Category: Music

Posted on

Where Does All That Pop Shit Come From?

It comes from here.

Max Martin produces shit.  Garbage.  Antiseptic mush.  Tripe.  Poop.  Muzak.

[Rick Beato on the same subject.]

Ever wonder why most contemporary pop music has all the distinguishing hallmarks of a wet noodle?  This is why:  Max Martin, and his ilk.  Producers who take whatever creativity and originality remains within a young singer’s aspirational heart and sticks it into a pencil sharpener and grinds it into slivers of febrile strings and then hits it with a flame-thrower and finally shreds it into a box of saturated kitty litter: here, audience, is your dinner.

The Beatles were wrong.  Neil Young was wrong.  Bob Dylan was wrong.  Jimi Hendrix was wrong.  Paul Simon was wrong.  Tom Waits was wrong.  John Prine was way, way wrong.

All of them created distinctive, original music out of their own minds and experiences and intelilgent, thoughtful personalities, and crafted the recordings in collaboration with sympathetic studio producers and sympatigo musicians whose personalities merged into a distinctive entity with personality, mind, and purpose.  They jammed.  They worked alone in dark rooms to imagine words and notes.  They tried out whacky ideas.  But always, always the artists were the masterminds, the creative force behind the songs, the originators and inventors of the work.

If you believe in Max Martin, they should never have done that.  They should have hired a snare drum consultant, a vocal consultant, an Autotune consultant, an echo consultant, a reverb consultant, a D chord consultant, and consultants for all the other chords, and all the notes, and all the knobs on the recording console, each of them committed to optimizing the one mechanical component of the hit record, based entirely on the previous hit and the next hit and all of the future hits that can be promoted and packaged and Spotified and shoved down the tiktokky throats of 12-year-old girls everywhere.  “Picks up the rice in the church where her wedding has been”?  No, no, no:  “Mmmmph ooommm zommminisa, oompah, bahm bahm bahm, auoooooo!”  Yes, yes, yes: those syllables sound moomy.  Swirl them, swish them, lick them.  It’s the sound, not the content!

His roster of customers is a who’s who of mediocrity:  Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Bon Jovi, Celine Dione, ‘N Sync, Pink, Adele, Kesha.  Did you have thoughts about admiring Taylor Swift’s phenomenal “talent”?   We won’t know if she really has any: she is a Martin collaborator.  All she has to do is stand in front of a Neumann microphone in a recording studio and fart and Martin will turn it into a gigantic three-alarm hit, the fucking Grammy people will give her an award, and the sponsors will elbow each other aside to line up at her ass. That means her music is not the product of her imagination or talent or inspiration.  It is the product of a faceless mechanism that doesn’t even need her.

Joe Coscerelli, the author of this suck-up, should be journalistically disbarred for the incredible facetiousness of comparing Martin to Lennon and McCartney, because, you know, the only thing important to compare is sales of hit singles.

“It’s staggering when you see it all together,” said Barry Weiss, a friend and veteran record executive who is also a producer of “& Juliet.” “You can legitimately say Max has had a 20- or 25-year fertile period as a writer. The Beatles were what, eight years?”

“Staggering”?   Seriously?  Seriously?!  You seriously want us to believe that this manufacturer of interchangeable non-descript jingles has had a career that should be thought of as “staggering”, and this output rivals the Beatles, except for more than twice the duration?

Barry Weiss isn’t out of his mind.  He has precisely the mind-set of a music industry executive who doesn’t give even one tiny little fuck about genuine artistic quality or originality.

Martin’s mentor “was not a musician in the traditional sense but began developing a system in which songs were written more like television shows” and that sounds exactly right.  Like “Friends” and “Saved by the Bell” and “Family Matters” in which the entire scripts have been jettisoned in favor of Jaleel White screaming “did I do that?!”  (Urkel is obviously Bill Cosby’s real personality exposed.)

Here’s a sample of his genius:

You’re the one that I ever needed/Show me love and what it’s all about.

Yes, now you see where that crap comes from.  A Swedish songwriter who believes songs should have feelings but not “content” as if a song that avoids content doesn’t have a meaning.  It does.  It means you are a cog in the machinery of exploitation and anesthetization.  And eccentric, idiosyncratic elements of taste you develop are the enemy of Martin’s product.

More drivel from Pink:

The singer Pink, who has worked with Martin for more than 15 years, called him “a closet punk rocker,” who is “very unique in how he can break you down and pull you apart and then put you back together in exactly the right syncopation, down to the second. He knows how to take your mess and make it feel good in people’s bodies.”

Martin’s music is a psychotropic drug that activates a few cells in your somnambulant brain and massages a few loose spirals of squishy ego until you feel all better until you don’t.

Martin is clueless about his own actual identity, or is he?

“Sometimes I question, like, ‘OK, what do I do?’ I make three minutes of sound. What’s the point?” he said.

No, he does know, on some blank level, that all he does is produce “three minutes of sound” and he has asked the right question.  What is the point of this shit?  But he’s lying.  The point is to make a lot of money.  The sales, the popularity of his work, is meaningless– it’s all about selling units to units.  Now he has a musical, which is the masturbatory equivalent of Linda Ronstadt doing an album of jazz standards.  It’s a joke that the “artist” himself is not aware of.

 

Posted on

Fat is Thin, White is Black, Music is Noise, Art is Shit

There inevitably comes a point at which some clever writer or critic seeking prominence will proclaim that contrary to established opinion, this shitty artist or musician is actually great and should be adored but only us truly sophisticated or pure thinks can appreciate the utter brilliance of the man or woman or fish.

And it’s usually bullshit.

Justin Bieber really is a genius.   Michael Jackson actually matters.  Look at how many records Paul McCartney has sold.  Frank Sinatra — the phrasing, the world-weariness!  Leonardo DiCaprio’s desperate commitment to his roles!

We’re all supposed to go, oh yes, I’m cool, I can see how the contempt for that artist is just snobbery.  Andy Kim really does belong in the Canadian song-writers Hall of Fame for “Sugar Sugar”, along with Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.   That guest on CBC’s “Q” that Tom Powers is desperately sucking up to (“Is it possible that you are so great that it actually works against you?” and “when did you first realize that you were a genius?”).

 

Posted on

Monkee See

Here’s the well known story about the Monkees:

In the mid 1960’s– 1966, to be more precise– Screen Gems decided that a TV show inspired by (read– copied from) the Beatles’ movies “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night”– might be a hit.  They already had a young British singer and potential heart-throb Davy Jones under contract so they put out an ad in Variety looking for young male singers/actors and held auditions. They ended up with a couple of actual musical artists in Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, and a singer Mickey Dolenz.  They were hired as employees of Screen Gems and put to work.

The whole project was a typical piece of exploitive corporate derivative trash.  It was conceived of as trash, executed as trash, and will never not be be trash, no matter how much nostalgia one wafts over it.  It catered to the most manipulable segment of the television audience, adolescents and pre-teens.

The original sin of this project was Screen Gems trying– not too, too hard– to make it look like the Monkees were a real band.  They tried to hide the fact that the musicians on their first album were all paid studio ringers, though the vocals were provided by the actual Monkees.  On the TV show, the Monkees pretended to be playing their instruments as they performed the songs.  They were also pretending to sing, but that goes without saying– almost every piece of dreck at the time used studio recordings dubbed over the video of the performance, even on American Bandstand and Hullabaloo.  (Ed Sullivan was, generally, the rare exception.)

The boys did record the vocals, in a studio.  Producer Don Kirshner quickly discovered that they had to bring the boys in one at a time or they would clown around endlessly and run up expensive studio time without getting a decent take down.

Here’s the popular conception about it today: the Monkees really wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and they complained bitterly that the studio, led by a crass producer, Don Kirshner, wouldn’t let them.  Most writers about the issue today are sympathetic to the band members.  They were oppressed and exploited by Screen Gems and their talents cruelly repressed.

Because, after all, they really were a great band.

Let’s get that out of the way for a moment: the Monkees were a shallow pop band of no artistic significance whatsoever.   Like ABBA and Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy and the Partridge Family, they were a product, shallow, derivative, inane, and trivial.  The studio musicians used on the recordings were competent– sometimes excellent– but they were interchangeable parts of a complex of almost mechanical production.

(I saw a recent interview with Bobby Hart, one half of one of the song-writing teams that wrote songs for the band, and he was quietly lobbying for more respect by insisting that “Last Train to Clarksville” was actually a protest song because the narrator had been drafted and was going to Clarksville to be sent overseas: “I don’t know if I’m ever coming home”.  Yeah.  Deep.)

They began to believe their own press.  They became delusional, attributing their popularity to something magical they had in themselves, outside of the entertainment complex that nurtured and managed and exploited them.

I am not sympathetic.  I absolutely believe that Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, and Davy Jones, and Mickey Dolenz should have been completely free to not sign contracts with Screen Gems, not audition for them, and embark on musical careers on their own, play gigs, rehearse, practice, go to New York, whatever they want.  On their own.  Without the massive and overwhelming support of the Hollywood machinery that made them famous.

Nesmith might well have had a career.  He had money– his mother invented Liquid Paper (that’s a whole other era!) and time.  Tork was somewhat known as a solo artist in New York, though I doubt he would ever have become famous.  Dolenz and Jones were not going to have an impact anywhere, though Jones might have made it on TV as a Bobby Sherman type teen heartthrob for as long as it lasts.  They were all born on third base and thought they hit a triple.

But this righteous indignation!  If I had been in Kirshner’s position (as much as I despise him), I would have fired them all and enthusiastically encouraged them to go for it: embark on careers in the music industry and fulfill your heart’s most passionate desires, to write songs and perform with your instruments, and the best of luck to you.

Does that mean we won’t be on TV in prime time every week for a couple of years?  Well, no: that’s the job you turned down.

That is not what you were hired for.  And that’s not the agreement that was signed.  You voluntarily signed up to be actors in a contrived, derivative TV program.  Then you decided you wanted to be co-creators of the TV show for which you were hired as actors.   The creative jobs were already taken when you signed on.  Good bye.

It is unseemly to take advantage of the monumental publicity apparatus Screen Gems provided them and the privileged access it gave you and declare that, as someone else observed, you really are Vulcans.*

It’s similar in some ways to Hilary Clinton running for president.  Yes, she may have been cute and had a great hair-style, but she obtained the platform from which to run by virtue of being married to Bill Clinton, who did start from nothing, built a career as a local politician and then a governor, acquired a stable of donors to fund a presidential run, and ran for and won the presidency.  He gave you some high-profile jobs in his administration– and a lot of privileged connections– which you leveraged into a Senate run and then a run for the presidency which, against all odds, you lost, to an idiot, the worst candidate for president in 200 years.

She may have been smart.  She may have been as qualified as any other presidential candidate in recent history.  But there really are lots of those around.  She was the fucking wife of a former president who leveraged her privileged access to the corridors of party politics to push herself to the front of the line.

  • * Peter Tork stated:  “The Monkees creating the album Headquarters was like Leonard Nimoy becoming a Vulcan”.  Here.

 

 

 

Posted on

Kicking the Crack

Once in a while I just want to rant about some long-standing irritant.

A few years ago, Leonard Cohen– whom I deeply admire– issued an album with a song on it (called “Anthem”) with the lyric:  “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in”.  Many people I know have quoted this line to me– nodding their head as if in deep contemplation– as if it is profound or beautiful or deep.

Here’s the whole context:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It’s not a great line.  It’s not even good.  It’s lame.  It’s a Hallmark Card of pseudo-profundity, and emblematic of Cohen’s exhausted talents at this stage of his career.  Nothing on any of his recent albums is as remotely interesting as his splendid earlier songs like “Suzanne”, “The Bell”, “Chelsea Hotel”, or “Famous Blue Raincoat”,  or “The Future”, or “If it be Your Will”.

I thought of it today as I was listening to the Bare Naked Ladies cover of “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Bruce Cockburn, and these lyrics arrived:

Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.

I thought, aha: that’s the same idea as Cohen’s crack about crack, but far more beautifully expressed.  The word “bleeds” gives it a more visceral punch.  The word “kick” alludes to desperation.

Cockburn never rose to the level of Cohen at his best, but he has written some exquisite songs and his musical skills are far more impressive.

Posted on

An Alarming Digital Theft

We live in an age of digital theft, though not the kind you think of.  The real digital theft is committed mostly by companies like Google and Meta that steal your data and then resell it back to you in the form of advertising.

But some digital theft feels more like highway robbery, as in this story in the Times about some humble folk artists who were robbed of the ownership of their own original songs.

No one should be surprised that there is theft, even of intellectual property.  What is disconcerting is how difficult it is to reclaim ownership of the stolen property.  Our “system” of publication and distribution of intellectual property is clumsy and defective.

But I believe the genie is out of the bottle on this issue.

 

Posted on

Divas about Divas

Join us for SIX: The Musical, a 90-minute extravaganza inspired by the queens of pop – Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Jennifer Lopez, and Rihanna.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a less promising enticement.  I’m impressed though at the remarkable collection of seven of the most inconsequential talents in the pop universe, seven of the singers I would least likely want to hear, all of them making extensive use of Autotune, all of them products, all of them narcissists of the highest order.

On the same day, someone else on Facebook posted a photo of Taylor Swift at some football game with the comment that she did not “ask” to be on TV at the football game.

On the contrary, all she does is “ask” to be on TV.

 

Posted on

Music Industry Reform

The music industry is structured to rip off artists and fans. It’s time the government legislated minimum standards for all recording contracts specifically to prevent companies from charging artists for ancillary services they are actually providing to themselves, and to guarantee minimum royalties per unit sold regardless of advances. Producers should also be prohibited from seizing co-writing credits for songs they record even if they suggest specific arrangements and instrumentation. And yes, break up the ticket agent monopolies so that venues and artists are free to choose the lowest cost agencies. Every recording on which the singer is auto-tuned (which is almost all of them now) should be labelled as such so we can tell who really is a good singer and who is just processed noise.

And it should be illegal to claim that ABBA was ever really anything more than a banal pop band.

Posted on

On Dylan’s First Album

One of the most astute comments I ever did see on early Dylan:

“These debut songs are essayed with differing degrees of conviction,” writes music critic Tim Riley in 1999, “[but] even when his reach exceeds his grasp, he never sounds like he knows he’s in over his head, or gushily patronizing … Like Elvis Presley, what Dylan can sing, he quickly masters; what he can’t, he twists to his own devices. And as with the Presley Sun sessions, the voice that leaps from Dylan’s first album is its most striking feature, a determined, iconoclastic baying that chews up influences, and spits out the odd mixed signal without half trying.”

From “Inside the World of Rock” posted to Facebook, 2024-03-20.

My second quote of the day, from the NYTimes, on South Dakota Governor Kristi Noemi, who appears to be grooming herself for a shot at Trump’s VP:

This approach to political image-making has its roots in the pantomimed femininity of Phyllis Schlafly and Sarah Palin, where the promise of a powerful woman was defanged by her participation in the pageantry of traditional gender cosplay.

NY Times

Wonderful.

Posted on

Mumblecore

This is my response to a Facebook post praising actor Tim Robbins, especially for his super, mega, amazing role in “The Shawshank Redemption”–a highly over-rated film that substitutes the outward trappings of “significance” for real depth.  (Watch “Cool Hand Luke” for a film that really is what “Shawshank” thinks it is.)

Here it is:

It’s called “method acting” and I cringe every time I encounter it in a film. Makes me love British actors and others who speak in normal tone. The delusion is that, by mumbling, you latch into some kind of elusive authenticity or, better yet, convince everyone that you’re like Brando. (Brando could get away with method because he really was a very good actor at times.)

Devotees of the method will even mumble, absurdly, when speaking into large crowds or from distance. It’s like you believe that if you use the same plates and silverware as a gourmet restaurant your food will be just as good.

My comments on Reddit about the magnificent opulence of John Williams movie soundtracks:

I know I’m a minority (sigh) but I don’t think there is a single piece of music by Williams that moves me. Most of it reminds me of brass bands in parades. Most of it is pretty similar– individual pieces never stand out to me. In movies, Williams provides big crescendos to tell you to be impressed by the director, and the quantity of movement in the scene (armies, machines). Does he have a single melody you could say is “haunting”?

Music in movies that did move me: Yann Tierson (“Amelie”); Ennio Morricone “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. Maurice Jarre (“Doctor Zhivago”), Nino Rota (“The Godfather”). The theme from “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Elmer Bernstein is quite beautiful and lifts the movie. The music from “The Third Man” is not my favorite but it is at least very distinctive.  Far more distinctive and evocative than Williams.