Before the music dies
Posted by matt_cochr on 8 June 2008 - 4:25pm.
Apparently there is a film coming called "Before the Music Dies" I stumbled upon it's promo site which has a number of excerpts from the film.
Whilst I know there have been various articles in The Word about the effect of Autotune and studio technology on pop, here it is demonstrated in no uncertain terms.
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Turds in 'can be polished after all' shock...
That was depressing, but very revealing.
This refers to the dubious...
use of Auto-Tune in the studio.
But ever since the dawn of time...
...studio hacks have been writing songs for telegenic young girls to sing. How do you think Motown was run? Dusty Springfield didn't write all her songs, did she? All those masterpieces produced by Phil Spector happened in precisely the same way the song in this clip is happening. The difference is this one isn't very good - and that doesn't seem to bother any of the people responsible for it.
I hate the attitude, exemplified by the woman at the top of the clip, that "real music" is music written by the musician. More often than not music written by the musician is dull and derivative. It's only the exceptions who are really good at it.
All those landfill indie groups write and perform their own songs and they're every bit as tiresome as the tune here.
And let's not forget. . .
that what for some people is the greatest album ever made, Pet Sounds, was pieced together from unfinished musical doodles that Brian Wilson had lying around, bolting on lyrics penned by an advertising copywriter he called in for the project - a relationship that was identical in every respect to a client briefing his ad agency. As soon as the album was done, Asher went back to knocking out jingles for cereals.
The other Beach Boys, of course, just came in from a tour, sang what they were told and then went back out on the road again - basically acting as the product's sales force.
There's nothing wrong with delegation of talent...
when making records, in fact many of my favourites were made in this way (Spector, Motown, Elvis). The trouble is that I don't believe the professional songwriters, producers and engineers working today are in the same league as their forebears in the 1950s and 1960s. The crutial difference is that when Holland-Dozier-Holland were writing songs to order for particular acts, they were so good at their jobs that the songs didn't end up sounding like they were coming off a conveyor belt. And this was also because of the excellence of the Motown house band, who could energize any song they were working on and stop it from sounding formulaic. And furthermore, the acts they were writing for were great singers with lots of personality and charisma.
The problem with a lot of modern studio technology is that it removes any trace of personality from a performance, as is shown in the clip above, in which Auto-Tune is used to correct the pitch of a frankly hopeless singer. The mistakes and happy accidents that used to occur in the record-making process (and contributed so much to the individuality of a performance) are being erased with the click of a mouse on a computer screen. And as has been discussed elsewhere on this site, records have started to sound indistinguishable from one another because of the standardisation of the methods by which they are being made.
Yeah...
...that's the argument that gets my goat with people who criticise Elvis- all those people that moan about how he covered other people's music. I've heard most of the original versions and Elvis' are often substantially different anyway. Almost all the great 60s bands started off covering other people's tunes too.
'Landfill indie' is right on the money, I find it dull as ditchwater too.
Smoke And Mirrors
I'm not so sure it's depressing. The music industry has always been about such things. The technology makes it easier, but as soon as multi-track recording was available recording wasn't honest. And even before then, how many great records exist where the band didn't even play on them? There's a long history of session players standing in for the real band.
I'd sooner have a shiny turd
....as in an honest good production job, where the craft of polishing up the gloss is acknowledged, whether Phil Spector or Pete Waterman, Trevor Horn or Chinnichap, than , say, the lo fi glory of Daniel Johnston. (But, ever paradoxically, Ice Cream Man by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers is still a stunna!)
Slips of things and middle-aged men
When Jerry Wexler took Aretha Franklin to Memphis, he was 50 and she was 25.
Not "real music" then. Glad we've got that cleared up.
When people start talking about songs...
"hitting three million radio airspins", am I the only person that finds his skin starts to crawl?
The title's put me in a bad mood before I've even seen it
Why, oh, why do people equate "music" with "the record industry"? It's like equating "food" with "the franchise- restaurant industry". People will continue to make and listen to music without record companies and agents and royalty systems just as people continue to make and eat food without Happy Meals, Whoppers and Egg McMuffins.
We've been told before that downloading is "killing music", but now "music" is apparently dying because 45-year-old men are artificially making people sound better than they actually do.
Two words occur to me in response: boll and ocks. As long as there's a kid singing "Baa Baa Black Sheep" in the bath somewhere, then music is as healthy as it's ever been.
By any other name
It's just the name of the film. I'm often lacking in inspiration to title these threads of discussion on here.
That's what I meant
It put me off seeing the documentary, not reading the thread!
Sorry for the confusion.
More gripes
Kacy Crowley, the girl at the beginning of the clip, has a quote from an unnamed 'record industry executive' on the homepage of her website that describes her as "Bob Dylan with tits". Lovely.
Complaining that songs written by professional songwriters are somehow less honest than the "real music" penned by actual performers is nonsense. And the reason Jewel is a much greater success than Cowley is because she knows this.
Erykah Badu's hair is great, mind.
songwriting
why is it that this snobbery of having to write your own songs exists? Didn't musicians like the Stones and the Beatles only get bullied into it by their managers because the big money is in the publishing?
It is one of the most instructive elements of the story of pop..
...that the first three acts to make writing their own material a priority were all very very good at it.
That's Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richard and Bob Dylan.
The overwhelming majority of people who came afterwards weren't very good at it but that didn't stop them.
Andrew Oldham says he locked Mick and Keith in a room and made them write "Tell Me" because he was fed up of them recording Beatles covers.
Bob Dylan always saw it as priority. Hence the appearance of Artie Mogul in "No Direction Home" claiming, with some justification, to have been the man who made Bob Dylan a star. Dylan's songs were big successes for people like Trini Lopez and Peter, Paul & Mary long before they were successes for him.
Fiona Apple
Crap songwriter (Criminal is a great song and Paper Bag is okay but everything else is pretty poor) but a good, if limited, performer.
A shame they see her as a singer-songwriter as she would be much better giving up the writing and just performing other peoples songs.
Leonard Co...
at.
Isn't it
a lot to do with the changing times in the sixties, the decline of deference - I am going to do what I want, which then led to rock music? It was an inevitable change that can't really be reversed. Many songwriters then chose to perform their own material rather than give it to someone else. And a lot of the appeal of that music is in how it is performed and how personal it is, and the particular sound that was achieved, almost sometimes more than in the songwriting. Very few covers of Dylan and Beatles are as good as the originals - one or two maybe. In fact I can only think of Hendrix - All Along The Watchtower.
Meanwhile manufactured pop and written for teeny-bopper type pop continued and does to this day and sometimes great records appear from there too. I would make a distinction between that and the kind of music performed by the artist who wrote it primarily for self-expression, like much 'rock' - they are different things.
And as for rock, well like any art form there are very very few who are really exceptional practitioners.
Performer Vs songwriter
It's great that you can have people involved in the performance end of the music business who don't write songs and concentrate on performing them. It's also great that you have some people who can write great songs but might not be the best people to perform them.
But if someone can't sing, can't play an instrument and can't write music or lyrics, in what way are they an artist in a musical sense?
More to the point, doesn't Autotune and related technologies render more than half of the Pop Idol/ X-Factor decision-making process pointless? Pick the person who looks interesting and has some kind of personality - you can fix the musical stuff in the studio.
Sorry to be a reactionary
Sorry to be a reactionary fart, but isn't there a danger of going too far with this technology-fixing thing?
Okay, I can happily go with the idea that it matters not a jot if you write your own stuff, but surely it's not too much to ask that you might be able to actually sing and not be completely tone deaf?
Autotune when used to correct errors as egregious as those on display is the equivalent of getting Paris Hilton to star in your movie and then CGI'ing her lips because she can't act. Why not just get someone who can act in the first place?
Would The Word have employed Kate Mossman if she couldn't handle basic sentence construction..?!
Going back to music, is there really a global shortage of people who are photogenic and personable (which again rules out Hilton) and able to master the basics of singing? I can't believe there is.
"Going back to music, is
"Going back to music, is there really a global shortage of people who are photogenic and personable (which again rules out Hilton) and able to master the basics of singing? I can't believe there is."
There isn't but the big difference between some of those and the good looking non-musicians is that those with some ability quite often think that puts them in the 'real musician' category. Not quite so malleable for those 'evil svengalis' that run things!
Look at how quickly the production line puppets disappear after they start to get involved in the writing. I suspect it has less to do with them being talented or not and more to do with the management/production teams wanting to maintain their royalties.