, not really the way to be I thought. I left band life behind in my early twenties in favour of “the studio” and that is where I remained.
But looking back at the rock era it really was a phenomenon. It was incredible that for a few decades in the 20th Century a young man (a woman less so) could rise to such heights. He could hang with his mates and play music, a fun thing to do anyway. He could hope to be appreciated for it and then some. He could aspire to being famous and idolised, to making big money, to being internationally renowned, to becoming an institution and a historical figure revered by future generations, discussed, analysed and endlessly written about. He might even die young as some kind of cultural hero. Way to be, surely!
In post-war Britain there was a significant number of young men who succeeded in ticking one or two of these coveted boxes. I was one such. Another from Liverpool ticked them all and had an airport named after him. That was after being assassinated by a fan. I’m talking John Lennon of course who qualifies for being possibly the godliest of all rock royalty. I’d probably choose him as my personal favourite.
That this tired old shorn-of-empire country still steeped in its Victorian heritage could produce such as Lennon alongside a raft of imitators like me is a remarkable fact in itself worthy of examination. I suspect there are many my age who still keep their inner Mick alive, who think they could have rivalled Clapton with the right breaks. Yes I might be a tad sniffy about rockers but for all their excesses they seriously left a mark. It was something of a privilege to have lived through their time, a time when youth had a really potent voice.
It’s pretty much over now and rock no longer rules. In the manner of all cultural swings, that was always going to be the way. The attentions of today’s youth are dissipated. Music is effectively free and the record business is on life support. There will be no more stars who act out like medieval monarchs. Tech guys like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are the icons of now.
But even the techs look upward to the gods of rock, to the young men who a few years ago set the tone, who defined the era, who created a youthful excitement previously unimaginable and unlikely in future. To call them rock gods is hardly an exaggeration. Their deportment is well captured in the words of one of their number, one of their highest deities: “excuse me while I kiss the sky”.
Adele's Story
Just another fat lass who can sing was how somebody put it. I don’t much like disparaging remarks like these but I get the point of that one. Adele is hugely over-rated. I don’t mean I dislike her music. She is perfectly listenable and easy to get just like a ton of other artists. And that’s fine. When I say over-rated I mean by critics and commentators, the ones who create the cultural context in which music is understood. I think of them as storytellers because in many ways that is what they are. They invent stories around music and its makers.
To them Adele is the real deal, authentic and unpretentious, and that is what I take issue with. The other day I dialled up her 19 album and the first thing that struck me was how unnatural it sounded. I noticed DI-ed acoustic guitars (i.e. recorded without microphones). I heard digital pianos where “real” ones might have been used. Moreover, I was surprised just how audible the tuning corrections were.
Now, I have no complaint with any of that especially tuning software per se. It can save a huge amount of time in sessions, time which can be given to things more important than fixing pitch. However, if you’re “authentic” then you probably wouldn’t artificially pitch the vocal. Or if you’re going to do that, you’d make sure it was imperceptible.
This is not to condemn Adele and her people as being fake. As I’ve said many times in these writings I don’t care about authentic whatever that is said to be. All performance is fake. All art is fake. In a way that is what makes it interesting. It is a fabricated version of life that brings perspective to the real thing. Actually I’d say authentic doesn’t mean authentic but its opposite. It means faking it like an actor fakes her part. The measure of her talent is her ability to fake convincingly. And anyway, I doubt it is Adele herself who is claiming to be faithful to any creed. She didn’t set out with an authenticity manual. It is the commentators, the storytellers, who are making the case for her “realness”.
My point here about such stories is that they are fashioned around artists and their work retrospectively and are a thing apart from their source material. They are constructions from the imaginings of commentators and are as much invention as the art itself. I used to find this bemusing as I often couldn’t connect the work with the commentary. Through time I realised that I didn’t have to connect the two. It was possible to engage an artist’s work without much adherence to its context which was as separate as I wanted it to be. It is well possible, and I do it all the time now, to have a good relationship with an artist’s work without any knowledge whatsoever of what is being said about it. Sometimes I know nothing at all about who an artist is but still engage their work meaningfully. And I rather like that relationship of minimal context. It is a much more direct and immediate experience.
Yes I appreciate that many people need help from a tastemaker. They need pictures painted. They want contextual material in order to “get” what the music is about. They want someone to expound on what the music means and answer that question. To me it is rather an unnecessary question because music can mean pretty much what you want it to mean. Perhaps you want it to mean not very much at all beyond the sensual pleasure of listening to it. I think that the requirement for too much context before a connection is made with music is actually detrimental to the art and to one’s relationship with it. It is rather like sugar and salt in food: too much and that is what you are tasting. After a while it’s the sugar fix you’re after before the nourishment.
Adele’s so called credibility is an additive. She gets spun by critics as the real thing, true and modest, not like your typically hyped pop star. Her record label XL pitches her that way. They happen to be the current hipsters translated into commercial success. I have no qualm with that. Success is the measure of good art. But the bullshit that gets spouted in its name is annoying. One piece I read this morning praised Adele for not using studio trickery. Huh!? The commentator spoke of her like a messiah come to save music. She must be really special because nothing’s good enough for this particular guy. In a world absolutely teeming with music old and new he finds little to please him so addicted is he to the sugar and salt of his own myth-making.
Significantly Adele complained this week about having to pay 50% of her big take to tax. She resented that apparently, having to give £4M to the exchequer. Banking the other £4M is not bad for a young woman singing songs. She was criticised for the remark and now you sense the tide beginning to turn, the story starting to change. Even an ex-boyfriend was said to be suing her for using their relationship as material for her lyrics. (Barking!) She is no longer “just another fat lass who can sing” but now a massively rewarded pop star taking her place among the super-rich. I wonder how long will it be before her music isn’t sounding quite so good? Not long I’m sure.
LATER
A few days after writing this I read Tom Ewing’s piece in The Guardian which also casts a sceptical note on spin. “Music business stories are a cocktail of post-facto rationalisation and wishful thinking,” he said. “A lot of good music gets released all the time: sometimes, some of it gets bought. Beyond these boring facts, the rest is storytelling.” He could’ve taken the words from my mouth. He referenced Adele too, another indication that perhaps her credibility is on its way to being down-graded.
Vashti Bunyan
When I saw Vashti Bunyan as part of a vocal group on a Nick Drake tribute I thought she must have been Nick’s sister or something - there for the token. Her singing was so unaccomplished. Then I saw her again on The Review Show recently and realised she was a respected artist.
Apparently she was part of the London scene in the 60s, first taken up by Andrew Oldham (à la Marianne Faithfull) and later by Joe Boyd. She made a record then which didn’t do much and gave up music only to be brought back 30 years later when her old album became a cult. She has now put out more releases and is enjoying some success.
It’s a nice story and good luck to her. But I can’t help marvelling at just where the bar is set when it comes to conventional musicality. I like to set it low myself. Actually maybe I like for there not to be a bar at all. But sometimes you hear a performance and it is so devoid of technique that you remember there has to be a bar.
Vashti’s singing would be below the line. Yet I rather liked it in the context of the Drake tribute because I assumed she was token. To learn that she is credible in her own right was such a surprise. If I’ve not said it often enough I say it again: it’s all about context.
I’ve since been checking Vashti out online and indeed her attractiveness is clear. She comes over as a lovely person, delicate, beautiful and modest. Able to inject these attributes into her music then she resonates. I am now a convert. I really shouldn’t be such a technique snob.
Elgar’s Nimrod
The first time I heard Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations I was awestruck. It felt like one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard.
I learned recently it was the piece of work that set the composer up. A few years later he was knighted and became an establishment figure raised from his lower middle class origins. He seemed to enjoy the elevated status.
All art is relative to perspective. Most art, even the most celebrated, is appreciated only by a minority. But occasionally a work appears to be of such outstanding character to be of universal value. Nimrod might be one such.
Interestingly, I looked at at the piano score recently and was surprised to see it was in 3/4 time. It sure doesn’t feel like a waltz. Clever man that Elgar!
Clueless About Music
I listened to a Guardian podcast today with Steve Levine, producer of Culture Club. He was talking about Motown and giving insights while deconstructing some of the musical parts from the big hits.
What struck me was Levine’s intelligence and articulacy. He was knowledgeable and well informed. He was also clearly passionate about these great works. The journalist conducting the talk, Alexis Petridis, came across to me almost clueless by comparison.
That’s the thing: many of those who talk about music bring so little insight to the fore. They are usually all opinion and prejudice. Musicians too: few I’ve known have anything interesting to say about music whatsoever.
I’ve been long enough starved of the company of people like Levine who are knowledgeable about process. He talked about Norman Whitfield (writer of Grapevine) being a process guy, meaning he was steeped in everything to do with the art of making records.
Apparently Whitfield had Grapevine turned down by Gordy several times. Even after Marvin Gaye recorded it, it still wasn’t given priority by Motown. As with What’s Going On in the 70s it would become an iconic hit despite the record company. So often true that. Everyone turned down The Beatles. Clueless!
Two Rock Festivals
I fondly recall the Reading Festival in 1975. It was a huge musical event over three days in August.
I read in Andy Beckett’s book When The Light’s Went Out about how the same week another festival was happening at Watchfield. It was linked to the free festival movement which the previous year had its concert stopped by the police who waded in aggressively. There was a feeling that too heavy a hand had been employed and instead of trying to ban “music & sunshine” the government should themselves sponsor a festival the following year. Watchfield was the result.
It was not much of a success up against Readings’s all star cast. Yet Beckett doesn’t mention Reading in his book which is strange given it was a huge event happening less than 100 miles away. I suppose not being political it didn’t merit a mention. Strange too that the organisers of both concerts should go for the same weekend which was surely bound to dissipate numbers.
And strange again that I knew little then, for all my counter-culture credentials, of the free movement with its tilting at windmills agenda. It was trying to bring about what it called the Free Albion State, an alternative society based on a network of independent collectives. The free festivals were part of its expression.
Ubi Dwyer and Sid Rawle were two of the leading figures associated with the movement. I salute their endeavour, particularly Sid, organiser of Watchfield, who died this year. Both men did jail time for their radicalism. Interesting times indeed.
British Jazz
It’s amazing just how accomplished British jazz was in the 1960s. Tubby Hayes was as good as they come. Yet these guys paled up against the American legends: Armstrong, Davis, Coltrane, Gillespie, Parker, Monk and the rest. It wasn’t that the legends were so much better it’s just that the story of jazz belonged to them, the originals, the ones that blazed the trail.
The spotlight moved to Britain when The Beatles became kings. It must have been tough for the British jazzers then, playing second fiddle to the Americans in their own genre, then seeing home-grown pop, which most of them probably hated, come to dominate the era.
I had the privilege of recording some of these great players thirty years ago and maybe didn’t fully appreciate their high value. In aid of name-dropping I'll list a few: Jimmy Deuchar, Bobby Wellins, Stan Tracey, Tommy Whittle, Mike Westbrook, Keith Tippett, Don Weller, Dick Morrissey, Elton Dean, Roy Babbington, Henry Lowther.
Respect.
Pay What You Want
I took part in a blog conversation the other day where someone was making the familiar but tedious remark about how the Internet was making it difficult for musicians to earn from their recordings. In particular this person objected to the “pay what you want” option for music available on the likes of Bandcamp describing it as a begging bowl option. I don’t agree with that. “Pay what you want” lets appreciators be patrons of your work rather than customers buying a product which I think offers a more appropriate relationship to the arts than the commodity model.
That apart, I’ve pointed out often enough as have many others that historically most musicians made nothing from their recordings anyway and that the Internet actually opens up new possibilities.
I contributed this to the conversation:
I often think that the elephant in the room in discussions like these is a simple fact: that down the decades the great majority of recorded works had zero commercial value. Outside of these works being meaningful to their creators and an immediate circle they were virtually worthless.
The record business then was like a high stakes casino where the big wins were huge. There were few artists who got recorded at all and of those who did, and had their work released, a tiny minority were commercially successful. They were the hens who laid the golden eggs.
With technology and the Internet the age of the golden egg is over. What we have in place is something entirely new in its embryo. The old values and associated metaphors don’t make sense any longer. It doesn’t follow that a piece of recorded music should have a given monetary worth. And as I am pointing out, it never did.
The motive for putting your music out - i.e. letting it go into the electronic ether - has to be that it might be heard. It might be discovered by people in far-flung places it otherwise would not have. This is a great boon. It is an added benefit to any artist in its own right as until fairly recently such a thing was impossible without the patronage of a major player. However, you can’t immediately attach a commercial tag to that with any realistic expectation. Actually if you do, it is likely to have the effect of tying a lead weight to your work. It ain’t gonna fly.
If big numbers catch on to what you’re offering then you’re closer to a negotiating position where money-making deals are possible. Until then, you’re not exactly giving it away, you’re just letting it be heard. Sure, if you can find a way to get folks to part with cash on the way then all power to you.
Asking people to pay what they want is not a begging bowl it is just adding a further dimension to this interesting new scenario. Some might oblige, most will not. Whichever way it’s a harmless option which does not demean your creativity and value. That will be determined by other, much more important factors.
Hip To The Hipster Trip
Music means so many different things to different people. It features in just about every human cause from peace to love to war. There are few contexts that don’t have some appropriate music application.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed about my career is having so much involvement in such a wide variety of music types. I learned early on that there were distinct systems of value for each type. Classical musicians read from a different rule book to jazzers, and folkies were another world apart. Rock, pop and punk players behaved like they had thrown the book away. They all had their histories, their heroes and mythologies, their pecking order of standards.
There was one group I never had much time for and they were the hipsters. For they seemed to deny the innate virtue of having an eclectic taste. They would tend to take their chosen brand too seriously and peddle it with ruthless exclusivity. They were hell-bent on telling you what to like and deriding you if your own choice didn’t match up.
In some ways I am their opposite, their nemesis perhaps. I have a broad mind musically and a big ear. I am wide open to all sorts. This capability might be my single biggest achievement and it grows year on year. The hipster by contrast is narrowly defined. If there are a million things to like he will seek just the one. He is the equivalent of an audio snob in a hi-fi shop. He is the guy in High Fidelity who hates people who like the wrong music.
I think that hipsters are characterised by immaturity. Almost nothing pleases them as if they never quite got beyond being that picky fifteen year-old in high school. Perhaps they weren’t hip enough then and spend the rest of their lives trying to rectify the injustice.
You can be sure that what hipsters like they’re not going to like soon. Shortly they will have moved on to the next hip thing that nobody else knows. Actually a lot of them don’t like music that much. They often end up not liking anything at all given their confused motives: they are trying to influence the pack they are never quite a part of.
It is rather unfortunate that these types have historically played quite an important role in the breaking of new music. Some became gatekeepers and tastemakers, the ones artists had to impress to get a gig, the ones who told the uninitiated what they should be listening to.
I think their role mercifully is becoming obsolete. There are now so many new modes of discovery, some created by computers which will throw a thing at you based on what you’ve just heard. “If you like that you might also like this” is one of the finest features of the online music experience. The algorithm has a minimal agenda and isn’t fussed about coolness.
I think this is good. It might free people to simply like what they like rather than having to consult a pre-determined set of values about quality laid down by someone with a dubious agenda.
I confess to feeling superior to the hipsters never much needing their approval in order to develop my proud musical ear. Beyond the school-playground I never much felt the need to be hip to their trip.
Fantasy World
Which world was it where musicians were able to make reasonable income from recorded works? I ask the question because after a long career in the recording industry it’s not a world I recognise.
To make serious money from recordings you had to be party to a major deal. That deal then had to convert to a hit record which very few ever did. And most musicians were never party to major deals anyway.
Outside of the big league and its casino culture, records were absolutely not wealth generators. Ask most indie label owners or independent artists. These activities were labours of love and not financially viable initiatives.
So I ask again, and not just rhetorically, where was this world where the average artist thrived from recorded works, a world that according to conventional thinking is being decimated by the new tech?
Why File-Sharing Is Okay
In a Guardian article yesterday the writer said this: “In none of the arguments have I come across anyone who has properly explained why illegal file-sharing is OK. And if it's not OK, why should its effect on the market be welcomed with a wink?”
The argument be this: that art works are ultimately public goods. Copyright originally granted a short term arrangement whereby a work was protected allowing money to be made from it. It thereafter returned to the public to be enjoyed, altered, improved, copied, distributed et al. That is still the case but the protected periods are being extended into virtual perpetuity and as such go against the public spirit.
Why is file-sharing ok? Because it harks back to the original idea of art works as shared entities within an ethos of cultural progress. They were never intended to be commodities designed to make very small numbers of individuals massively wealthy.
Assuming copyright to be synonymous with ownership is misleading. You own your car until such times as you choose to dispose of it. Less so your copyable art. After it’s out there it’s in the shared space. Having it restricted by copyright was only ever supposed to be interim measure, one that is being increasingly rendered irrelevant by technology.
This is not of course to say that us artists should't be able to earn. It is to say that we will no longer be able to do so from selling distinct copies of our work. We are finding other ways as we always have.
The Gravy Train
There is a misleading premise in the perennial question: what are musicians to do now that the Internet is destroying the music industry.
It is misleading because the Internet is not destroying the music industry. It is the record business that is screwed. The music business is in rude health. So to answer the question what are musicians to do: they are to do what they have always done. If they are driven and ambitious enough they are to find ways of turning their talents into a career. That is not an easy call but it’s a possibility.
When I started out, the options available were similar to the ones that still exist today. Here are some: get a qualification and teach, get a qualification and join a professional orchestra or choir, get accomplished and become a session player, become a live performer, become a producer or engineer, open a recording facility, join or form a function band, compose music for visuals, advertising and broadcast. Or a concoction thereof.
Granted, some of these are not very sexy. But we’re talking jobs here. A careers councillor might advise caution and rightly so. The arts in all its forms is a precarious endeavour. But he wouldn’t shoo a student from the room who suggested any of the above. They are tangible. He might shoo If the student suggested becoming an artist or a songwriter and pursuing a record deal. Why? Because that would be the equivalent of buying lottery tickets as a career choice. It’s not an impossible prospect just an unlikely one. It always was. Nothing has changed in that regard except it is even more unlikely now.
Of all musicians, a very small fraction got on the record business gravy train. All but a small fraction of them were thrown off again. Of the remainder another small fraction got to drink from the cup. Being an artist in the record business is not and never was a viable career option. So why do so many discussions seem to assume that it is?
The new networks and associated technology add something extra to the business of making music whether one is involved professionally or recreationally. They take something away from the traditional business of making records. And that loss hampers virtually no one other than the gravy train people. So to ask what are musicians to do is a legitimate question with a simple answer: find work! To ask what are the folks on the train to do is like asking what will kings and queens do when the world is a republic. Why would anyone care?
Santa Claus
The major music labels behave like royalty. They stand aloof. They rarely come out and defend themselves convincingly against attacks even when they might make a reasonable case. So in the interests of fairness, and given I often rubbish the record biz for its useless career value, here is a point it could make more often in its own defence.
It might argue that a major recording contract was a much sought-after proposition. Still is. Think about it: you’re a talented teenager with nothing and someone is offering to spend a seven-figure sum developing your music. There’s a 5% chance you will make money and be internationally renowned. That person will lend you the funds for you to keep your side of the bargain, i.e. produce a master recording. If things don’t work out you don’t have to repay the loan. If they do work out you will repay it from your slice of the proceeds. Santa Claus or what?
In a phrase deal-makers savoured as it fell from their lips: the loan (advance) will be non-returnable but fully recoupable. Who is going to say no to that? Even today with young artists being much more savvy and realising there’s a lot of devil in the detail it is still going to be hard to refuse that kind of patronage.
The End of Great
For art to achieve consensus value it has to come across unique. The people who create it need to be doing something only a few can even if all they do is win a talent show. It is their exceptionalness that gives them legitimacy and authority, their passport to importance. Such conditions are evaporating in the present age and it is for this reason that I predict the end of popular music as a cultural reference within a generation.
This is not of course to proclaim the end of music itself, only new music with broad appeal. More significantly it means an end to the idea of greatness. To be great an artist had to be approved by the mass with its singular platform and its tendency to a singular view, a view which pretty much everyone recognised. With mass culture becoming infinitely fragmented then no artist can rise onto the platform because the platform itself is effectively being taken down. Without that platform there is no widely shared recognition of what is approved. That means no consensus and so I think it fair to say that the Age of Great is over. It is over at least for a while to be reinvented perhaps in another era.
Greatness has gone only in the sense that it is no longer possible to be currently great. The celebrated artists of the past aren’t going anywhere. They are preserved for posterity in recorded works. Their cachet will increase with time as their value gets passed down and rediscovered by each coming generation. And these are the defining characteristics of greatness I think: consensus then posterity. With no consensus there can be no posterity, so greatness in the arts with its need for mass acceptance might turn out only to have been a passing phenomenon specifically of the industrial age.
All the popular music forms as they have been fashioned so far are now exhausted. The music of the folk traditions, of classical, of jazz, of the multiple genres of the rock era, are now only revisited and homage paid to the masters of antiquity. There are no new movements on the horizon, and even if there were, with the dismantling of the mass platform they would have a problem being heard above the noise of self-expression brought about by the Internet, a platform which allows everything to be in the public domain. To achieve consensus in any large degree is becoming impossible.
It was truly exciting to be born into a great age as I was in 1956 when Miles Davis was on the cusp of producing his greatest work, Elvis had just happened and The Beatles were around the corner. The following three decades produced an explosion of musical imagination which rivalled anything that had come before it. Significantly this impressive flowering was cultivated in an elite environment. Only the chosen few from any pool of talent were given a voice. Their exclusive status made their appeal all the more alluring. While others were relegated to obscurity the “stars” shone all the more brightly, as much a consequence of their privileged status as their abilities. The rarified world of such elite players in the arts is passing being replaced by something much more devolved.
I don’t say any of this with foreboding. Music will always have its place. But for a while it is going to be defined by its posterity rather than its currency. This will be difficult for my generation to grasp, a generation brought up to consider greatness in contemporary music a part of the natural order. It was not always so. There were few to match Beethoven and Mozart in classical music throughout the 19th Century and no new towering greats in jazz since Davis and Coltrane. The Beatles are still the benchmark for pop and will probably remain so.
Music might now return to its traditional roots, to a participation activity in which anyone can be involved. Your community is just as likely to be a virtual one, connected through online networks. Artists who chose to follow the muse as a way of life may earn a modest income this way supported by those who want to hear their voice. But wiser counsel should probably discourage people from pursuing music as vocation because opportunities for success will be fewer in future. Obscurity is far more typical than ubiquity. It always was despite appearances to the contrary. And maybe it is no bad thing having greatness diminished over coming decades. For the preservation of art’s integrity there needs to be less of it in any case.
Forget The Copies
There is a clear distinction to be made between a recording and a copy of a recording.
The pure recording itself is a work of art embodying a set of creative inputs such as composition, arrangement, performance, production, engineering, programming, editing, and mastering. The copy is a copy of the art. The art is the work itself and the processes involved in creating it.
Historically the record business grew up around selling distinct copies of the art. That way of doing business is no longer viable.
The idea that artists might find ways of funding the work in its purest form and forgetting about the copies is not only a good idea and one worth looking at, it might also be necessary as the new technology continues to diminish the price value of the copy.
Cars & Horses
The arrival of the printing press changed history beyond imagining. At the time most would not have appreciated the full implications of the changes they were living through. With innovation it is subsequent generations who really ring the changes and reap the rewards.
In the twentieth century the printing press equivalent was the invention of the transistor and later the integrated circuit leading to the information age and the Internet. These technologies are still in their relative infancy and the reverberations are still to be realised.
I use that perspective to underline the point that during times of radical change most don’t get it. The old habits die hard and people do what they have always done albeit a bit differently. Word processors replace typewriters; emails replace letter post, even if some don’t get it immediately. I did actually know guys who had their secretaries print out their emails for them to read. I never saw a car being drawn by a horse but the message of that image was clear enough too. People’s minds are the slowest things to change.
The digital revolution has only just began to impact on the society that has seen its inception. We are to a large extent still thinking horsepower rather than internal combustion. This is nowhere more prevalent than in attitudes within the cultural industries especially those which have built massive wealth mountains on ownership of copyrights. Technology has rocked the foundation on which these agreements are made.
You can’t have powerful copying devices on every desk, on every lap and in every pocket, then have these devices link to highly efficient networks allowing information to be passed back and forward in an infinite way; you can’t provide such innovation when hitherto nothing like it had been remotely possible then expect existing agreements around what can be copied and what can’t to stand good. You could only expect such agreements to require serious revising. If they were agreements dubious in the first place, that tended to make only a very small number of privileged people very wealthy, then you might only rejoice at their demise and relish the opportunity to formulate new ones.
Welcome to the present. Those who made fortunes from the copy boom should be pleased they did. They won’t be able to do that again. That is not to say that something created which is culturally valuable won’t produce earnings. It is to say that the earnings will not be determined by how many unit copies get notched up. Because of the ubiquity of the copying devices, that particular practice has no scarcity value anymore. Anyone can copy. Anyone can distribute. Artists of all kinds will now need to use their creative powers to fashion new ways of generating wealth, ways that specifically don’t depend on copies of their work being bought and sold.
So the message is clear to those who would prematurely shackle the emergent technology in service to their conventions: unhook your new cars from your old horses and take a drive. The frontier is an exciting place to be if you have the imagination for it. If you don’t, go do something else that better suits your mindset. Conservatism always has its place.
Major To Minor
Apparently there are more people involved in music-making now than ever before. Of those involved, a minority do it as a way of life. Of those who do it as a way of life another minority are contracted to the major league. They are the elite.
It is the major-leaguers who are currently most affected by copyright issues and the changes brought about by the new tech. It is not too much of an exaggeration to speculate that the elite's days are numbered. The future is likely to be fashioned from the values and experiences of the mass of professionals and amateurs in the minor leagues.
Whether or not this is a good thing is arguable. The majors are having their world torn apart just now and I have a feeling that when that world finally disappears something valuable will have been lost.
But that is the reality. The minors are in the ascendency. They have a stake in an alternative future and are well placed to embrace it with a happy heart.
Shaping The Future
You hear it said all the time that artists should be paid absolutely. It is a fairly empty statement to make. Anybody who wants to be paid for anything has to make a deal of some kind. You don’t turn up uninvited, start digging somebody’s garden then demand payment. You make an arrangement.
Likewise, us musicians can’t expect payment simply because we created the work. We need to do a deal first. If you’re a recording artist and your deal is dependent on unit sales then it’s a bad one because the market for units is fast disappearing.
Seek payment for your work from those who would have you make it. Create it, let it go, then start over. With such an outlook we have a better chance of shaping the future rather than complaining about the demise of the old system.
Side Issue
What to do about free downloading is such a yawn issue now. Recorded music currently is making a transition to a future where it will not be paid for by the unit. That doesn't mean it will necessarily be free. Nothing is. In the UK health care is free only in that if you have major surgery costing tens of thousands you don't actually get a bill. It's not really free of course it is just paid for differently.
This is what is happening with recorded music. It is re-structuring to be paid for differently, possibly by subscription or license like radio and television, or better still by return to old fashioned patronage where the public pays the artist for creating art. At that point sharing files won't matter. What matters is that artists can get paid consistent with their worth. That was always what mattered and most of us never got paid anyway. Perhaps a new system with new people running it will be fairer.
So get over the peer-to-peer paranoia. It doesn't matter. It is a side issue at most. A non issue eventually.
Authenticity & The Recorded Work
My medium is music as recorded work. By that I mean the recorded work as an end in itself outside of music's historical attachment to performance and the old traditions of musicianship.
The greater part of my personal experience of music has come through the joy of listening to records. I've seen my fair share of live shows and have indeed spent much of my adult life in venues but these experiences pale in number compared to the hours spent steeped in recordings. If most people analysed their behaviour they would find pretty much the same thing: that their relationship to music was almost entirely cultivated by recordings. It has been music's defining medium for a century now and continues to be.
I remain loyal to the recorded work despite its recent commercial meltdown and despite attempts by aesthetic fundamentalists to demean its value in favour of the supposed real deal: live performance. I don't subscribe to that. Nor do I subscribe to the artist as some kind of shamanistic being who has a mainline to authenticity. I couldn't care less about authenticity. I think it is a nonsense concept when applied to music suggesting that some kinds of sounds are somehow more real or more credible than others. All music is simply organised noise whether live or recorded. Value is conferred upon it by imagination not by what it is or how it gets into the air. I'm not fussed whether an album is made in a day with one mic in a room or in five years using every kind of studio trickery. All I care about is whether I can get into it. And that is as much down to me and my own taste capacities as it is anything in the work itself.
Nowhere is there more bullshit spouted than in music criticism. I'm not talking here about professional critics who do a worthy job. They are creative and they take real risks. I'm talking about criticism in general, particularly the snobbish brand which takes itself too seriously and think's itself an authority. I have zero regard for that and every regard for liking what you like whether you are knowledgeable or not. That is why I am able with no irony, embarrassment or shame to remain true to the Mariahs and the Britneys. With the help of talented producers and writers they have made outstanding, state-of-the-art music which enriched the lives of many millions, particularly young women. Most authenticists (usually male) are contemptuous of these hugely successful women and their followers (usually female). They use the less than admirable personal lives of the pop divas as ammunition for taking down their contribution to the art.
The same authorities also choose to ignore that recorded works generally have a reality unto themselves. Somewhere they hold to the idea that a music recording is like a facsimile of an otherwise performance ideally captured live without any fussing. This kind of thing harks back to music's arcane mythology. The snobs would almost take delight in finding out that some recently discovered blues singer was a wasted alcoholic with broken teeth and a broken life. If he was black with a history of racist abuse against him even better.
The recorded work as a thing in itself has fallen outside the standard mythology as advanced by the authenticists. Yet recordings for long enough have been entities in their own right. Sergeant Pepper was a product of the recording studio used as musical instrument. Since the invention of magnetic tape performances had always been edited from the many into the one. At least from that point on authenticity had taken a knock. Editing has been the singular aspect that has contributed to recorded performances being made up and in that sense to be synthetic products. Multi-track recording allowed for an even more sophisticated form of editing to be done and then digital technology even more so. Even the much maligned tuning software allows producers to do more quickly something they have always done which is pay close attention to intonation. Previously, tuning a vocal was done by editing, simply re-doing out of tune lines. Much time and concentration was taken up by attending to that. The technology now renders that rather tedious part of the job easy. From tape editing to auto-tuning (it doesn't have to be "auto") these technologies are at root instruments for the manipulation of sound. A piano is an instrument for the manipulation of sound. So is a violin. So is a studio mixing console.
Recordings brought a massive benefaction of music to ears all over the world in the space of a few decades. Those who delivered it (the recording companies and their producers) created value and meaning for many and did so in a way that could never have been achieved through live performance. Actually it is live performance which has become an exotic species of the bigger beast that is the recorded work which for most people is more real. A live concert is something done for its treat value like going out for a meal. Live is the gourmet restaurant while recordings are the meat and potatoes of real life. In this sense music as appreciated through recordings has more authenticity than does its less patronised counter-part. Listening to recorded music is what we do as a culture. It is how we engage with the creative output of millions of musicians the world over. Occasionally we go to a gig. Every day we hear recorded works whether we want to or not.
Those who rail against the new tech and cleave to their need for so called authenticity are themselves the myth-makers. Looking backwards to a primitive past where music was only ever experienced on location is little more than a romantic attachment to history. The recorded work changed the musical experience opening it out to be much richer and diverse. There is no going back.
The beneficiaries of such well curated music archives are all of us who today can tap a screen and within seconds have access to anything that takes our fancy. In uncertainty, randomised playlists will churn out infinite possibilities without recourse to a radio loud-mouth full of opinion and prejudice. Old musical attachments can be remade and new ones discovered. That it can be done for something approaching free seems unusually good for this world. So good it is almost suspect. Music is the great gift of mankind to itself. The recorded work amplifies its sharing potential a million-fold. Arguments over authenticity are facile and degrade music's dignity. They should be ignored. The majesty of the gift is better served without them.
Lily & The Complainers
I was surprised to see Lily Allen complain about file-sharing. I had imagined she might have been cleverer than that. Seems not. And all these others in support of her. What planet are they on? Really, the train has left the station with this argument. Technology has destroyed the old way of doing things in the record business. That is never coming back for good or for bad. These artists should show some insight and embrace the future in an imaginative way and not make themselves seem so spectacularly self-interested or just simply ill-informed by supporting a system that is being consigned to history.
It is almost a cliche now to hear people say that we musicians are entitled to be paid for our recordings. If that is so then history has done us a terrible injustice. I've been in the biz a long time and have worked with thousands. The number I have come across who actually earned significantly from their recorded works is virtually zero. Why? Because the record business has always been about the golden egg - i.e. all its focus was on the million seller. Most of the wealth generated from recordings went into the coffers of a relatively small group. They were among the most privileged people in history. Those who bitch about the demise of the old record business make an argument in favour of the future being like the past. It won't be.
If the riches in music had historically been more evenly spread allowing recording artists in general to finance their careers from royalties, and if the new tech was genuinely putting such artists in jeopardy, then Lily and her complainers would have a case. As this is not even close to being true they should be silent and go enjoy their multi-millions. The rest of us can forge the future without them. The age of the golden egg is over.
Copyright
When considering the future of copyright (if indeed copyright has a future) it should be remembered that its perceived purpose was to allow artists to get paid. Historically it never did that job very well as most people party to a recording or publishing deal will testify.
Paying creative individuals for their work makes sense. Society wants their output and creatives want to give it. In order to allow them to work professionally and follow the dictates of the muse then funding needs to come from some source. The copyright system was supposed to perform this task but it tended to succeed only in rendering wealthy a small coterie of the fortunate. These were the hit-makers and the agencies and corporate moguls that supported them. In this sense the old system was quasi-medieval in its structures: the few amassed wealth while the many lived in poverty.
In recent years copyright has been blown apart by the internet and revision is underway. Whatever form that revision takes it should be about focussing on the objective of financing art. If a work is sufficiently successful then the creator needs to be rewarded commensurate with that success and be able to keep on working. Artists can then do what they do as a career choice.
The immediate question is how do we compensate creative people and allow them to remain solvent. Not how do we ensure multi-national corporations, the people who run them, and a handful of fabulously affluent artists maintain themselves in medieval lavish.
Access v Ownership
I wrote earlier about the music-streaming website Spotify. I resisted the temptation there to comment on the deeper issues of access versus ownership. I'll do that now.
I think there are legitimate concerns about relying completely on online servers for everything. If a company like Spotify goes down and you don't have hard-copies of your music collection stored locally then you effectively lose everything. Suddenly your lovingly assembled playlists disappear. With CDs, hard-discs and iPods, short of a fire or burglary, they remain intact. This concern applies to cloud-computing generally where information is stored online as opposed to on the personal media in your room. It is a risk certainly but I suspect it is a risk people will become more at ease with. The Cloud will become pretty much as secure as anything else is. Money in the bank is not 100% safe as recent times testify but it is still preferred to a stash under the bed. The same goes for online storage and file streaming. It will become a commonplace feature.
Those who fixate on ownership for its own sake will find this transformation more difficult to adopt. Although I understand their concerns I have less sympathy with them. I think ownership is given too much importance generally. It boils down to issues of violation and having a right to recourse should possessions be stolen. If somebody takes my stuff I would like always to have a right to process and have the crime redressed. Beyond that right to process I've always been mystified why anyone needs to own anything. All you really need is legitimate access to what you need as you need it. Whatever systems that can be implemented to allow that to happen is for me sufficient.
That being so I think that favouring access over ownership is a big ethical leap. Ownership is something of a primal instinct. It underlines acquisitiveness. Access requires trust and some faith that agreements made will be honoured. If I pay Spotify a monthly prescription then I expect them to uphold their commitment just as I would a bank for keeping promise. Trust is an aspiration. It is something that should be encouraged and taken seriously. Its breach takes a heavy toll. The contemporary financial meltdown has left much cynicism in its wake and damages the spiritual fabric that binds a society's relationships. It may be something of a stretch to uncover such issues from a deliberation on whether to embrace Spotify and music streaming. But for me it opens up an interesting philosophical divide. I am on the side of the more evolved ideas that are bound up in access. I would prefer a world where ownership is diminished in favour of trust. Access versus ownership exposes a deeper divide between those who are comfortable with higher levels of trust and those who want to covet possessions.
I think that divide is one of temperament. Those big on ownership are likely to be more hardline in their dealings. Those who are happy with access are more inclined to sharing. The internet has a huge capacity for sharing and it would be hopeful to think that such capacity is ripe for exploration in the years to come and can make a pivotal contribution to how humans interact. I say think about these matters and think about whether you are a sharer or coveter. Ask yourself which side are you on. It is a big issue, a big issue with an opportunity attached.
Spotify
Apple has just given Spotify the green light for its player application to be available for download at the App Store. Very shortly your iPhone will be able to act like a gigantic iPod. You will have ready access there to a vast library of recorded music. You won't own the music (did you ever?) in the way you owned a CD or a download. But you will have full access to Spotify's music servers. What is more astonishing is that Spotify playlists will be able to be synced to an iPhone or iPod Touch and played offline. You may not be playing actual downloaded music but it sure will feel like it.
Spotify is free to use currently with some fairly unobtrusive advertising endured. Alternatively for £10 per month the ads are gone. Either way it is a high quality user experience. Just about any recorded work can be accessed on demand within a couple of seconds. Some are surprised that Apple sanctioned this iPhone application as it may well be sounding the death knell for its own iTunes and the iPod. iTunes with its buy-per-track method requires an actual sound-file be downloaded. You climb the pay-wall, then do the download. It's not cumbersome. Apple has it streamlined to be quick and easy. Yet with Spotify - bang! There it is. The music is coming at you in few seconds with no negotiating to be done. Since I started using it a few months ago it has never been off my computer desktop.
Streaming is not universally liked. Many prefer to have some kind of tangible hard copy in their possession. It then feels more like ownership. Some don't even like downloads for that reason. They prefer to have the CD or the vinyl or whatever actually there on the shelf, something they can see, touch, feel and smell as well as listen to, something that engages all the senses. I get that. Way back when it was being predicted that computer files would come to dominate how music was consumed I really did not imagine that. I thought that there was too much historical attachment to that full sensory experience of a physical music album. I included myself as one unlikely to be converted. From the browsing of racks of records in a store, to the reading of liner notes, to the rolling of joints on LP covers, there was just too much emotion tied up in the physical for all that to be swept away in favour of an unsexy mp3 file. I was turned around with indecent haste. When I saw what downloading offered I was off on a new journey. What was so seductive about it was accessibility. I could find everything and anything quickly. At the mere mention of an artist I could go find that music, sample it and have it right there in my collection. iTunes overnight became my de facto music player. My CD collection receded into the background and has remained there. I rarely buy one now.
As if in sync with my consumer choice record shops began to disappear from the high street and the music business went into implosion. As these stores had become pretty uncool places to go into and the record biz had done me no favours as a musician myself then did I care? Not a bit. I now listen to more music than I ever have both as a consumer and as a professional. I listen to a wider variety of artists from the obscure to the high profile. I get as much and more from that experience as I ever did. That I can throw thousands of tracks on to a tiny player the size of a fag packet and go off in the car with it seems miraculous. It is a true wonder of the modern age for anyone into music.
So I am a total convert to this development in every way. If I can now substitute the downloaded iPod tracks for their streamed equivalents alongside everything else that is catalogued on servers then better still. The listening experience is exactly the same. It is access that has been so much further enhanced. Once the music is in the air it doesn't much matter much what the carrier is unless you are a picky audiophile who likes to fuss about sound quality. I fuss about sound enough in my work as a producer. I'm only too happy to let all that go when it comes to leisure. Then it's all about the emotion. The technical niceties are immaterial.
If you've not tried Spotify already I highly recommend it (it will be available in the US soon). If the iPhone app due in a few days is as user-friendly as the desktop version then I will feel justified in proclaiming that the future has truly arrived.
Radio Bullshit
Apart from the excellent new online radio services like Last FM which take you off on a journey of your choosing, the only radio I listen to now is BBC Radio Four. Music radio is so appallingly bad that not only do I get nothing of value from it, but I get a sharp prod of annoyance from the experience of it. It's not the music itself - I'm good with that, even the chart - it's the utterly inane drivel that pours from the mouths of presenters that jars me. Listening to these people is nails-on-the-blackboard time. They have to be gone immediately, the dial turned to something more civilised before they pollute my airspace.
It is a source of great satisfaction that radio is becoming increasingly redundant in being the conduit for how popular music is passed into the public domain. The new tech is so efficient that everything and anything you want to hear is at your fingertips. It is your choice, where and when, without recourse to some idiot programmer's agenda while a drivelling nonentity passes worthless comment.
Now I should say: Russell Brand is genius and Chris Evans was unique in his day as were John Peel and Kenny Everett in theirs. But these guys are rare breed. The average radio jock or television presenter is an empty-headed moron with nothing useful to say on anything.
Long Live The King
Although no doubt self-inflicted, to see this man reduced to a circus freak was depressing. To have his talents ritually ignored in favour of a prurient gawping around his weirdness says more about our culture than it ever did about Michael Jackson. Still, for those with interests more decent the music was always there, important and preserved for posterity.
Better away, Jackson. You can be back on the throne now where you belong.
Commercial Death
I shouldn’t really be discouraging people who come to my studio to make music recordings with a view to commercialising them. Providing services is what we do here. What folks do with their work is their choice. And who the hell am I to advise against having a go at something. Any shot at success in the arts is a long shot. Always was.
But I have to say: being an unknown and releasing a music album these days makes about as much commercial sense as releasing your personal photograph album. If you proposed to do that everyone would look at you incredulously. Many think that any given music recording has a commercial value. It hardly ever did and does so even less now. The commercial recording has become an economically devalued entity.
It used to be only the elite musicians that got to record at all. The process had a fairly high bar attached which only the select few were able to reach. They were generally chosen by industry professionals, the so called gatekeepers who controlled entry to the market.
In recent years the high bar has been abolished. Anyone can record. Everyone has easy access to distribution. And although these changes are slowly becoming clear, many in the music biz still haven’t fully grasped the implications.
All Change
The business around recorded music has for the last few years been undergoing the most fundamental change in its history. Since the 19th Century and Edison’s time the music industry has been able to generate wealth by turning performances and compositions into recorded copies that could be sold to the public in one format or another. This pay-per-unit model thrived until recently when it has been threatened by the Internet. The ability now to copy music and pass it around freely means that the century-old industrial process that took care of manufacture and distribution is increasingly redundant. Anyone can now produce and distribute their own work easily. With that the big music companies could be out of a job.
Now the problem is how can creative individuals in recorded music and their business partners turn their work into earnings. Its not just a question of how but whether. It may turn out that society no longer wants to pay for recorded music. Like poetry or photography or blogging it may remain a worthy activity but with largely no commercial value.
Whatever moves are made, whatever deals are done, clever or stupid, the next few years will determine the future. Most people don’t grasp the issues yet. Many have the standard reaction: that what is happening currently is some kind of moral outrage. They talk about how music is being “stolen” by unscrupulous down-loaders. Anyone applying the slightest intelligence knows that is nonsense. The outraged tend to talk as if this “stealing” is somehow denying them their income when the money they have made from their recordings down the years was miniscule anyway. It wouldn’t have kept them going in breakfast cereal. Yet they somehow want to stand by the old system as if it is some kind of sacred cow when it tended only to make a very small number of individuals very wealthy.
What exists at the moment is an opportunity to create a new environment. But that change could evolve different ways depending on how imaginative people in the music business are. As I say, it might be to condemn music recordings to the commercial dustbin. Or to be more optimistic, it could lead to a fairer distribution of the money society is prepared to award its music-makers. A reorganisation is conceivable whereby performers and composers could make modest amounts sufficient to sustain them. Although by no means a certainty this is a realistic possibility. There are many musicians such as myself who would be delighted to be able to pay the rent from their recorded works.
Ways of moving forward with that in mind should be sought, not inhibiting the process of change as the majority in the business seem to be doing, either by clinging to already outmoded thinking or in the case of the big players by suing their customers for embracing the future quicker than they have.
The Mythology Of Music
Some research.
A large sample of people was given forty-eight recorded songs to listen to by different artists. The sample was divided into two main groups. Group 1 was a social group. It was allowed to review the songs and have discussion. Group 2 wasn't. Its members listened alone.
The results did not at all surprise me. In Group 2 (no conferring) no one song or artist emerged more preferable than any other. Within Group 1 (conferring) the contrasts were huge.
To further their argument the researchers had divided Group 1 into eight smaller social groups each of which conferred internally but not with the other seven. Within each smaller group, one song emerged as a distinct favourite while another song bombed. The extremes were considerable. No two social groups returned the same best or worst song.
The point reinforced here is that beyond a certain threshold of talent the value of music is determined by factors other than the music itself, often by peer influences. In other words it is determined by context as much as by content. I've been saying this for twenty years: that success in music is due not, as is commonly understood, to some innate quality in the work but more to the complex social, commercial and cultural factors that surround music-making.
Saying this out loud always draws a blank. Why? Probably because it undermines the mythology of music. It's a far more agreeable prospect to believe in the mystical essence of a work, that somehow the creator is tapping into some transcendent wellspring and pouring forth; or that some ontological force is being transmitted by the piece and your well-honed sensor is suitably tuned to appreciate it. The mythos sits better with the emotion felt from music than does the considerably more mundane aspects of the process such as liking something just because others do.
The experiment points to a consensus theory of quality. It implies that good music is simply music that gains sufficient numbers of followers. Ideally it should do so for a long period toward posterity. Then it can be said to be truly good. When you live in the desert like I do due to your radicalism it is always heartening to come across findings that support your radical view.
Gold Dust
Art and commerce are not so contradictory. They are different elements of a process. Anyone can produce a piece of artistic work if they have the impulse and the talent. Trying to get that work into circulation and make it stick is much more difficult. Artists are often contemptuous of that process as if it’s outside their remit. Yet surely there is hardly one among us who wouldn't jump at the prospect of wider acceptance. To be rewarded for your art is very nice work if you can get it. You do the thing you want to do, you enjoy doing it, and then you get applauded and paid. Who wouldn’t want that?
All the great artists throughout history were great not just because of what they did but because what they did was accepted by significant numbers. Without acceptance a particular work has no value beyond what it means to its creator and possibly those in the immediate circle. The context into which the work is presented is what gives it its value; it is as important as the work itself. That context is where commercial interests kick in. To say that art and commerce are incompatible is to ignore the importance of context. They are different aspects of the same thing. The commercial world is the environment where artworks are circulated, appraised, controlled and rewarded. This keeps the creators solvent. At least it's supposed to. That the rewards sometimes go way beyond solvent toward excess is a feature of rampant capitalism and applies to art as it does any other commodity. If you are attached to a hit you will score big.
You can't have meaning in art without context. The context includes business and money-making. Many can perform but if they want to do it to an audience someone has to find a venue, make a stage, provide equipment, organise tickets, tell others about it, sort out the money, pay those involved for their efforts and so on. Artists generally don't do this. They need players. Players control the context. They are often hated for their conniving and controlling but they are necessary beasts. Without them nothing happens. Without the Epsteins and the Geffens, the Blackwells and the Bransons, there would never have been the great cultural phenomena with which they were associated. They are the conduits and they are gold-dust.
Tribute To Tony Wilson
Tony Wilson died yesterday. I never knew him but I knew he was one of the most unusual people ever to work the music biz. He combined an odd mix of attributes. He was clever, intellectual and cultured, yet easily able to act out like a rock and roller. He went about his business with a belief in possibility bordering on unreal.
When I heard he was ill I sent an email wishing him well. I wouldn't ordinarily do that to someone I don't know but for Wilson you change the rule. I should not have been surprised when he answered back with thanks and signed off in typical revolutionary voice - ‘VENCEREMOS’ - meaning we will win.
Cheers Tony. You didn't win that final battle but you left a mark and won the respect of many. For that your memory will be cherished for a long while to come.
McCartney
Context is the greater part of music.
If Beethoven crawled out the grave today and set about making symphony number ten they wouldn't have it. They'd be saying that the 200 years in the ground did something to him, that he'd lost it. Perhaps Mozart was the real deal.
Same with that renowned concert violinist Joshua Bell who busked in the subway and got ignored. People pay substantial sums to see him in his place but wouldn't look at him twice out of context.
Paul McCartney? There is nothing, absolutely nothing he can do short of being assassinated that would bring back widespread credibility because his time has come and gone. Competition from his dead and legendary partner aside he will always be up against his former self which was so great as to be untouchable.
All music has its time and there was no time like The Beatles. McCartney has made respectable music in his later years. Electric Arguments is a fantastic piece of work. But that's not what's important. It's all about the context and that can never again be in Paul McCartney's favour while he is still alive. All the talent in the world can't fix that.
Rock Is Dead
The rock era is over. It's not the stupidity of bad old record labels to blame although god knows they've done their bit. It is over because all art-forms have their day and rock has had its. (And what a glorious moment it was leaving a great legacy of recorded works that will last for generations to come.)
The rock era is over also because there is now too much of it. It has no scarcity. Every other kid on the block plays guitar and is in a band. So is his dad. This contrasts the 60s when the genre was new with few numbers. The older generation then were mostly set apart from it. The ground-breaking London scene was made up of a few hundred elite players who would go on to define the world of pop.
There are more people doing music now than ever. The greater percentage don't make a living from it of course but do it as an activity. Some might have a myspace or a blog to complement the activity and to service whatever miniscule following they might have. With this, the necessary relationship that value has with scarcity is lost in the sense that it is no big deal to be in a band, to write songs and make recordings. You can even put these recordings out in the world with the click of a mouse. Until fairly recently getting stuff out was a tough business. It required major money and major determination and no small amount of serendipity. Now anyone can. In the anyone-can world there is no scarcity and as a result value is diminished. Or at least the value associated with greatness is diminished. And all art harkens to greatness. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard said that art does not die because there is no more art, it dies because there is too much. That is the rock context. Even when there is vital and original work being done it drowns in the sea of mediocrity that surrounds it.
This is why the rock era is over. But does it matter given that all forms have their moment and pass? I don’t think so. As they pass, the defining works become richer as posterity bestows them the tag of greatness. This happened with classical music and jazz. It is happening now with rock. It is not to say there isn't contemporary quality around as some assert. Actually there is quality and talent everywhere as good as ever. It is just that the context has changed. And context is king. Mass market with mass appeal is disappearing by the day. Niche is the thing. And that's fine too for what it is. But whatever it is it can't lead to greatness. Greatness feeds off a feeling of being unique. You can't be unique if a million other people are doing what you do - and are also on the platform competing for attention.
The beauty of the recorded work as a form is that it doesn't go away. It remains in personal collections everywhere in its myriad formats and will outlive it creators to be rediscovered by future generations. There will soon be no need for it to be reinvented and restated as the kids of today are doing. Although they do it brilliantly they are, just the same, only revisiting. What was done before was so exceptional that what else can they do but pay homage? The Arctic Monkeys can never be Zeppelin. The Arcade Fire will never be Floyd.
There are those who blame the corporate record companies for the current demise of commercial music. But the big labels do what they always have done. They try to chase the hot thing and commercialise it. That they might often make a bad job of it is another matter. That they are dealing with the huge changes in their industry right now with incompetence is consistent. This time though it looks like they will be unable to catch up and so the end of a great era is upon us.
The deeper issue just now is a cultural one. It is a contextual and historical shift. It is a different world for the record business from even just ten years ago. The new music format (mp3) is an excellent development for those who have a genuine interest in music for its own sake. All is at your fingertips and for free if you wish (try Spotify). Your collection can be accessed in such a wide variety of ways. Thanks to Apple's innovations you can stick it all on to a little player the size of a cigarette packet and carry it around with you. You can shuffle every favourite song you have ever had and listen at random to whatever the system throws up like having your own personal radio station without the bullshit of presenters or advertising. With myspace you can hear what the band just around the corner is doing without even knowing who they are. With another click an artist ten thousand miles away is just as accessible. This is a truly interesting phenomenon but it is also at the heart of why rock is dead.
Long live rock.
Overload
The contemporary scene is in overload. There is so much of everything to the point of over-stimulation. The base animal finds it too much and is increasingly like a rabbit in the headlights. Popular music, the once defining art-form of the 20th Century, no longer tells a story other than one of its own decline. There is so much music around now, so easily accessed, that the specialness has gone. Ordinariness prevails.
This is not to say that the old stuff won't retain its specialness. Past works are guaranteed their place at the top table. The classic songs will become richer with time. The point I make is to do with currency. The days of greatness are over in music and possibly all the arts. This is the age of ordinary. Everything is rendered ordinary because there is so much on offer that anything different that might push the frontier gets lost in the crowd. There are more people on the stage these days than there are in the audience.
In an individualist world there is no individuality and everything becomes the same. Popular music is generic. People copy others, play safe, become afraid of risk and those types who historically would have taken risks are excluded as not being relevant because they are too different. Marketing folk and analysts look to what works and order up more of the same to maximise the take. This is a disaster for creativity.
There is no sign of the overload problem lessening. The volume increases exponentially by the hour. Consequently I think the golden age of popular culture is over and it will be a long time before great works of genius are seen again. Mercifully the vintage material still exists and will remain the gold standard. The films, the music, the books and plays can always be looked back upon for identity. It is just that contemporary work will increasingly have no purchase not because of innate quality or lack of talent but because the overcrowded context won't allow it.
High Bar
Music is my world. It is what I understand. I have argued that the business of it needs an elite. Arriving at this probably objectionable conclusion has come from years of thinking about how music is made and appreciated.
For long enough the record industry WAS the music industry. Nearly all the wealth generated came from recordings. Careers were won and lost based on record sales. Recently that cash cow has been dealt the severest challenge as the recording sector finds itself facing possible commercial extinction. Music as commodity (the cd) is looking like it might be about to be consigned to history. With it the craft and professionalism associated with the traditions of the recorded work are being eroded in favour of the internet culture and its user-generated content. It is becoming almost uncool to be accomplished. Rough, rude, uncut, untutored and uncontrived are preferred values in this new setting.
Similar changes are effecting other spheres of the culture world too. The elitist strong-holds of journalism and broadcasting have also been coming apart as blogs and online services increasingly have a bigger impact. As Wikipedia becomes more bloated by the hour with new information on every conceivable subject it looks like the integrity of old-style encyclopaedias and their specialising authorities are in for a rough ride also.
It's not hard to predict the problems all this might throw up if any kind of thing gets put forward simply because it can. Whether it is technically accomplished is unimportant. Whether it is factually sound doesn’t matter much. Whether it is of consensus value is insignificant. Virtuosity is an irrelevance. Specialised knowledge is for geeky specialists. The Wikipedia phenomenon seems even to embody the question of why should experts be trusted above anyone else. The answer to that is too obvious for the questioners. But it should be answered. Specialists have spent years on the subject matter assimilating knowledge past and present. They have had their works scrutinised by their peers and critics before claiming a place on the public forum. This was the old high bar that faced anyone trying to put forward almost any kind of contribution to the culture world. It was set high for good reason.
The simple point is this: it is fashionable to be down on elitism and to advocate an 'anyone can' world. But I fear that if all the elite structures were done away with completely it would only be after they are gone that their crucial function might be appreciated. That function includes filtering and financing. It provides structure and identity. It involves the assumption that just simply to have got there required being “good enough” to reach that high bar and so be deserving of public consideration. High bars are important for all kinds of valid reasons. They are important if you want to be a lawyer or a surgeon. They are important for being an artist too.
Prophecy
Back in the 70s we used to sit around, likely in some altered state, conjuring up the future. We’d predict things like music on tap, or an entire recording studio in a box, or a music world where musicians controlled the means of production and distribution free from corporate dominance.
Twenty years on I had given up on such daft notions and thought them immature. Clearly I had taken Alvin Toffler’s futurism too much to heart. Reluctantly I started to accept the status quo. The record industry was in rude enough health and saw no need for radical change. Our speculations had been youthful fancy no less. I probably took the disappointments a bit harder than the others having built a career around anticipating these radical ideas. It was simple disillusionment. I would not have been the first.
Oh but how things change. And didn’t my friends and I have our fingers on some kind of prophetic pulse back then? To say that control would fall away from the urban centres and that records would be made anywhere was not exactly a resonant view at the time. To predict the end-days of the super-stars, that there would be no more Beatles, Elvises or Michael Jacksons, would have met with derision. That tastes would become more mixed and eclectic, less tribal, and that parents might enjoy the same music as their children, something unusual when I was growing up, was a lateral thought. To have all the music in the world available to you deliverable down a line was close to science-fiction. And that these changes would revolutionise the culture industries as we knew them and a new age of less elitist, devolved creativity would be ushered in was akin to fantasy.
Yet as young men these were the kinds of notions we speculated. They were predictions far from obvious. It was pre George Michael, Madonna and The Spice Girls; it was pre rap and hip-hop, pre electronic dance music and pre grunge. With the 1990s delivering huge hits it seemed that the system was working fine as it was, deeply entrenched enough to last a few more life-times. It was time I put aside silly ideas and joined the gravy train. The technological advancements that were supposed to fundamentally alter the landscape only ever seemed to tinker at the edges of the established conventions. The record business continued to flourish and to make a few lucky individuals wealthy beyond their dreams.
Enter Apple. In 2001 Jobs stood up and announced the ipod, an apparently innocuous music player. Someone gave me a copy of the new iTunes software and I wondered how that could possibly be of any use to anyone. That sexless computer files might replace artful CDs? Never gonna happen! My powers of prophecy had clearly deserted me at this point because before long the entire record industry was fearing for its future such were the shock-waves produced by the new tech. An entire new paradigm for music-makers and creatives generally was on its way. Who would have thought it? We did.
Scots Untapped
A Scottish artist has to gain legitimacy elsewhere before being fully appreciated here. I doubt if there is a single Scot in the history of popular music who hasn't found their outlet to the world via an institution from somewhere else.
Scotland has enormous untapped potential in music most of which goes to waste due to a lack of any real support system, commercial or otherwise. If the same thing is true in other fields we could be sitting on a cultural gold-mine. Just a thought.
Snobbery
It is rare for pop musicians to cross over into the classical world but when they do critics are unforgiving. McCartney got hammered when he tried it. I'm sure the complaints made are valid enough although I'm just as sure they are mainly remarks from snobbery.
It would be simple if there was a reliable assessment scale in music from zero to ten with rubbish being zero and excellence being ten. It would make things so much easier. But that's not how it is. Artworks are complex even those absent of sophistication. Merit is not only about years of endeavour, working the craft, mastering technique and learning convention. Ultimately making a meaningful connection is the measure of any piece of art. Sometimes the work that does the business will come from some untutored source possibly ignorant of what had gone before, naive and spontaneous but still relevant. Connection is the primary arbiter not authority.
The popular music of the past fifty years is by definition contemporary and so it can't yet benefit from the kind of posterity that "serious" music enjoys which goes back hundreds of years and can look to a long history of appreciation and commendation for its validity. It may be a century from now before we know whether The Beatles are as good as Beethoven. If over the period people continue to value The Fabs then quite simply they will be.
Maligning the attempts of those in pop who adopt the classical form such as McCartney did may be justified but at this point it is hard to separate these criticisms from old fashioned snobbery.
Nice Work
It is such a simple thing to say but worth saying anyway: we should make sure our young artists can work by paying for them to do so rather than commercialising them. It was Germaine Greer who said that and I agree with her totally.
In music, instead of doing deals which tie artists contractually in order to turn their work into a commodity, record companies (or the new institutions that come to run music and recording) should employ music people whether performers, writers, or producers and give them a living wage just like any other job. They could turn up for work in the morning and make music like other workers make widgets. Who wouldn't be up for a job like that?
The old record companies didn't give a shit anyway about their artists beyond their commercial potential and their ability to lay the golden egg. Okay, the successful ones became big stars and earned huge sums but the majority earned nothing. If institutions paid for their creatives to live - to eat and pay rent - rather than force them into dead-end commercial contracts then it would provide more constructive work for more talented people and be a better service to music and society generally.