There hasn't been much of interest in pop music lately other than how rich Taylor Swift is going to be by the end of her tour. But that changed this week. And the interesting thing is, this really isn't what you would call "pop" music though it sure is popular:
If you want to read up on what this is about: Oliver Anthony’s Army Is Here to Stay.
We’re noticing that protest songs — and particularly protest songs coming from independent artists who aren’t affiliated with the corporate record industry, like the Tom MacDonalds and Bryson Grays, for example – are beginning to take over the music business.
That’s a good thing — because pop music is a wasteland, and the record industry as it currently stands deserves to be disrupted and crushed.
So when a former factory worker and off-the-grid farmer goes and buys a top-grade microphone and a resonator guitar and belts out a protest song for the ages for his YouTube followers, and the record industry has no part to play in his near-immediate viral success, it tells you that the little guy isn’t done fighting.
That's more about the political aspects, but to me, the musical ones are just as interesting. Here's the thing: what I dislike about current pop music is that it is a big budget, high-tech industrial product. A lot of songs are written by a team of Swedes who know what people want, i.e. something very similar to everything else they listen to. But one person with a guitar and a bit of creativity and something authentic he wants to say really can be more powerful aesthetically than any amount of industrialized product. Music is not a frozen fish stick or a designer t-shirt. It is, at its best, the expression of an individual human soul. And some things I really like about this story is that Oliver Anthony is not signed with a record company and said this about his career plans:
"People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off 8 million dollar offers. I don't want 6 tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don't want to play stadium shows, I don't want to be in the spotlight."
For another take on the phenomenon, here is the New York Times: How ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Reached the Top of the Charts
“Rich Men North of Richmond” sold 147,000 downloads in its first week, more than 10 times the sales of Mr. Combs’s “Fast Car,” the No. 2 song on the overall singles chart. Mr. Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” benefited from a similar surge last month, with just 822 downloads the week before its music video became a culture war battleground, according to Luminate. Following the backlash, the track sold 228,000 copies.
Mr. Anthony, who did not respond to requests for comment, has attempted to float above the political fray. “I sit pretty dead center down the aisle on politics and always have,” he said in an introductory video posted to YouTube earlier this month.
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What Spatial Audio Can and Cannot Do for Classical Music
Whether you’re focusing on a stray slide-guitar accent in the Dolby Atmos mix of Taylor Swift’s “Mine (Taylor’s Version)” or appreciating the serrated details of brass-arrangement filigree in Frank Zappa’s vintage “Big Swifty,” the idea is to bring the souped-up, three-dimensional feel of large-speaker arrays into your ears.
But classical music was there decades ago. Deutsche Grammophon and the Philips label both experimented with “Quadraphonic” — or four-channel releases — in the 1970s.
Yes, I had a 4 channel setup in the early 70s but it never really seemed worth the effort.
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Why settle for a recorder when you could wield a contrabass clarinet – or something you invented yourself? Meet the players drawn to the unusual.
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Piece Hall: Is this hidden architectural gem UK's best gig venue?
The Piece Hall, the world's only remaining Georgian cloth hall, is becoming a sought-after venue for global artists to perform at. Why is this little-known, architectural triumph in West Yorkshire captivating so many almost 250 years after it was built?
Jessie Ware likened it to playing a gig in Venice.
James's frontman Tim Booth agreed - it was as if he was on an open-air stage at an Italian piazza, the crowd roaring back at him on a truly memorable summer's evening.
As someone who has played in a few Italian piazzas, especially the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, I'm in complete agreement!
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Here's another tune by Oliver Anthony that is getting a lot of attention:
Here is a charming lute duet that I must have played with a hundred students:
How about a guitar duet:
The Anthony song is a lot of i-VI-III-VII Axis variant progression. If that's not pop in harmonic terms I don't know what is. Sure, the "vibe" seems rootsy but rootsy vibe in pop goes back to the dawn of recorded music. Karl Hagstrom Miller pointed out in Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow that bracketing out styles based on how "authentic" they were along race categories was in the practice of the business. Marion Try Slaughter (stage name Vernon Dalhart) was trained in classical music and wanted to be an opera singer. Being from the South was a bit of an impediment to an opera career but he did famously well as a country singer using a variety of pseudonyms.
ReplyDeleteAlternately, Lonnie Johnson used to play "light classical" with his family before the influenza epidemic killed many of them and there were reports Mississippi John Hurt was known to perform opera excerpts but the industry was eager to basically pigeon-hole these country and blues artists as just that, country and blues artists. Hagstrom Miller went through accounts of a tension between the versatility of the country and blues performers on the road at medicine shows and what the nascent recording industry decided they ought to be famous for.
Which is not exactly casting aspersion on aspirations to or claims of authenticity, more an observation that authenticity is, to put it rather bluntly, constructable and milieu-specific.
reading the song as a kind of right-wing dog whistle is not a surprise in the realm of, say, NPR, but this long-form on the Anthony song deals more with the lack of transparency in the music industry regarding monetization and how what gets measured at what level influences what is regarded as a hit
ReplyDeletehttps://thenewinquiry.com/blog/american-sajaegi/
Thanks for adding some context and especially for the Sajaegi link which filled in a lot of blanks for me in just how the economics of the business work these days.
ReplyDeletewas on something of a spree this weekend at the blog. Saw a few pieces on music online and it got me thinking of Rob C Wegman's overview of the crisis of mensural polyphony from 1470 to 1530 and the irony of how the thing that stopped Catholic reformists from stamping out mensural polyphony was the Lutheran revolt.
ReplyDeletehttps://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-sprawling-links-for-weekend-post.html
It also is a bit of a counterpoint (pun intended as unavoidable) to Philip Ewell's contention music theory in the U.S. has been framed by white supremacist 19th century deification of a dozen German composers. I don't contest THAT part, I actually agree with him, but the intra-guild elitism and snobbery of professional musicians has a long pedigree and Rob Wegman did a good job of explaining the egregious bad faith slander professional musicians made that their "enemies" hated music across the board. They didn't, but they did object to what they regarded as incomprehensible shrieking in Latin that didn't benefit ordinary churchgoers that was bankrolled on the system of indulgences to provide musicians who often got their jobs via simony to serve clergy who used purgatory as a way to leverage money for posh cultural display.
This discussion nicely illustrates the ever-shifting and complicated social world professional musicians have always hat to navigate to get paid. It seems to have always been a very competitive market, requiring both musical and social skills, and often helped by connections but never devoid of genuine skill requirements. Seems like a pretty tough way to make a living!
ReplyDeleteBeing an adult learner with only amateur aspirations, I manage to duck all that, though sometimes my practicing suffers when I'm too tired from laboring all day and running a house (and son) in my off hours. Luckily I seem most attracted to music that is hardly for an audience: consort music and small early music ensembles. The social dimension here is mostly in the playing itself, making music in a house and doing it as participatory activity rather than a public performance. Good thing, because my progress is so slow that nobody would pay to hear me, nor even keep much attention. But learning to be a better musician as I look ahead to retirement has become, aside from trying to set up my son to be alright after I'm gone, my biggest goal in life, a continuous journey for its own sake, purely for the love of music, market and popular tastes completely irrelevant to me.
Had I been more focused as a child, understood the need to practice and focus, perhaps I would have aspired to be a professional musician. But instead I wasted my life! Trying to fix what's left of it, and enjoying the way serious musicians talk about music and culture. Thanks Bryan (and Wenatchee), some of my favorite discussions are right here at The Music Salon!
You're not kidding it's a tough way to make a living. I think you have a pretty good situation Will--you enjoy music without having to make a living at it. My life path was different: I achieved a modest amount of success, enough so that I was hired to run the guitar department in a conservatory and later start a guitar program at a university. But the sad truth is that this "success" just enabled me to struggle, year after year, with a minimal salary until I finally packed it in. My post-career career has been more productive and, frankly, I enjoy music more! It's a tough life for most professional musicians.
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