Musical State Of The Union

Nice rant, Victor. It sounds like you needed to get that off of your chest.

I felt the same during the Reagan years about how I wished Robert Lamm would write another “political” song. Lamm is the keyboarist and one of the principal songwriters for Chicago, and has written some very biting lyrics about the state of the world back in the laste 60s and early 70s, esp. “A Song For Richard And His Friends”, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?”, “Questions 67 and 68”, “Someday, August 29, 1968”, “While The City Sleeps”, “Something In This City Changes People”, “Harry Truman”, and many others. I thought that success had sent his muse packing to a very nice and luxurious vacation somewhere, and that the 80s were a time where thinking Americans needed what he had once provided very desperately. Instead, he and his band fell under the spell of David Foster and started creating some very lovely “power ballads”, selling lots of copies of such deep political songs as “Hard To Say I’m Sorry”, “Stay The Night” and “Hard Habit To Break.” Thank God U2, REM, Bruce Hornsby, and the Phil Collins album with “Another Day In Paradise” happened to come along when they did — people with brains needed some lyrics to listen to. Lord know, Bobby Lamm took the train to the coast, and part of him left (maybe permanently) when Terry Kath died.

While love songs are awesome and meaningful, we need writers who can make an intelligent and powerful case for making the world a better place. We need the poets and bards and people willing to say “I am your leader, I am your guide” so that people can refind their direction.

Rich

One of the more prophetic lines from a “political song”… Here’s a lyric written in 1975 that fits in 2007….

“They’re building safer cars,
and rocket ships to Mars,
from men who’d sell us out
to get themselves a piece of power…”

“Harry Truman”, by Robert Lamm of Chicago

Then, his political muse went on permanent vacation

Rich

PS I think this thread has spawned a couple of ideas for new discussion threads: “political songs” and “guilty pleasures” to name a few.

Alas, a year later, and a fun topic is resurrected. Thanks, Nicos, for a) joining our little forum and b) for helping many of us revisit topics and giving us a new point of view.

What is the “State Of The Musical Union” a year later? Pretty much the same. A lot of artists and composers are working their butts off trying to make art, and some are even successful at it. I found a few interesting diamonds in the rough this year – one of the industry moguls of the day (Timbaland) unearthed a semi-obscure band called OneRepublic, remixed one of their tracks, and turned that sucker into a hit record. That led me to check out their other work, and I discovered some interesting and listenable music. In short, it’s still total dumb luck as to whether or not an artist’s work gets wide exposure. And, also like always, a lot of garbage floated to the top.

The one thing that struck me in the past year was the emergence of one single media and entertainment company as the dominant force in the music marketplace – Disney. And the new star of the day – Billy Ray Cyrus’s kid, playing the role of Hannah Montana.

This movement tends to beg a lot of questions that I don’t have the answer to:

• What will or has this done to the state of the art?[/*:m:fdf43]
• Is it good? Is it bad?[/*:m:fdf43]
• Does it make even the slightest bit of difference that they have eclipsed all of the “traditional” music companies?[/*:m:fdf43]
• Why did the “traditional” music companies get eclipsed? Is it because of online music piracy, the lack of new blockbuster acts, or just sheer lazy marketing on their part?[/*:m:fdf43]
• Does this open up a huge void that new indie music companies are in a position to fill?[/*:m:fdf43]
• Technology has certainly changed the distribution channels for music, and thus the flow of money. WIll it help or hurt the ability of an artist to create music and retain those legal and commercial rights necessary to finance more art creation? Has the old copyright paradigm been rendered obsolete?[/*:m:fdf43]

In short, where are we now? And where are we going?

Heck… am I reading this wrong and I’m just completely ignorant and full of schnitzel? Thoughts? Any and all are welcome. This is always a topic worth discussing.

Rich

David Day wrote:

A year later, we have Stacked Mary Possum, Un Poco Loco/Chant Song and Camp Meeting!

Life is good!

Have you had your “daily dose” of Stacked Mary Possum today? : 😆

Well, David, you have a point. I think it’s right on the top of your head 😆

Rich

“Where do we go from here?” – W. Cronkite, 7/20/1969, just after Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon.

David Day, in his marvelously audacious way, wrote:

Have you had your “daily dose” of Stacked Mary Possum today? : 😆

Actually…. yes, I did. And it was tasty as always. Thank you very much for the suggestion.

Rich

“The only thing I hope to never see is another possum in this tree playing possum” – L. Reed

This has been true for some time. As the focus of individual radio stations has narrowed, so has the focus (and thus, exposure) of so many listeners. The artist’s lot has become “work for years to put together enough material for a solid album that will have enough hits on it to sustain you, and then try to cram a promotional tour and the writing and recording of an entirely new album into the next year.” The development process is stunted almost from the start, and you end up getting hyper-formulaic second offerings in an effort to recapture whatever it was that you took years to do in the first place.

But,is this all that different from what has been in place all along? How many albums did the Beatles chunk out that were essentially recreations of their first album or what had been their live act going back to the bars in Hamburg? And they sandwiched all of that around endless touring. They were lucky enough to have had enough material to sustain the initial few years of insanity and moved enough product that they could earn the freedom in the studio that so many new artists these days expect from the get-go. It also didn’t hurt that they had a couple of guys who could write a new tune or two in a hurry, although that process changed from a cycle of “write, rehearse, rewrite, rehearse, play live, record’ to “write most of it, work out the arrangement in the studio while sorta rehearsing, record, play live (maybe)”.

Bruce followed a somewhat similar path. The first album (“The Way It Is”) was the product of years of schlepping around trying to get heard and signed. The second album (“Scenes From The Southside”) was a by-product of that in that many of the tunes were probably ready to be recorded when the first album was climbing the charts. Of all of the Bruce Hornsby albums, those two have the most similar sound. “Night On The Town” was different in that the songs sounded like ones that the band had hashed out on the road before going into the studio, and it feels more like a full band album than a Bruce-with-backing-musicians album. If Bruce hadn’t had material for the second album ready or nearly ready when the first one was doing its’ thing on the charts, the third one might never have happened.

For so many artists, it’s the second album that’s the key. I don’t know what the standard is these days, but it used to be that a new act got a 3-album contract. The first one was a roll of the dice and depended a lot on what material was ready and how well the artists acclimated themselves to a studio setting. The second one was often the big payoff album on the contract, and the third one only got promotion if the second album did OK. Unfortunately, if the second album did really well, the third one might have been assumed to not need all the promotion that it might get. Then, if it fell on its’ face for lack of hits or promotion, au revoir band, next…

I can think of a few examples from the 80s.

Mr. Mister’s first album was ok-ish. You could tell that there was something interesting going on, but it wasn’t quite there yet. Their second album, “Welcome To The Real World” was chock-full of hits and sold like a monster. The third album was artistically their best offering, but it didn’t have another “Broken Wings” or “Kyrie” on it, so the record companies didn’t know how to promote it and crossed their fingers that it would do OK because of residual “name” from the previous one. It tanked. They broke up.

The Bangles had a nice run. Their first album was kinda of a knock off of the GoGos, but it had “future promise.” They lived up to the promise on the second album, which had all of their biggest hits. The third album found them stretching artistcally, but only “Eternal Flame” was a hit, and they didn’t get a second contract. They broke up.

A&R development by the record companies seems to have long been just a myth, with the possible exception of a few isolated periods in the mid-to-late 60s or early 80s when a new generation of record execs would be taking over the helm at the companies and wanting to make their mark on the industry before retreating back to the safe confines of formula pop.

Rich