Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
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Why I Don't Hate Spotify


It’s all over blogs and shit that musicians should hate Spotify and other music streaming businesses because they do not compensate artists enough. My heroes Thom Yorke, David Byrne, and Nigel Godrich have all made written statements condemning Spotify, claiming they hurt the blooming artist. These three [white men] have been my heroes, my inspiration. Somehow though, for the first time I find myself strongly disagreeing with their statements. I believe we are in a digital age, where information is shared equally by all. Should we not have access to music the way we have access to books? Could our society not be improved by the socialization of enjoying others’ music?

David Byrne, of the band Talking Heads, wrote last week in a New York Times Op – Ed, “In the future, if artists have to rely almost exclusively on the income from these services, they'll be out of work within a year.” Yes, of course times change,but in my opinion, that just means that the artists’ service should change too. In art school, I learned from an established professor that a great artist uses what they have, that they conquer their limitations. When David Byrne mentions these future artists, it is assuming that they make their music using fancy studios, full orchestras, and the latest equipment. Musicians now shouldn’t sit on their ass and complain about how they don’t have enough money to rent a studio, rather they should prove they are worth listeners' time and make something with what they have. 

 Take me for example, I would love to have a full band and studio time, but I don’t have the money, so I just use my slow and decaying 4 year old slow laptop, and I make it work because that’s what a great artist does. Byrne fails to see the possibility that a different kind of musician could become prevalent. Musicians are already starting to become known for their resourcefulness and DIY quirks and charms that happen under the circumstance of a DIY budget are appreciated. This is the whole point of hipsters, isn’t it?

Nigel Godrich was quoted in a lengthy blogpost saying, “Smaller artists who are not in the position to charge anything like the Rolling Stones or Madonna [on merchandise and concert tickets] are not the ones that benefit…” blah blah blah. Yes ok, just making good music doesn’t sell anymore. So artists should find something that does. This is the whole point of merchandise. I put up my songs for free on bandcamp (when they aren’t a sarcastic $500), but every now and then I get someone who gives me some dough, just because they enjoyed the service I gave them and felt they could help out. It’s like busking, and it isn’t a disrespectful way to be an artist in my opinion. But this occasional generosity doesn’t in any way come near to the amount that I have made by selling T shirts, posters, and albums. How closed off and stubborn does a musician have to be, to not be able to make a package or some type of physical representation of what their music is, and then offer that to fans in exchange of money?

Or if not a physical copy of something, artists should just focus on the experiential aspect of listening to music, by making concerts so good and so different that people would be willing to pay for it through ticket sales. What even is music and why should it be considered a different medium than merchandise and performances? It’s all the same. Being considered an indie/pop musician today is an art form in itself. 

 I leave you, Buffalo aspiring musicians like myself, with this: if you want to navigate the world, adapt to it. There will be more musicians out there than in the past, there will be a surge in creative expression, but if you want to get anywhere with it you need to set yourself aside by being truly out of the box. The box being preconceived notions of what is required of you.
~ Post by Shawn Lewis/Lesionread
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The Music of Alt-J: Candidates to be the Next Coldplay


First time I heard about Alt-J, the fast-tracked Mercury Prize winning group that’s gained lots of popularity over the past year with their debut album, my friend said they had been compared to Pink Floyd. This peeked my curiosity, and I took to Spotify to screen their music.
I was suspect of my friend's misplaced opinion because I knew he hadn’t spent much of his life actually listening to Pink Floyd. He’s more into hip hop and just recently discovered the Grateful Dead. But since Alt-J are scheduled to play at NYC’s Governors Ball festival in June and we’re both going, I wanted to check them out. 
And yea -- this band doesn’t sound like Pink Floyd. Ungodly amounts of weed wouldn’t even come close to convincing me of that. But I could tell how some people might perceive them as being so with their “trippy” and “eclectic” songs, if you think trippy is four dudes tapping away at keyboards and drums in the most banal way possible. 
But just picture a band being fronted by a handsome, normal-looking dude who happens to sing like a mix between Smigel from Lord of the Rings and Dave Matthews, but backed by a group that is steeped in today’s booming, worldview, rhythm and sample-based musical styles -- just in the most watered down way possible. 
They are Animal Collective without the weird time signatures, feral qualities and interesting song structures. They are “Mumford and Sons meets heavy beats,” as lead singer Joe Newman said in a recent interview. They are a shallow amalgamation of indie music at this point in the 21st century. And they sure as hell aren’t anywhere near Pink Floyd. Their official biography even goes on to ambitiously state that they sound like “In Rainbows era Radiohead.” They even have the word “alt” in their name. Unintended irony? 
This is a band that debuted in the Top 20 last year and peaked at number 3 on iTunes. They are about to embark on a victory lap tour of summer festivals and currently litter Spotify commercials with plugs of their album, “An Awesome Wave.” They speak about their music very specifically, dubbing it “Folktronica,” and go out of their way to point out the musical interludes on their albums, like they invented them. They look like every fortunate white kid who grew up with hip hop and recently discovered music from third-world countries, incorporating it into their own. You could see what these U.K. art students who occasionally dabble in hallucinogens were going for. Watching them live and listening to them, it’s like they never had serious ambitions in music and then one day someone online happened to find their music and here they are. 
Every so often, a band comes along and changes music by challenging listeners and rewards by showing them where music can go. The consequence of that is being assaulted with a million generic clones, many who gain more praise than their predecessors. An easy pill to swallow for the masses. After Radiohead’s OK Computer came Coldplay, who road to the top of the charts in the early 2000s with enough confidence and ambition just as the last of good strain of mainstream music acts were disappearing for good.
Now the mainstream is gone. And Coldplay is much better than these guys. I actually like a lot of Coldplay songs. The product though just seems to be getting worse and worse. 
Since then, independent music, which has generally indicated where popular music is headed, turned to a more grounded, organic feel -- at least to me -- with the popularity of traditionally American music like Wilco, Bright Eyes, Death Cab and stuff of the more singer-songwriter variety. Soon after a band like Mumford & Sons comes along and capitalizes on all of that -- sad as it all is. To most of the world that doesn’t follow all music closely, they seem like first comers of their kind to much of the world. 
In the past five years, electronic music through a world perspective has been peaking in independent and popular music. This is where Alt-J gets their chance, now that the terrain for this musical palette has already been tested by those who came before them; they can come in and find much success. Your average music listener will think they are the next Pink Floyd or Radiohead, and that is what should piss you off. 
You might be like, wouldn’t it be worse that bands sound like Maroon 5, Creed, Rihanna, or Lil Wayne? Shouldn’t we be happy that musicians are mimicking music that is in better taste?
It’s not anything new that celebrated acts in the underground who never get enough recognition get ripped off by some second comer from a major label and they get all the credit for it. We see that all the time. 
But Alt-J is different because they are on an independent label, Infectious Music, not on some monolithic music label like Universal. This type of BS is supposed to be carried out by major label goons, not pimped out by original, supposedly exploratory independent music labels.
On that note, I leave you with the one Alt-J song I like, ‘Dissolve Me." Further apologies to contributor and Alt-J fan Alicia Greco for this article. 



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Making It: The Pitfalls of Music Criticism



For whatever reason, much of the U.S. media arena and it’s critics are obsessed with typifying every category of entertainment. To an extent I get it, top ten lists are fun to read and award ceremonies have their place, but at what point does it get tedious or fruitless? At what point does it cause us, the audience, to misinterpret a piece of music or take it for granted? I know many people, including myself at times, who will only listen to an album on grounds that it received the right amount of critical acclaim. For the record, I am a big fan of Bon Iver and think he makes extraordinary music, but I often find myself trying to reanalyze his work; I am constantly putting Bon Iver thought a critical filter, attempting to find debris. And I have. This isn’t about Bon Iver being a good musician in so far as it’s about how the majority of listeners have come to find this out. What if Pitchfork or SPIN or whatever other copycat source didn’t give the self-titled sophomore album 5 stars or a 9/10 or whatever it was? What if the day that influential review was written the assignment was instead given to the writer who was having a bad day and wasn’t really feeling the whole chamber-folk falsetto getup? This also goes for the phenomenon of people who hate an artist precisely because they are critically acclaimed (you know who you are.)


While these foolhardy rating systems and top ten lists have propelled readership for music magazines and websites and opened up a lot of avenues for independent artists, I fear they have additionally limited the way in which we listen to a work, and decipher it’s strengths and weaknesses. I’m not saying there aren’t objectively good and bad records per se. I have a lot of respect for music critics, and try to read a multitude of various sources, but what I am proposing is that we attempt to break away from the habits of skimming music like we would a textbook a half hour before a final exam. 


Obviously most of us have thought about this before; I am certainly not the first to bring up how Pitchfork can be notoriously over-critical. Most of these thoughts actually sprung from a song I heard just yesterday from a largely unknown, new artist. It was a remarkable song by Jeff Tweedy’s (lead singer of Wilco) son, Spencer, called “Rushmore.” Even still, all I could think upon first listen was, “This is terrible. This kid will never get out of his father’s shadow.” It was a great first song. My first thought should have been, “Wow, this kid is going places.” But then I started over-thinking and coloring everything. I thought, “how much of this kid’s talent is fostered out of his father being a musician and having a bit of money, instruments, and influence?” I mean, how can he not get into a studio to record something great. Right?




Upon further contemplation, I found that that’s another thing the entertainment world is profoundly obsessed with. As much as Spencer Tweedy is at an advantage, he is already at a great disadvantage. That being his last name. Sure, Jakob Dylan has had a good run with the Wallflowers, and Ziggy and Damian Marley have achieved mainstream success, but it’s hard to think of any offspring of a famous musician ever living up to the legacy of their parent, or even being able to classify themselves as a completely different musician. Even the article where I heard Spencer Tweedy’s new song felt they had to mention that the song “hints strongly at his father’s own work.” I don’t know why that made me so frustrated. I expected them to mention how it sounds like Summerteeth, and I’m sure Spencer is proud of that fact, but I couldn’t help but think how this young musician would ever make it out from the shadow of his father’s sacred 10/10 rating from Pitchfork for 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

This string of thoughts on the idea of “making it” was also spawned from a book I’ve been reading: The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, which was the poet’s first and most acclaimed book. Throughout the book Berrigan fragmentally recounts friendships he’s had in his life. Part of sonnet XLIV reads, “Anne is writing poems to me and worrying about “making it” / and Ron is writing poems and worrying about “making it” / and Pat is worrying and not working on anything.” It doesn’t really matter who the people in this poem are. They were most likely friends of Berrigan’s, they might sound like friends of your own. This may not make very much sense out of context, but I think what I pulled from these lines is that we’ve become a culture that is much to worried about “making it” to the point where we forgot why we listen and talk about music in the first place.

I think part of what it comes down to is abandoning this whole umbrellaed idea of "indie." I don't really know where I'm getting at with all of these thoughts, but I think we've come to the end of the indie road, especially as it is starting to become synonymous with a word I hate entirely: hipster. Whatever conotations that word has started to carry could be the plague of the music world, but that is a whole different type of rant. Essentially what I'm getting at is this: if you really enjoy a piece of music or art then you should know why. Like, really know why. Basically, don’t end up like that pony-tailed-how-do-you-like-them-apples guy who gets bested by Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting. 



Tom Dennis
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