Here’s another power-pop band that isn’t totally in the thrall of their influences, so they’ve gotten a fair amount of press (which goes to show that something isn’t dead). I do hear different influences in each song, but the quotes are slippery, shadows of sounds that are in my head but hard to put a anvil or stirrup on. Which means some of the songs I kind of like because they remind me of Graham Parker or Rage to Live, while others, like this one, sound like they might work (with a little work) in an arena.
This one sounds like the hardest song Joe Jackson ever recorded.
These guys are from Australia and seem to have found a way to make the virtues of straightforward rock feel uniquely their own. It helps to have a great singer, this one is named Shogun, and catchy clever songs.
Here are some thoughts about streaming and recorded music from recent reading. In some sense, this is a dump of links for future reference, but I hope I connect some dots, too.
Ben Sisario told the story, in yesterday’s New York Times, of a songwriter name Perrin Lamb, whose independently released song ended up in a popular playlist on Spotify and earned him $40,000.
Which reminded me of Rosanne Cash’s comment that 600,000 Spotify streams earned her $104. She called streaming “dressed up piracy,” but I think she misses what’s happening here. The streaming services are often owned, at least in part, by the big three labels, and the labels collect money and distribute it to their artists (while taking their own cut, just as they did off records). As the artist in Sisario’s story shows, if you don’t have a label more money passes through to you.
One problem with the idea that streaming services are ripping off artists is that the streaming services are all losing money. Pandora announced huge losses this past quarter, plus ended settling with music publishers for three times the cost it want to pay for the rights to stream music written before 1972. Pandora has tens of millions of customers. If it’s still losing huge numbers and it’s costs are going up, how is it going to survive? Spotify is in a similar position, losing lots of dough despite being the leader in subscribers.
Making money on recorded music, this guy Philip Kaplan argues, was a historical accident. Records were meant to be a spur to get people to buy record players, but the software companies that eventually emerged figured out ways to make more money selling copies of music than the machines to play it on. Streaming services, Kaplan argues, are simply restoring market efficiency to a process that was exploited by the labels.
A guy who has a blog called Startups and Shit, pointed me to a NY Times article from 2007 about how cultural hits, like hit songs, happen. According to the experiment Duncan Watts writes about, predicting hits is so hard because there is no single line of taste that hits have to cross. Not quality, not simpleness, not nothing. In fact, hits erupt out of apparent quality blips, in which a small network likes something which somewhat randomly spreads to other related networks simultaneously. When enough networks light up, there it is, a hit!
These network explosions amplify the perceived quality of the hits, though objective analysis among any of the individuals in the network would show a small advantage in quality. Watts calls this a “rich get richer effect.” Watts writes:
This, obviously, presents challenges for producers and publishers — but it also has a more general significance for our understanding of how cultural markets work. Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow “better,” at least in the democratic sense of a competitive market, than their unsuccessful counterparts, that Norah Jones and Madonna deserve to be as successful as they are if only because “that’s what the market wanted.” What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “reveals” what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question “Why did X succeed?” may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise best seller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
The Startups and Shit piece links the hitmaking effect of networks with the network the major labels control most tightly, namely radio.
His suggestion for the streaming services is to sign their own artists and try to break them on their own radio services, much the way Perrin Lamb, who surprisingly earned $40,000 for a song from an album that wasn’t even on Spotify when it broke on Spotify.
In this way, Spotify and other services, could break the discovery grip of the labels on radio, and arrange to get more money to artists at a lower cost. Win win.
Well, not for the labels.
This leads us back to Philip Kaplan, whose piece ends with a link to a band called Extinction Level Event’s lead guitarless metal viral hit, Entropy, and to his own band’s self produced and promoted metal band, Butchers of the Frontier. Rockers, he says, from recording, promoting, selling tickets and merchandise, are doing it for themselves, as they should be.
I went with my daughter to see these four young men called Darlingside last night at the excellent Rockwood Music Hall in lower Manhattan. It’s a clever but lousy name. Darlingside, I mean. Rockwood is a clever and excellent name. We were there at the invitation of the author, John Seabrook, who is writing about the band for the New Yorker, who was there with his son Harry. Lucy and Harry were born two months apart 16 and a half years ago, and have grown up together in many ways. Rockwood is a 21+ venue. Special exceptions were granted. They were the youngest people in the room, surely, just as John and I were probably, statistically at least, the tallest. And maybe the oldest, now that I think about it.
John knew about Darlingside because his wife’s niece went to college with them recently at Williams. They’re very cute and apparently the kids at Williams thought they were great. These two things aren’t unrelated, but cuteness doesn’t diminish their skills. They are talented multi instrumentalists and harmonizers. Their first album came out yesterday and the show we saw was their first on their record-release tour. All of which is supposed to suggest that I didn’t know much about them until I listened to the album yesterday. It is full of very smart lyrics, and soft but engaging arrangements and vocals. In other words, it is not rock.
But watching their lovely show, which was thoroughly enjoyable and displayed a sense of humor the earnest songs on the album don’t, it was kind of easy to project back a few years to a band that was perhaps a little edgier, a lot less interested in being lovely and a lot more interested in telling it like it is. With drums.
Today my daughter found this old (from 2012) music video from Darlingside. It’s not hard rock by any stretch, but it’s a strong song with a rock beat and a sharp video that came way too late to hit the indie boom. But the harmonies are still front and center, and delightful, as is the dark storyline with a happy ending. This, I think, is Darlingside.
Some of my very favorite albums are produced by Rick Rubin – Master Of Reality’s debut, Danzig’s debut, The Cult’s Electric, the great live Red Devils album King King to name a few.
In fact, there was a time years ago when I would take a chance on albums specifically because Rick Rubin produced. Can’t say that about any other producer.
Which brings us to ZZ Top’s La Futura. As one of the Amazon reviews says, “How many times have we heard ZZ Top has gone back to their 70’s sound only to be disappointed?” Desperate for something new to me, I checked this out, sampling a couple tunes. It sounded pretty damn good. I ordered it.
“Blown away” is all I can say after playing it three times yesterday. This is back to the old 70’s sound as far as I’m concerned. No crappy processed, compressed guitars, no electronic drums, no fucking stupid synthesizers. This is dirty boogie blues in the spirit of those early gem albums, stripped down and in-your-face in usual Rick Rubin style. This album kicks ass.
And funny, as much as I hate slow songs, I’m gonna give you the only slow one on the album, which I actually like. Call me crazy, but this song reeks of Phil Lynott/Thin Lizzy and perhaps that’s why I love it so much. Everything else on the album is straight-ahead and upbeat. I highly, highly recommend it.
I was thinking this was my favorite album of 2015, but it came out in 2012. Oh well. My loss for not finding it until now.
So I haven’t been on here in a while. That’s for sure. And since I last posted, my music tastes have gone in a new direction heading towards soul, R&B, and hip hop. Thought I’d share a few of the songs that have stuck with me lately:
I found Leon Bridges when I was looking into Outside Lands artists to study up before the festival. All of his music is great in my opinion, although he doesn’t have a whole lot out yet. Can’t wait to hear what he does next!
I am generally partial towards male singers, but Alice Smith is definitely an exception to that. As Lawr might say, she can really wail. This entire album (called She) is wonderful. This is actually a (better) cover of a Cee Lo Green song.
And then there’s D’Angelo who has got this whole other thing going on. His music is so interesting and fresh. I dig it.
And on the off chance anybody is steal reading/ listening, I thought I’d throw in this guy. He has a very unique sound. Interesting music and good lyrics. You can’t go wrong!
These are a few of my latest favorites. All of them but Alice Smith will be at Outside Lands. Unfortunately, I can no longer attend, but I was still exposed to all kinds of great music from the lineup!
In the comments to my post about our tastes for pop music being set when we’re teens, more or less, Gene said: “OK, but ALL pop music is retro now – there haven’t been any cultural changes in more than 20 years, which is unprecedented since pop culture entered its modern phase in the early 20th century.”
I would have agreed with him until my daughter started in middle school. There she met a whole cohort of teen musicians. These guys (in this case they’re all guys) play piano and guitar and saxophone and drums and sing really well, but in their spare time they write and record dubstep.
And I have friends whose sons also record dubstep and go to EDM concerts where all the music is spun by djs with computers. I know, I know, we hate this sort of music, but to say that ALL pop music is retro now misses the point that the pop music that is listened to by the youth today sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Most of it, hey-get off my lawn, doesn’t even sound like music.
Rachel Kushner’s novel about life in New York in the late 70s is really lively. Her protagonist lived on Mulberry Street in the late 70s, between Spring and Prince. I lived on Mulberry between Prince and Houston. This is a book with historical resonance for me, and dissonance when something is wrong, since Rachel Kushner most definitely was 10 years old when the action was going down.
Not much is wrong, but there is a subplot about a revolutionary group called the Motherfuckers that pushes credulity. A chapter is devoted to their “actions,” including robbing banks, that seem appropriately cool rather than outrageous. Except for this one action:
“Beat up a rock band from Detroit called the Stooges. Beat the shit out of them for not being tough enough, and having a reputation for intensity though it was unearned. The Stooges had played at a rock club on Second Avenue, and just after their set ended word spread that the band was piling into their limousine and heading off to Max’s Kansas City for dinner with rich people and celebrities. The crowd became enraged, dragged the singer and his bandmates from their limousine and forced them back inside the club. The Motherfuckers concentrated on pummeling the singer and then pissed on his satin pants. Which he was still wearing as he lay on his side, groaning. Not quite in the same way he had groaned and yowled onstage, trying to peddle his fake intensity to the young girls, among them Love Sprout and Nadine, Fah-Q’s and Burdmoor’s respective womenfolk. Fah-Q and Burdmoore crossed streams of urine over the body of the singer, and Burdmoore knew that brotherly pacts ended badly. But he was in it to the end. He was ready for badly.”
My buddy Gene wrote this song, and with each iteration he raises the level of the vocals and the cleanness of the mix. Which is good. But the reason to love this song are the propulsive guitars and the rock solid drums. This thing kicks from the stall to the cleaning stall and probably even to the sleeping stall (I’m borrowing my daughter’s horse vocab here).
I was talking to Steve about country music in Arizona. We’re both fans (he plays in a country band) and agreed that the country music radio we’ve listened to lately was horrible. I came home and quickly discovered Brandy Clark. I have no idea if she gets any country radio play, but she writes clean and sharp country songs with classic country music themes, without cliche or hokum or manufactured pathos.
I have a reservation. She tells stories about workers and their families, and while I’m assuming that’s where she’s from, what I hear makes me less than certain that these are her stories. Her song about believing in Jesus and the Lotto, for instance, seems not a little condescending and alien, like Obama talking about people clinging to their guns and religion out of despair. I may understand the point, intellectually, but I’m pretty sure the subject of the songs wouldn’t recognize themselves.
That may be a problem, or maybe she’s taking on the shibboleths of the genre. It’s too soon for me to tell, but it’s something to keep an eye on.
And catchy melodies and concise lyrics wash away many sins. I like the tunes of her songs, and the sharp turns of phrase (these are “her songs” in the pop sense, always with writing partners and collaborators), and most of all the arrangements, which can be elaborate as in this clip, but are still direct and honest and accessible.
Her album reminds me of the first two Steve Earle albums, and early Roseanne Cash. Good stuff if you like country music that maybe doesn’t land on country radio.
