Podcasts, Rips and Shreds of Words
The first quarter of the new year is coming to a close and I thought I would give everyone a glimpse into some of the music that I have been listening to. I have put 2 podcasts together (scroll down below) , the first featuring music from 2011 and the second, music from prior years.
The first three months have been relatively tame in retrospect. There have been some notable releases, namely Radiohead’s ‘King of Limbs’ which is not featured in the podcasts below because I figured that my target audience has probably already read the Universal Sigh and coming up with conspiracy theories as to if and where there will be a second disc to the album.
The next three months however has some very appealing releases including the new album by Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), maker of quite possibly the best album of the 21st Century in ‘Person Pitch’. He has emerged from the shadows of Animal Collective’s Avey Tare (Dave Portner) as quite possibly the best two visionaries in a band since the Beatles. 7 songs in various forms have already been released as parts of singles for his upcoming album “Tomboy” a much more intimate release than ‘Person Pitch”. The songs on “Tomboy” have been reportedly remastered by former Spacemen 3 member Sonic Boom (Peter Kember).
For ‘Person Pitch’ the music didn’t copy elements from the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds but reinvented it. While tape loops and mixers had been prominent in Pop Music, Lennox took the idea to an entirely new level as if the album had been created in front of his computer screen. With the expectations being so high for this album, and the eventual delay in it’s release, there will be a hefty amount of fans that will see this release as a letdown. There is no 12 minute “Bros.” or “Comfy in Nautica”, which became instant classics the moment they made their way to the eardrums of fans.
My own favorite track so far has been ‘Alsatian Darn’, which opens up this albums a bit and gives fans a moment to groove on a hot summer evening. I have included ‘Surfers Hymn’ from his most recent single release.
I think the real reason that the Animal Collective/Panda Bear/Avey Tare catalog has been so appealing is it’s insistence of avoiding the rather unappealing aspects of society. Being plugged into the events surrounding us often wants us to also tune out.
For me, 2011 has been an odd year. It’s the first time that I have not purchased an R.E.M. album within at least a week of it’s release since Green came out in 1989. Featuring probably some of the worst vocals in memory and weakest lyrics, “Collapse Into Now” felt like a true “R.E.M. by Numbers” album, taking some of the sounds that made them popular years ago but as Greg Kot had mentioned, these sounds made me want to pick up the old albums and not the new ones.
I had finished reading Greg Kot’s ‘Ripped’ which just so happened to occur before SXSW started.
The corporate music industry for years had a much more powerful hold on what people listened to. Realize that in the old days for someone to get heard, there needed to be a mechanism for that music to reach the fans. They could read about it in print (Magazines, Newspapers, zines, .etc), they could listen/view it on radio and television and then could make that purchasing decision with (CD, LP, Cassette, .etc).
Greg Kot describes this scructure as well as the influence, albeit at times very dark, to show the relationship that Corporate Music could push music out to the masses.
In very simple terms I always amounted this to getting your single on the radio, your video on MTV and your face on Rolling Stone magazine before a major music release. Kot goes into much more detail that this relationship was being controlled by promoters that had deep pockets, pushing out many of the independent music producers. It was not worth it for a small indie label to try to get their music on the radio, for the reason that it they were pretty much priced out.
However, looking at record companies and their challenges in the 90’s, we also have to look more closely at the maturation of the band. A band that I have followed very closely for many years, R.E.M. is a prime example.
When R.E.M. released ‘Murmur’ in 1983 they became a darling of the critics. Their pop sound fueled by both punk and folksy Byrdsian-chords with equal amounts of Athens dance sound, were pushed by their label to go on tour with the ‘Go-Go’s’, also on the IRS label and declined that offer. They looked at their short summer jaunt with The Police in a negative light.
While the band had been very successful as a live band and used this mechanism to hone their sound, there lacked a certain maturity that they knew they were not ready for. It’s one thing playing in small clubs and pizza parlors and then all of a sudden opening for the Police in Shea Stadium.
R.E.M.’s time on IRS allowed them to slowly build into an act that by 1987 they were ready to make the jump to a bigger label, that would give them the distribution and resources necessary to make that jump.
If we make the jump to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, there became that rush to discover the next big scene and or gobble up and band that was in a current scene (See Seattle). Some said that Chicago would be that next big locale and what you saw was many labels taking risks on up-and-coming bands hoping for the big rewards later on.
If you end up buying low on the next big band to hit the planet and it ends up selling millions then talent scout that discovered that next big band is in for a hefty raise. The problem, however, is that many of these bands like Veruca Salt (which I seem to remember Greg Kot discussing years ago in an article about an unsigned band from Chicago that was discovered at SXSW that never got a chance to mature) end up getting signed to large contracts and never lived up to expectations.
So while the record company was making bad decisions in certain cases trying to maximize their profits, the game was changing. The industry had always ignored the artists they put on their labels. Elvis Costello could voice his frustration about “Biting the hand that feeds me” in ‘Radio, Radio’ and could turn a blind eye to fans that constantly complained about the lack of diversity or ownership in radio, that was about to change.
The internet and the mp3 allowed for freedom from the corporate music machine and their music choices and over the last 15 years as well as the refusal of these labels to understand how the music industry has changed. The process became more democratic. It became much easier to push your music out to international audiences simply by posting a song on a website. Similarly, leaks of albums could be downloaded and early reviews among fans communicating in forums, pointed others to what music to look out for. Wilco, for example, might have been screwed if ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ was made 10 years prior, but once it got leaked to the internet and fans concurred that the record company made an unwise decision by refusing to release the record, thinking it was not the hit record they expected, it became a game-changing moment.
Kot’s book serves as a reference point, pointing out the influence of numerous moments when we see this shift happening.
Greg Kot mentions ‘Radiohead’ on several occasions, introducing them with their stellar ‘Kid A’, an album that leaked before it’s release and in the meantime created a buzz among the fans for being a game changer. The album lacked everything that shaped the music industry before it, the hit single, the mainstream video. It’s buzz was created from fans doing essentially an illegal act, finding it on Napster or similar service and talking about it with other fans. That only grew when the internet-based critic site Pitchfork gave the album a perfect 10.0 score at it’s release. It showed that the influence had shifted from mainstream sources over to independent sources and in the process asked many more ethical questions about this process about how music fans were obtaining their music.
The argument over illegal downloading of music is that it takes money away from the record company and the band. The argument for downloading is that it allows for the fan to filter through what is good and bad and make his or her own determination of the bands and artists that they follow. Realize that the music environment is much different now than it was then. For some fans, downloading music allows them to test the waters so to speak for what band’s music is viable.
The label has argued that the individual downloading hundreds of albums should be paying for them and that is lost profits. On the flipside, would that individual purchase those albums outright? Most likely due to limited monetary resources, people do not have the budgets to purchase every album they are downloading.
The fan that is discovering a new band is most likely passing that information onto other fans and so forth. For this creates the buzz.
The argument against the Kid A formula and of course later on with ‘In Rainbows’ –Pay as you wish scheme is that Radiohead was already one of the largest acts of the globe. The good graces of the fans were on the backs of the corporate music world that supported them before this. At the same time, Radiohead claimed that they made more money on the In Rainbows release than on any other. By kicking out the middleman, their profits soared.
Kot does not bring forth a formula for the upstart band or for any band for that matter. His succession of acts covered, (Bright Eyes, Wilco, Death Cab For Cutie and Prince) will become Turn Back the Clock moments.
The bigger question of course is “What’s Next?”. Kot theorizes that music is still a powerful enough mechanism that live music is still an integral part of the music industry. It will be difficult for the indie upstart band to make a profit if their music is created in front of a computer screen and cannot perform live.
There is still something magical about the venue, the nuances of a lead singer or the extended solo or medley that captivates an audience. There is a very disturbing situation when a band becomes either complacent or incompetent live. I would look currently at some of my favorite bands at the moment and relate the idea that it’s powerful live performances become instant Tweets or Facebook messages.
So ultimately, it becomes the fan that becomes your best marketing tool.
And on that note, I will get to the music below.
Setlist
- Braids – Lemonade
- Panda Bear – Surfer’s Hymn
- James Blake – Limit to Your Love
- PJ Harvey – The Glorious Land
- Wire – Two Minutes
- Yuck – Georgia
- Smith Westerns – Imagine Pt. 3
- Clint Eastwood – Sweet Sweet Matilda
- Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
10. Mogwai – Mexican Grand Prix
11. Anna Calvi – First We Kiss
12. Cut Copy – Where I’m Going
13. Destroyer – Savage Night At the Opera
14. The Joy Formidable – The Everchanging Spectrum Of a Lie
- Neutral Milk Hotel – Song Against Sex
- Neutral Milk Hotel – You’ve Passed
- Neutral Milk Hotel – Someone is Waiting
- Spacemen 3 – Walkin’ With Jesus
- The Kinks – Big Sky
- Unrest – Cherry Cream On
- Wire – I Am The Fly
- The Soft Moon – Breathe The Fire
- The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Over and Over
10. Husker Du – Terms of Psychic Warfare
11. The Rolling Stones – Sway
12. Sic Alps – Cement Surfboard
13. The Specials – Do the Dog
14. Olivia Tremor Control – I Have Been Floated
15. LCD Soundsystem – Losing My Edge