innerspaceboy

Every few days I find myself writing an impassioned and somewhat crappy music manifesto. Here is one of them.

From at least the 1950s forward, with the popularity of the 7″ single and the commercial boom of post-war FM radio, music marketing exploded and marketers sought not to predict the future of popular music, but to direct it.

Console radios (and later their transistor offspring) moved music from the reach of the listening elite who would attend evening classical events to the masses, most of which had no particular ear or preference for music. The consequence of democratizing music listenership was that radio was forced to pander to youth culture masses who wanted the short, simple and familiar structure of rock & roll 24 hrs a day.

The 60s were a time of great revolution, reflected in both folk music and in new experimental sounds inspired in part by the drug culture of the day.

The 1970s offered the first hint of an audience demanding more than blues-based guitar riff rock with the rise of progressive rock and kosmische musik, incorporating madrigal song, classical, elements of jazz, and complex polyrhythms and time signatures.

Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, released in 1977 was the first dance track to forego a recorded orchestra and instead consisted of entirely synthesized sounds and voice effects. This was a warning sign on the path to the cultural “distillation” process, and was quickly gobbled up by the pop creature hungry for dancefloor rhythms and processed vocals.

By the 1980s, Video Killed the Radio Star, making popular music all about image at the expense of content and talent.

Still, a dedicated art rock and post-punk scene prevailed, with acts like Pere Ubu, Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, and Wire further demonstrating the survivalism of substance in music.

By 1989, ambient music which had (ever-so-quietly) exploded onto the scene with Eno’s Music for Airports found a new audience. After clubbers heard Dr. Alex Paterson spinning in the White Room at the Land of Oz albums like The KLF’s Chill Out, Space’s Space and The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld were released (all by the same few DJs). This sparked an experimental ambient culture soon embraced by Aphex Twin, Biosphere, and the then-newcomers Boards of Canada who would gain international acclaim for their LP, Music Has the Right to Children. This was the new heady music of 1990.

So-called “alternative rock” dominated the FM airwaves for the remainder of the decade with an indie sound that spoke directly to its generation of angst-riddled listeners. Seattle grunge died gracefully with the release of Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York and rock finished out what would be the last of its 40-year life, signing off with No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom in January of 1997. Save for a few rare exceptions in the world of pop music, there was a clear path of rotting decay which followed –

Later that year, The Prodigy released Fat of the Land, a best-selling sell-out record whereby they left the rave scene and embraced radio-friendly big beat. Spice Girls’ Spice followed, recycling the Monkees factory-assembled-band concept for another commercial success, and the nail in the coffin was the album, …Baby One More Time released on January 30th 1999. True to form, another polished and squeaky-clean band released their third album – Backstreet Boys’ Millennium in 1999, a record which secured their super-stardom.

By 2002, rock was dead and buried and the Core Media Group rebranded popular music as a reality program – a vehicle by which to market and directly profit from manufactured acts.

Over the next ten years, pop decayed into the most distilled essence of artificiality.

– An outrageous and exaggerated Madonna-facsimile became a pop icon

– A sixteen year old boy said the word “Baby” fifty-six times becoming the most-watched video of all time on Youtube

– and Rebecca Black happened. (Mrs. Miller is likely upset.)

Pop Music.

In 2012, Reuters reported the results of a study which concluded, Pop Music Too Loud and All Sounds the Same: Official.

In fulfillment of The KLF’s The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, pop has consumed hip-hop, electronic dance music, R&B, country, and everything else around it. It has stripped itself clean of substance, fidelity (thanks to the Loudness War), character, style, and any element of unique identity it once bore.

In a now-legendary article about Jamie Wednesday in the NME, written by David Quantick, David mentioned that pop music is ever-recycling its ideas and that eventually, ‘pop will eat itself’. We are witnessing the realization of this prophecy right before our culture’s eyes.

Pop is now a self-parodying, purely ironic, insubstantial, auto-cannibalistic animal. It cannot sustain itself for much longer without a supply of original material to consume.

Are we due for a spontaneous generation of classically-trained musically-educated instrumentalists, manifesting in clear defiance of the education system which has long-abandoned arts education?

Instead we are left with a millennial generation who has been carefully conditioned from their earliest years to consume pop and to be collectively uncomfortable (or even repulsed) by the cerebral sounds of polyphony, afro-inspired polyrhythms, or improvisational compositions like jazz. All they want is a hook and a four-on-the-floor synth beat.

This is the musical incarnation of the newspeak Orwell warned us about – a culture raised from birth to see and hear only vapid, formulaic, 3 minute commercials and to buy the associated line of merchandise. This is what Clear Channel tells us that “music” means today.

I implore you to play your children classical, play them jazz, opera, experimental electronic music, and the countless micro-genres from around the world. Maybe, just maybe some of them will pick up an instrument, (whether lute or laptop) and learn to make beautiful new music.

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Chula Vista

Amen. Both of my kids are well versed.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Trollheart

I think most people here are informed enough in their music taste to eschew the bland pop manufactured music, and as you say, classical never goes out of fashion, proof when you see how many times artistes from rap to pop to rock sample or cover classics.

More importantly though, where is the video whence coms that clip of that young lady shaking her bottom?

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

innerspaceboy

I always try to respect and cite my sources, Trollheart. The image was the result of a Google search for "pop music + crap" and was sourced from an article by The Guardian with the title, Iggy Azalea and J-Lo's AMA Booty show caps a banner year for the butt.

The image caption read: Jennifer Lopez, left, and Iggy Azalea share a touching moment onstage at the Hollywood Bowl. Photograph: Todd Williamson/Invision/AP

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Zer0

That would be Music From The Adventures of Pete & Pete by Polaris, a one-off band put together as the in-house band for the TV series.



Music From The Adventures of Pete & Pete is very good album in it's own right and is sought after by a lot of indie rock fans. As far as I know it's never been released on vinyl and even used CD copies of it don't come cheap.

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innerspaceboy

For those longing for a classically-inspired youth culture, you need only to look east.

China produces 1 million violins a year, has 100 million people studying Western classical music instruments, Sichuan Conservatory has 10,000 students alone (Juillard has 800). For a barrage of facts and opinion about how classical music has taken China by storm, try this:

WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC IN CHINA | Facts and Details

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Chula Vista

You have to wonder how many of those kids are being forced into it by their parents though.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

innerspaceboy

In the age of digital music, it takes a little something “extra” to entice consumers to spend their hard-earned cash on physical media. The enormous convenience and portability of high-bitrate MP3 and lossless FLAC libraries have removed the necessity for dedicating walls (or in some cases, entire rooms) to house and proudly display our favorite albums.

But the beauty of a masterfully-designed and packaged album is one characteristic with which digital audio cannot compete. The same can be said for the experiential element of removing a vinyl LP from its sleeve, placing it upon one’s turntable, and carefully dropping the needle into the groove.

Record labels are fully aware of this key advantage, and in recent years have funneled an incredible amount of energy, time and resources into developing “super-deluxe” limited editions of albums both old and new to win customers over to buying the real thing.

Compilations, deluxe and limited editions have been an explosive trend in the last 10 years, and albums previously only available as bootlegs are resurfacing as official special releases, all in an effort to earn collector’s patronage. Official multi-volume Bootleg Series editions are now available featuring live material by Dylan, Miles Davis, and perhaps the kings of the bootleg market – The Grateful Dead, as the classic 36-volumes of Dick’s Picks are being sequentially reissued for the first time on vinyl.

Of course, the concept of deluxe and special editions is nothing new to the media industry. Deutsche Grammophon produced an impressive 16-volume library of hardbound 5LP sets celebrating Beethoven’s Bicentennial back in 1963. The complete collection of 80 records and a handsome oversize hardcover book made a perfect gift item for the classical fan in your life… though the set also burdens the recipient with the task of dedicating considerable floor space to accommodate the collection, and is a nightmare should they ever need to move.

Thankfully, the CD era granted increased portability with its more compact format. DG wasted no time and followed up the Bicentennial Collection with a 111 Year Retrospective of the label’s finest recordings. The two volumes released in 2009 and 2010 comprised a monumental 111 CDs marketed to completists and obsessive collectors of the finest classical music.

Still, even with all the conveniences of the CD, some deluxe sets take collectability a little too far. Perhaps the best example is the absurdly-overcomplete 500-disc World’s Greatest Jazz Collection – a compilation of apparently every jazz track that wasn’t nailed down.

These and countless other deluxe releases demonstrate how the market for physical music media has evolved to adapt to the convenience of digital audio. Listeners have become cultural curators, carefully selecting which recordings they will purchase in physical form to best-fit their personal collections and to tell their own stories. The act of investing in an LP or CD is now a significant and deliberate decision which serves to contribute to one’s autobiographical library.

In 2014, marketing guru Gene Simmons fully-understood this consumer desire, and produced what is one of the finest implementations of a music product designed for the collector’s market.

This is Kissteria – “The Ultimate Vinyl Road Case.” Thirty-four LPs, featuring nineteen studio albums, five Alive releases and their four solo albums pressed onto audiophile 180g vinyl. To further appeal to discerning audiophiles, each of the recordings has been newly remastered in ultra-high definition DSD. And as an added bonus, the set includes twelve archival posters, a KISS vinyl cleaning cloth, turntable mat, dominoes set, lithographs, and a certificate of authenticity – all of which is housed in an Anvil case weighing in at nearly 50 pounds.

The set was limited to 1000 copies – clearly an exclusive for KISS’ biggest mega-fans. The set symbolizes the perfect execution of a music product for the digital age. Listen up record labels – if you want to compete with the convenience of digital audio… this is how its done.

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innerspaceboy

I created a thread in the Lounge but I realized I failed to mention it here in my journal...

Fellow Banterers - Innerspaceboy needs YOU!

I'm compiling data for an article on music and technology. I've constructed a one-question survey asking users to share how you discover new music.

I'd like to run a feature on the empowering nature of metadata and how mobile web and both public and private online communities have adopted some of the best elements of digital music - sharability and dynamic organization, and introduced them into the vinyl and other music communities.

Today, groups like The Youtube VC take advantage of YouTube and of social media networking to share crate-digging stories, reviews, and album information of otherwise rare and unique albums with fellow collectors the world over. The community turns members on to strange and wonderful sounds that they may not have discovered in the days before the web.

And while commercial streaming services limit their catalogs to license-able mass market recordings, dedicated fans with a penchant for more elusive sounds have risen to the challenge and have ripped and shared their rarest LPs via less-than-legal channels to get great music into the speakers of listeners yearning for something unique.

I want to write about the tremendous impact global-connectedness has had on both the general music consumer and on the vinyl community. This survey is where I begin.

I don't know if the mods can give me a hand but please, take the one-question survey and if you'd like, share it with your friends.


Thank you all.

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innerspaceboy

Fun music-related site of the day - One of the earliest examples of a music recommendation engine I can recall. Marek Gibney's Music-Map was the earliest incarnation of his Gnod (Global Network of Discovery) engine. Enter an artist and it will visually cluster related artists in a text cloud.



Give it a try!

Gnod.com went on to expand and now includes recommendation systems for art, film, and literature, and has a fantastic visual product mapping system for users shopping for smartphones, tablets, and other devices.



I'm a big fan of discovery utilities, and I'll be giving the literature engine a try this evening for classic dystopian fiction and for music non-fiction.

While I usually swear by rating aggregation systems like metacritic and rateyourmusic, Marek's project has a simple but effective interface and the interactive cell phone and hard drive maps are impressively useful.

Have at it!

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