Music Banter

I mentioned the Ten Tracks Project in a previous post, and said I should really say more about this. It’s a fantastic initiative, one of those interesting new ways for a fucked music industry to somehow connect and reinvigorate a music-buying audience.

Here’s what they do: they’ve convinced record companies to offer us monthly bundles of ten tracks for a quid. That’s ten pence a song. Not bad, eh?

Everyone knows the situation the music industry’s in- thanks to the internet, last.fm, spotify, myspace, youtube and a million other legal-and-otherwise portals, no-one’s buying music. Interestingly, a lot of really good music is still being made. I have to say, I feel that my local music scene is getting better and better, and friends of mine across the UK are saying exactly the same thing.

It’s also true that more and more bands are keeping their musical projects in the realm of hobby, not career. That’s often a pragmatic decision, more than anything else. After all, how is anyone going to make any money doing this?

Here’s one way; make the music you offer, cheaper. And that’s what they’ve done here.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the truth is that the cost of production has gone down. People aren’t buying physical copies of albums any more, because they feel like a rip-off. No-one who knows anything about the way the internet works thinks that £12.99 or whatever a CD costs these days (see, I don’t even KNOW!) is a fair price. As a result, no-one buys anything at all.

Well, this is a way forward. It’s something of a win-win situation- the record companies get to package new artists they want to push along with bigger and more established names, we get to hear new music which we may or may not like, and we get a lot of it for a decent price. The artists benefit, too- we’d only be downloading their tracks for free, otherwise, if we heard them at all. It also fills an interesting loop that something Spotify misses- it’s easier to find new music this way, as that’s what a record company wants to push your way. I’m fine with that- I can live with the fact that a record company wants its artists to be heard. I want to hear them too, as long as it’s not a rip-off, and they’re not being forced down my throat through advertising.

The end result is, I’ve just downloaded 15 tracks for less than the price of a pint. Record companies have put new music in front of an enthusiastic listener without paying out for adverts in the NME, bribing and schmoozing their way onto some radio playlist or other, or anything else.

I’ll listen to these tracks. If I like the bands, I might buy more of them. If I don’t, well, they already got some cash from me. Now, what am I? Nothing, really. Just one person. But when this grows, well, the sky’s the limit, isn’t it?

So, it’s January and all those lists of ‘best song’, ‘best album’, ‘most memorable haircut’, ‘ooh, do you remember that time in April when’, ‘and what sold the most eh?’ and so on are finally over.

Aren’t they?

Well, not really. January’s music journalism, both in print and online, is dominated by a different kind of list, this time prospective instead of retrospective. They tend to have names like ‘up and coming’ or ‘ten to watch’ and represent the music industry’s attempt to cue up the next shiny slice of product for us to consume through our greedy ear-mouths. They are also, very often, terrible.

See, this is January. The month where NOTHING HAPPENS. It’s where record companies release dud albums in the hope of maximising return because there’s cack all decent to buy instead. Plus, no-one’s going to buy anything because we’re all in hibernation, miserable and skint from the pointless yearly orgy of over-consumption, excessively-priced disposable consumer novelties like the Mr T Keyring or whatever the fuck was supposed to be a fun stocking filler this year. No-one has a clue what’s going on.

And that’s where record companies step in. They think they can plan ahead. ‘Set the Agenda.’ ‘Prime the Marketplace.’ That kind of bollocks, you know what I’m talking about. These lists are carefully crafted piles of overhyped toss, the latest fad-chasing committee-approved nonsense that is destined to flare brightly, if at all, and then vanish entirely without trace as the music-listening public moves on to something that’s actually interesting.

Take the BBC’s ‘BBC Sound of 2010′, for example. Please, take it.

Oh, my sides.
Here’s the list, and I can scarcely conceive of a more pointless collection of mediocrity. Honestly, let’s just go through the top five. I couldn’t bear to go any deeper, and I don’t think you could as well;

Ellie Goulding: A pointless vocodered nonentity with no semblance of a tune or hook, no personality beyond a big wooly hat, and nothing to reccomend her to anyone ever. I’ve already forgotten her and I’m watching the video as I type.

Marina and The Diamonds: a part Greek, part Welsh, all-dickwad singer who sings in a dreadful faux-cockney album and seems to have been conceived as a kind of demographic-spanning combination of Katy Perry, Kate Nash, Little Boots, and god knows who, Gwen Stefani or someone shit like that? She openly admits to having auditioned for girl bands, but having ‘progressed’ beyond that. Bollocks. She’s as manufactured as Joe McElderry, and is being chucked out there because someone at Sony noticed that quirky girl singer-songwriters are ‘in.’ Cretins. Oh, and that jumper she is wearing is supposed to make her look ironic and relaxed about her image, but you just know it was picked out by her manager from a selection of the Ten Worst Jumpers Ever. NEXT!

Delphic, an oh-so-original Manchester band who say they want to shake up ‘stagnant indie’ by combining dance and rock. I was going to call them Twenty years out of Date, but actually it’s more like twenty-six, if you consider that Blue Monday was released on Factory Records (from where again- oh, Manchester!) in March 1983. This is about as cutting edge as Hank Marvin. Next!

Hurts are two shop mannequins doing electro-pop, who sound like OMD only twice as tedious. I literally cannot think of anything more worth saying about them.

the Drums are the first band featured here to have anything resembling a tune, but the thing is it’s not a very good one. This bunch of slackjawed tosspots are ‘on a selfish quest to make beautiful music,’ apparently, which is a shame as they’ve not really progressed much beyond looking a bit like the Jesus and Mary Chain, staring vacantly at the camera and playing shitty deliberately lo-fi faux-credible faux-Velvets toss. ‘I felt stupid’? You fucking sounded and looked stupid too. Twats.

I could go on but it’ll be better for all of us if I don’t. I’ll ask a question instead; is this really the best that 2010 has to offer us?

No. Of course it isn’t. The real sound of 2010 is still out there, waiting to be heard. Possibly waiting to be made. People will make their own choice, they always do. There’ll be great surprises out there, too.

I can guarantee you too, that when December rolls round and the last lists of the year are written, these first lists will have been utterly forgotten.

Not the most original of headlines, I admit, but I’ve recently been shown further proof. Want to see?

I don’t think you should, you know. Really, it’s not a good idea.

Oh, ok then, you young rock and roll rebels. Here it is;

You think I’m selling time? I’m not, I’m selling my dignity.

Yes, that’s right, Iggy Pop, the leather-skinned elastic monster of rock and roll abandon, Mr Lust for Life himself, has whored himself out on a car insurance ad. What kind of world are we in where this is allowed? I mean, really. Surely they can’t be paying him that much money, can they?

The whole sorry thing continues- here’s the more recent ad, wherein a stupid gyrating puppet controlled by unseen forces drives a car about and sells insurance whilst a slightly more stupid gyrating puppet hams it up in the passenger seat next to him; it’s called Iggy and ‘Little Iggy’.

Little Iggy? LITTLE FUCKING IGGY? Time was when someone mentioned Iggy Pop and ‘Little Iggy’ being seen together it would mean he was driving around Los Angeles, high on crack with his cock out. THAT’s the only ‘little Iggy’ I want to see, in a purely heterosexual rock and roller way, of course.

The whole thing is just one of those moments that life throws up from time to time to make us all feel like we’re getting old. Well I never, Iggy Pop doing Car Insurance, who’d have thought it. I remember back in the day he was challenging people to do a shit on stage and eating it, now, well, he’s just lost that edge, hasn’t he?

I guess it’s inevitable, though- eventually, you need to put some money by, you need to compromise to pay the bills, to sell out. They’ve all done it- John Lydon’s got his property portfolio, Moby his vegan Cafe, and Pink Floyd have a neon pink diamond mine on the Moon. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about people cashing in on their fame as their careers start to wind down. Still, there’s selling out and selling out. The thing that really bugs me about this is that Swiftcover don’t cover musicians.

That’s right, kids, advertising is a lie! Shocking, I know. Apart from the fact that no insurance company in their right mind would offer Iggy Pop any kind of insurance whatsoever, Swiftcover wouldn’t offer insurance to Sir Cliff. Musicians are a high-risk category, see.

Bunch of arse. Next time Iggy Pop does an ad, I want it to be for something appropriate and connected to his life, like the pharmaceuticals testing industry, not this Swiftcover Car insurance bollocks.

Car insurance. Bunch of Old arse.

And they didn’t even get a play of ‘Passenger’ in either. Twats.

There was a point on Saturday when I actually thought it wasn’t going to happen. I thought that a million grannies were going to buy a copy of that X-factor song for each of their grandchildren, and that everyone who downloaded seven copies of Killing in the Name Of was going to be disqualified and count for nothing.

I started to do that little backpedal in my own head of ‘even if it doesn’t win, they’ll have made their point,’ but I knew this was just lying to myself. I said so on here- it was going to be gutting if they lost, pure and simple.

But they didn’t. Oh, simple joy of simple joys, they didn’t. And now Simon Cowell looks like an idiot, and all that money that Sony spent on pushing the musical equivalent of raw tripe down the throats of the music-buying public has been entirely wasted.

That’s the interesting thing- this is the first Download-only Christmas number one. But it won’t be the last. In some strange way, you can see this as another part of the death throes of the old order. In the same way that a band like, say, the Arctic Monkeys, masterminded their meteoric rise through as crude a tool as Myspace, this is the sign that record companies just can’t BUY success any more, that unpredictable things crop up and succeed, and that the old tried and tested techniques for manufacturing success aren’t enough.

The media is dispersed enough that no-one is in control. Not really. That means good news for musicians, good news for fans, maybe not quite so good news for the people who are accustomed to making huge amounts of money from these two groups. That’s fine by me, honest it is.

You see, there’s always been music. There hasn’t always been a music industry.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Oh, there’ll always be infrastructure, and investment, and networking and promotion, of course there will. It’s just in the hands of the people now, which is what Tracy and Jon Morter realised.

There’s a lot of opportunity out there. If you’re a musician, you don’t need to do what they tell ya. You can just do it yourself.

I don’t buy much music these days. I listen to things online, I use Last.fm. and spotify, I listen to the radio and I swap mix-tapes with my mates, sometimes of music we’ve made ourselves. I don’t think I’m that unusual, either, amongst music fans. It’s just not necessary to buy music, any more. Maybe it’s just aging- I’m just the other side of thirty, and therefore on the slippery helter-skelter road to oblivion and irrelevance. Soon I’ll be at the final destination, sitting around amongst my CD collection and muttering about how pop music is just noise, and insisting that no-one knows how to write proper tunes since GodSpeed You Black Emperor! broke up. I can feel it starting to happen, too, that slow slide into the aged certainty that

I did buy some music this week. I hope you did too.

You see, this week, people decided that they were going to do something rebellious, something a little bit childish, and very funny indeed. They were motivated by a number of reasons, mainly a dissatisfaction at the seemingly endless string of bland karaoke nonsense that the TV show, ‘The X Factor’, was foisting on the British record-buying public at the Christmas number one.

It’s been one of those David versus Goliath stories- one one side is a husband-and-wife team with no resources whatsoever, who merely started a group on Facebook, suggesting that everyone buy Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name Of’ in the week of the 11th to the 19th of December, thus getting the 1992 hit to Christmas number one. The refrain from the end of the song, in case you didn’t know, is the repeated ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ which makes it the perfect rebel anthem.

No-one put any money into the marketting of this campaign, no-one put out huge ads everywhere, it just spread through word of mouth. It’s a totally do-it-yourself effort.

On the other side, is Joe McElderry, the winner of a TV show which ran on prime time TV for several months, and whose face has been plastered across billboards, advertising displays, and websites at great expense by Sony.

At the time of writing, I don’t know who won. What I DO know is that last night when I bought the song from Amazon, different versions of it were number one, number three AND number twenty on the list.

If it doesn’t get to number one, I’ll be disappointed. I’ll feel a bit like Simon Cowell, a man who I view as something roughly equivalent to Satan Himself in musical terms, has won.

What I do know, however, is that this has been something of an embarrassing week for Simon Cowell and the people he represents. If you spend all that money and get a serious challenge from a bunch of people who hate your music, is it really worth it in the end?

For Simon Cowell, and Sony music, the answer is probably yes. At the end of the day, they’re in business. If they make money, it’s a good thing for them.

That said, it’s nice to know that people can still really annoy the powers that be. It’s nice to think that rock and roll hasn’t lost its ability to be annoying, teenage, truculent and disobedient.

Fingers crossed.

For a long time now, an evil force has held sway over the music of the nation. A sneering, cynical enemy of all that is right and good, all that is original and heartfelt. You know who I mean. I mean X Factor. Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, all those other fetid shitbags who are responsible for churning out one god-awful, forgettable chart hit after another, all in the name of making themselves more and more obscenely rich. They’re manipulative, they’re unpleasant, they play on the desperate and pathetic desire that people have for fame, and a regular basis they churn out awful, awful music. Bland elevator-worthy nonsense which would stand no chance of success, and rightly so, unless it was allied to what is in effect the world’s biggest pop marketing campaign.

Theirs is a world where mediocrity, consensus and the safe option of what has worked before is all that matters, where individuals are disposable cogs, made to compete with each other, to humiliate themselves onstage and be subjected to withering criticisms and increasingly desperate acts in search of their brief, pointless moment of success, climbing over the bodies of their friends and fellow musicians to reach the top. Their time there will be fleeting, a brief flicker of success which will gain them next to nothing, but which will have already made obscene amounts of money for their watching overlords. They don’t care about sustained success for these people- one hit and that’s it. Suck them dry and on to the next one.

All the while, those who have masterminded these poor individuals’ brief rise sit in judgement, and grow ever wealthier. Their smugness is impossible to conceal. And to be honest, they SHOULD be smug, considering their achievement; they’ve somehow managed to turn their sordid trawling through the nation’s musical mediocrities into entertainment. Before this was done behind closed doors, and the cost of finding the next young sacrificial virgin to go on their altar of disposable mediocrity was born by these grimacing svengalis themselves. Then, at some point, they managed a wonderful trick; they got TV to pay for it. More than that, they got paid themselves just for being there. Genius! The moment when they came up with this idea, and said, ‘hey, let’s turn the one thing which we actually have to DO and pay for into entertainment’ must have been a bit like those moments in films where the villain reveals his master plan and cackles diabolically for hours.

It was the moment when manufactured, mediocre pop turned from a giant beast squatting upon the struggling, desperate coma victim that is the music industry, and extended their tendrils into television, creating the world’s biggest marketing con. Evil genius. Inexorable. Unstoppable.

NO MORE.

FUCK YOU, SIMON COWELL. I WON’T BUY WHAT YOU SELL ME.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE.

It’s getting to the end of the year, and you know what that means in the world of popular music- it’s lists. The Best Songs, Best New Faces in Music, Best Albums, Most Entertaining Haircut, Lamest Controversy and Sexiest Male/Female/ Artists of 2009 are going to be debated and discussed in magazines, blog posts, articles, and pubs the world over.

But is this really worth it? Is music really a competition? Can’t we all just admit that your taste isn’t my taste, and all just get along?

Maybe. Competition has created wonderful music, however. McCartney, for example, writing Sergeant Pepper because he wanted to top Pet Sounds. Oasis versus Blur, whilst it didn’t produce some of the best music by either band, was really entertaining. It’s also good fun to argue who’s best- Bat For Lashes versus Little Boots, whether or not the MGMT are actually serious.

This business of lists, though. It’s dull. It’s mildly obsessive. It’s all a little bit Nick Hornby, a bit trainspotter. Whilst I’m as bad as the rest, I want more from music journalists. I don’t want them to settle my music arguments for me. Admittedly, those lists do start arguments, so I guess that’s something that can be said for them.

My theory on this is that it’s the easiest way possible to write about music. Let’s think about this. You’re the editor of a magazine. You’ve got a hundred pages to fill. You’ve got twenty writers. You could hope that if you send them on out to interview people, find new bands and music you’ve never heard before. Maybe they’ll come back with something remarkable.

Or maybe they won’t. Maybe three or four guys will come back with something, the other seventeen will be junk.

Maybe then you go ‘oh, sod it, here’s a list of a hundred albums, arbitrarily ordered. Each of you write five generic puff pieces and we’ll know how much copy we’ve got.’

Laziness. Ease of formatting. Pandering to the advertiser. Rubbish.

This is why music journalism, at least in its print form, is dying.

Well, it’s one of the reasons, there’s a lot more besides.

Maybe I can do you a list.

There are a lot of good bands and solo artists around in this world. You know who I mean. Talented and hard-working musicians who write songs that people quite like, and who forge careers being- alright. Not bad. And it’s not their fault.

They don’t set the world on fire, their tracks are enjoyed, but are no-one’s favourite. I’m not talking about Pop Idol and its ilk here, they’re an altogether different kind of beast, a sort of devilish imitation of music which amounts to nothing more than a vulgar advert for itself. No, I mean the middling bands. The triers, who stick around but never seem to get better or worse. They all care. They all devote their lives to their music. What it is it that dooms these people (and us, by proxy) to lives of musical mediocrity, plodding along whilst others soar. I’m talking about the way Bjork manages to be a marvelous, unpredictable firework, and Dido, who seems like a nice girl into the musical equivalent of flock wallpaper. The way Coldplay calmly and carefully fashion a music which will fill the stadiums of the world but will never truly touch someone’s heart in the way that Elbow’s ‘Asleep in the Back’ does from the opening bar.

There are others. I’m sure you can think of them. It’s a good parlour game, actually. Find a genius, and a corresponding mediocrity. You could call it ‘Mozart and Salieri,’ if you wanted to get all classical.

So what makes a genius? 

Sheer dumb luck. unique influences. A spark. Genetic luck. Ah, damned if I know. 

All I know for sure is that when that spark, that greatness, that genius exists in someone, it is their duty to keep it alive at all costs, to let it grow, to let what is inside them come out, whether the world ever notices or not.

Mediocrity will always spring up. It is plentiful. For every Bobby Gillespie, every Karen O, there’s a dozen Paulo Nutinis or Joss Stones. For every potential Nick Drake, there are a thousand people who could be the next Chris DeBurgh. Now there’s an image to terrify you. 

If you have that spark in you, don’t you dare let it go out. You’ll know if it’s in you. It’ll eat at you, itching and twisting, trying to get out. And you can’t ignore it. You have to let it grow. You have to save music.

There’s too much mediocrity out there. Go out there, out into the big bad world and fight, fight for all your worth, to make that spark spring it into a fire. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to us. 

Without musical genius, all we’ll have is a sea of mediocrity, competence and beige conformity to a sea of pointless musical sludge. Without genius, the future is Chris Martin’s Vegan-friendly environmentally-sourced hemp-laced boot, stepping on the human face forever.

In case you hadn’t heard, things aren’t that good out there in the economy. Unemployment is up, stocks are down, bankers are figures of public hatred and across the planet, and Iceland has gone bust. Let’s say that again- Iceland, a whole country, is bankrupt. Seriously, how does that even happen?

Governments have been resorting to all sorts of desperate measures to put things right, with stimulus packages, quantitive easing, and a thousand other increasingly arcane measures aimed at pulling the world economy out of its nosedive. In some places, it’s worked, in others, you might as well have donned some spectacles, waved a wand at a graph of economic indicators and yelled ‘recoveramus!’

What does this mean for music? Well, for one thing, the average punter in the street has a little less cash in his or her pocket, which means less to spend on gigs and records. Let’s be honest, it’s kind of hard to get by right now.

It also means that record companies have less cash to spend on artists, which can force them to look increasingly to safer bets, proven cash-cows and rock dinosaurs who have pre-existing fanbases and can be relied upon to bring in a certain amount of revenue that an up-and-coming band, however good they may be, just can’t be relied on to do.

You’d think that’s a picture that spells doom and gloom, but it needn’t. the truth is, that hard times haven’t put a dampener on the party in the past. In the Depression, spending on luxury good actually went UP- the thinking being that people wanted to make themselves feel richer, or to reward themselves for making it through another month with something special.

What’s more, the abundance of money hasn’t always made for good music. The blues were born in the poorest part of America, in a time of grinding poverty and destitution. Jazz was improvised because musicians didn’t have the money to rehearse.

And then there’s punk rock.

Punk Rock was a product of the 1970s depression, with mass unemployment and dissatisfaction throughout the UK. A Labour government was on its last legs, and politicians seemed to have no answer or genuine connection to a generation who was growing up in a country full of empty promise, crap towns with nothing but crap jobs and drudgery to look forward to. Sound familiar at all?

No wonder Punk flourished. It was a flame in the darkness, a wild voice of the people who just would not be silenced. There has been no more powerful force in modern music than the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten screaming his contempt for the royalty in the year of the silver jubilee, censored at the top of the pop charts with a whirlwind of anger and energy surrounding him. Music was alive, it meant something, and after a decade of untouchable supergroups like the Eagles and Pink Floyd being all we had, music was once again being played by people who looked like they were members of the audience.

It’s always been the case- music, in troubled times, reflects them, gives the opportunity for those people who have nothing, those who have been let down and shafted on by the powers that be, to take to the streets and make a bloody great racket, or to gather together and remind each other that companionship and warmth is free, and can never be taken away.

It’s happened before- Woody Guthrie’s guitar was wielded like a weapon, emblazoned with the message that ‘this guitar kills fascists.’ Dylan knew this be true. He claimed in ‘All Along the Watchtower’ that all he had was a red guitar, three chords and the truth, and sang passionately about the possibility for change.

In the seventies, a punk fanzine famously published a picture of three chords and told its readership ‘this is a chord. this is another chord. now go form a band.’

It’s all you need. Just like Seasick Steve, you started out with nothin’ and you still got most of it left.

here you are again. Three chords, and a whole lot more.

Now go form a band.

Anyone who’s anyone knows that things aren’t what they used to be. Record company revenues are down, downloading and file-sharing is off the charts, and I don’t know anyone who’s been in a Virgin Megastore or read a copy of the NME in the last two years. Maybe I’m getting old. Or maybe things have changed.

In a lot of ways, the music industry as we once knew it just doesn’t exist any more, and a lot of this is to do with the explosion of the Internet, and the multitude of ways people now have to discover new music. Let’s list just a few, shall we? Spotify. Pitchfork. Limewire. Stereogum, Itunes. Youtube. Last.FM. Pandora. Myspace. Pirate Bay. There’s ten, and I’m sure that as you read this you’re smiling to yourself about the ones I missed. That’s how fast the internet is- more and more sources of free music, some legal and some not, are showing up online, seemingly by the day. The bizarre thing is that the music industry doesn’t seem to know what the hell to do about it. sometimes they sue, sometimes they put copy protection onto CDs, sometimes they get politicians like Peter Mandelsson to announce strong-arm tactics and threats to disconnect internet file-sharers from the internet. These approaches are a little wild and varied, but what they have in common is that they won’t work.

Journalists seem a little confused, too- they’ve lost their position of privilege, and are often hearing music at the same time as the army of bloggers and enthusiasts online. Some print journalists are keeping pace, and are writing great things, but you’ll get the same on the blogs. It must be a frightening time to be a journalist.

There are some people who seem to know what they’re doing, though, and it’s mainly the musicians themselves. As I type this, I’m listening to album by Them Crooked Vultures the new Josh Homme/Dave Grohl/John-Paul Jones supergroup.

It’s noisy, vibrant, joyously capturing the musical personalities of these three musicians, blending them into something entirely new, and exciting. It’s like Queens of The Stone Age jamming with Nirvana and Led Zeppelin, (because that’s exactly what it is!) and I love it.

It’s not commercially available yet. You can’t pay for it, except to pre-order. You can listen to it for free, however. Yesterday, I got an email telling me they were streaming their album online. On Youtube. The whole thing.

This is nothing new, of course. It’s not even surprising. Radiohead did it with Kid A, a couple of years ago.

Think about it, though, and imagine having this way of experiencing John Paul Jones’ first supergroup. Imagine if you could have listened to Led Zeppelin’s first album at the same time as journalists and DJs, back in 1969. Imagine if you could discuss it with thousands of other people instantly, as you explored a startling new music together. Imagine the excitement!

That’s where we are, brothers and sisters. Welcome to the brave new world.