Don't Get Me Started...

Words and music

This morning's newsletter sees Bob Lefsetz use a brief Ann Powers article in the LA Times as a jumping off point  for one of his typically entertaining, smart and naturally scattershot mini-disquisitions on the current state of the record industry. Powers' own jumping off point in turn is the Raconteurs' announcement - reported in the UK by the Guardian and BBC 6music - that their new album, Consolers of the Lonely, will be released simultaneously to the public and the press.

"The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first week's sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it," according to a press release, which you read in full on their website. Now there's arguably something of a schtick to this - and Jack White, for all his undoubted musical talent, is hardly averse to gimmickry - but the intentions here are pretty laudable, I have to say.

But it poses problems for Powers, who's been the LA Times' chief pop critic for a couple of years now and is generally held in pretty good esteem. Boiled down, her article essentially frames - and partly answers - the question What's the role of the critic in the new information age? She admits that critics' voices are sometimes lost in the online furore and that critics' own adrenal need to be the first with the new opinion, the new party line (opinion scoops, if you will) has been subverted by the web's speed of news and opinion transmission. But she ultimately takes something of a Third Way line, that professional critics will benefit from the new communications technology if they truly engage with them. "But we can -- we must -- view the Web's interactivity as a boon. Musical samples can help illustrate critical points. Dialogue with readers can illuminate our interpretations and make for interesting reassessments."

I'm personally not so sure about that. Her giveaway line is this: "A commenter on Idolator.com who goes by the name "SuperUnison" had a cute name for critics: "the context mafia." That's one family I'm proud to join."

I don't know who this commenter was, but were they ever on the money. Music journalism as my generation and the generation before us know it has all been about the context. Yes, there are musicological texts about pop music, but they're strictly for academics - and for the more inquisitive practitioner. But music journalism has, by necessity, been about the stuff around the music: the lifestyle, the lyrics, the political opinions, the personal travails and on and on. Not that this can't be great, but you need to be clear about what it is.

(I throw in a personal admission here. I used to write a lot about music. You can see an awful lot of it here. I remember grappling with the notion of actually writing about the music in a way which would mean something to non-musicians, but looking back I failed and failed. I was just another context mafioso, albeit a pretty low-ranking one. Paulie Walnuts, at best.)

But before the web, aside from radio, we principally learned about music through words; there have certainly been times in my life when I was reading about far more music than I was actually listening to. How could that not be the case? Obviously radio and the odd free covermount gave us a bit more direct access to the music, but it was always fleeting.

Now that "direct access" to the music is there for the taking. It's not that professional writers like Powers are being drowned out by the hordes, it's that we don't need words to tell us about music at all. We can just fucking listen to it. It's all out there. Knowing context can be useful, and there will always be among is those who seek that kind of information out, but we don't need it as conduit to the music any more. It's hard to predict with any accuracy what will come to pass as a result, but I'll stick my neck out and suggest these:

1. The craft of professional pop music journalism will largely wither; I don't see a future in which a Bangs or a Morley or a Shaar Murray will emerge.

2. The usefulness of an artist's "schtick" - their image, their stance, whatever - will decline; a schtick has to be written about to work.

3. Niche areas always unloved my critics, and hence ignored in the mainstream discourse - and yes, yes, I'm thinking metal here, but you can insert your own hobbyhorse - will flourish.

4. Where it happens at all, discourse about music will happen through the music itself.

It's this last point which I find the most thrilling. I've been very taken recently with the overwhelming amount of bedroom shred/metal guitar playing posted on You Tube. Now of course, there's some narcissism at work here, but at its best you get a sense of a real dialogue between musicians trying to nail a new lick, solo, rhythm part or indeed whole song. Here are a few random examples; I've taken Meshuggah and Meshuggah's genius guitarist-composer Frederik Thordendal as a cue. With all of them, check out out the comments thread.

Two high school kids play the rhythm parts to Thordendal's mesmerisingly complex metal-jazz piece Sol Niger Within. 

A young Brazilian does the same in his bedroom.

Likewise bedroom shredder Achokarlos from Spain. (Love that eyebrow action!)

An 18 year old Finn demonstrates his own Meshuggah-inspired composition

Achokarlos again, performing Meshuggah's Combustion. 

Now I admit that on one level this is just a bunch of musicians helping each other on, and using the web to do it. But check that last clip. That's the opening track from an album that's been out for less than a month! There's that speed of transmission again. This is, I believe, a paradigm shift; something truly tectonic is afoot here, and I love it.

Powers is right to be worried; The Raconteurs are right to see on opportunity out there. But I'm not sure either grasp how profoundly different the new world is.

Total Guitar and the upcoming year in guitar and metal

Had my monthly leaf through Total Guitar mag last night; I say this somewhat sheepishly as it's aimed squarely at the teenager first learning to play. That's cool of course, but you have to know where it's coming from. Anyway, most of the issue is dedicated to a run down of what releases to expect in the upcoming year, a sufficiently good year, it would seem, to warrant the tag "Clash of the Titans" (again, target audience: teenage metallers).

So here are a few things that caught my eye in that list and elsewhere in the mag...

French Death Metal's Gojira are currently writing their fourth album, due for an Autumn release.

The admirably daft Children of Bodom from Finland have an album out imminently; sadly I missed their show in London last weekend.

Mastodon (who remain vastly better for me on record than live - I've walked out on them twice now) have an unscheduled release.

Trivium's album will have "the catchiest, fastest and heaviest stuff we've ever done with the most intricate guitar work". Promising, but is it too much to hope they can sort out their live sound?

Opeth's Watershed (June) will be their "even faster and a lot more technical" according to guitarist and leader Mikael Akerfeldt, the coolest man ever to emerge from Black Metal, or prog, for that matter. They and Arch Enemy co-headline Metal Hammer's Defenders of the Faith tour in April; Brixton Academy 26th.

Also noteworthy, Between the Buried and Me, whom I saw in Brighton supporting Dillinger Escape Plan a few weeks back, will be joining Dream Theatre and Opeth on the preposterously-monickered Progressive Nation tour of the US this Spring. They were good in Brighton, very impressive indeed, but that came as a bit of a surprise; they've got the chops, for sure, but aesthetically they're a long way from prog, live at least.

And in the guilty pleasures corner...

Joe Satriani's, ahem Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock is out soon; he returns to the UK in May with the daffy but technically dazzling wunderkind Paul Gilbert on tow.

And the Satriani-tipped Herman Li's Dragonforce's fourth album drops in September.

Finally, The Deftones are a guilty pleasure for other reasons; September's album will be a "return to White Pony", apparently. Ditto Slipknot, back in August with possibly their last ever album.

So, all in all, quite a year ahead, what with Tool rumoured to be in the studio and Meshuggah's epochal obZen already out there.

Bob Lefsetz on SXSW

I've been reading former music business lawyer and industry commentator Bob Lefsetz's newsletter for quite a while now (with thanks for the heads-up to my good friend and former EMI Virgin colleague Malcolm Carruthers). Indeed, Lefsetz's acerbic, highly personal style was something that made my think about getting the somewhat-late-in-the-game Don't Get Me Started up and running in the first place.

I don't always agree with Lefsetz's musical tastes (although anyone who counts openly refers to Frank Zappa a a "true hero" is already ahead of most of the pack as far as I'm concerned) but his overall thesis about the state of the recording industry and the individual observations which fall out of that are most often spot on.

This weekend's post about the utterly pointless, anachronistic industry conference South By South West (SXSW) is a fine example of his insight - and sarcasm.

"Or you could go to the panels at SXSW.  To learn that fewer people have jobs at less money.  I’ve debated Net monetization at these conventions for NINE YEARS and nothing has happened.  Everybody’s just reacted to what some college student, not in attendance, ultimately has done."

Highly recommended daily brain food for anyone following the demise and eventual rebirth of the phonographic industry.

Who owes you a living? - Sharkey in the Register & the RSA's Future of Radio Conference

1. Overtones of special pleading?

I'm assured by friends and colleagues who know and/or have worked with Fergal Sharkey that he's a good guy - opinionated (which is good), non-suffering of fools (ditto) and a combination of smart, insightful and caring when it comes to the current state of the music industry. He also seems to have the ear of a lot of people in the industry and in policy making circles so I felt obliged to read the Register's recent interview with him

Mistake.

Talk about dispiriting... My guess is that Mr Sharkey's overall stated view of the industry, the audience and technology is a highly political one. He is certainly prepared to make some contentious points - never too contentious, mind - and knows damn well things have changed, in many cases irreversibly. And he's not exactly impressed by the behavior of a lot of the record industry. And yes, he recognises that the new technologies have enabled a lot of people to get out there and do things for themselves, while pointing out that not everyone can expect to get rich doing it (although why anyone would assume that everyone does want to get rich doing it is beyond me - beyond a vague suspicion that commentators in the field are so appalled by the seemingly inexorable rise of the modern popularity contest TV format that they can't see the motivations of those beyond that world's appeal... that is, most of us).

It's a view best captured by this:

"Has the internet and technology opened up opportunities for people to go out there and do their thing? Absolutely, no question. And in my book anything that's going to encourage people to be creative in any way gets my bloody applause every single time.

But the reality is this. Is MySpace going to turn you into U2? I'm afraid it's not."

So far, then, so,"fair enough", if hardly revelatory.

But once he gets on to file sharing he gets into some very thorny shit indeed. Here again, I reckon that he's performing something of a political tight-rope act, acknowledging that record companies need to rethink their game - and most especially their pricing strategies - but ultimately insisting that musicians should be paid for their recorded work and that the public need to be "educated" about this.

I quote: "... consumers have to get their head around the idea that they cannot continue to do what they've been doing... What is beginning to come out of some of the research is: some of the educational messages are getting through. I think most people understand that there is a moral issue here - in that you are depriving young musicians, artists, songwriters, and composers from any ability to generate any kind of income."

The language here is really pretty irksome here: "a moral issue"...  "consumers have to"... "messages are getting through"... So, in that order: it's about ethics, apparently, the obligation is on consumers (that is, us) to understand this but thankfully we're beginning to get it (I assume it's taken us so long because we're ever so slightly thick).

It's difficult to say which bit of that sticks in the craw the most, but the line about the "moral issue" is a strong candidate. Let's get something absolutely straight: copyright - and everything that goes with it - is NOT about ethics, nor ever has been. It's about (among other things) pragmatics, about building legal systems which make for the best outcome for the most people. The way the history of phonography panned out until it went virtual was that musicians, composers, business execs and, not insignificantly, the audience, benefited from a certain status quo where some "creatives" (and let's be absolutely clear: it was always a minority) managed to make a living (and for an even smaller minority, got stinking rich) by the limitation of audio copying.

I say "limitation" advisedly. For all its daft campaigning (ie the use of LP inner bags to inform those teenagers among us who taped the odd mate's album that, despite spending every last penny we had on music in some way or other, we were committing musicicide) the industry only really got worked up over large scale, commercial piracy - and quite rightly. Now we need a different model or - as I'll argue elsewhere - a plethora of different models to keep some people making music and some people listening to it. And that model will surely evolve, whatever your view of the Invisible Hand. Just don't pretend this is about morality.

The killer line though, and the one which I think summons up Mr Sharkey's position best is "I've never met anyone who's prepared to go to work from Monday to Friday and not be prepared to be paid at the end of the week. But that's exactly what we expect our musicians and our songwriters and our composers to do. I don't get it."

No, I don't get you. I don't know whether Mr Sharkey has ever had to do a job "from Monday to Friday" but I suspect not; it's inconceivable to me that anyone who has could equate being in a band, or writing songs or whatever with doing a job. Yes, it can be extraordinarily hard work, work which can put people over the edge. But being an artist is not doing a job. It actually undermines the very notion of artistry to claim that it is.

Again, it's about pragmatics. It works out well for most of us that artists are able to do what they do more or less full time. There are, of course, honourably groundbreaking amateurs (and yes, I'm going to invoke Charles Ives here) but on the whole we all recognise that people develop their craft, their thinking, their art best when that's all they do, at least professionally. But... we need to accept the new mechanics of music distribution (and for that matter, of all reproducable art) and figure out new ways of making them work for as many of us - producer, consumer, "prosumer" - as possible, not browbeat the audience into doing things more or less like they always have because we're too lazy to think a little.

But to be really blunt here: no one owes anyone a living, least of all artists.

2. Let's Put The Future Behind Us

And so on to the Royal Society of Art's "Future of Radio" panel discussion on Monday evening. I won't go into much detail here, as it's not especially relevant to the post. I will say that, to be honest, it wasn't an especially illuminating discussion, although, to be fair, I think it was aimed at a generalist audience rather than, say, the Radio at the Edge crowd. Certainly my former colleague Ayesha Mohideen was on excellent form, spelling out clearly what the benefits of digital technology are to a traditional brand like Test Match Special, using an amusing conversation with her dad to illustrate them (and scuppering the usual "this is just for the kids" protestations before they were made - although made they surely were; see below). And Andrew Phillips from Channel 4 Radio was amusing and charming, without being able to say very much about what his employers were actually going to do in the audio field.

But it was, I'm afraid, Neil Gardner, Chair of the Radio Independents Group who really got did me in*. Mr Gardner's schtick was a simple one, and one, on the evidence of audience reaction, with a lot of support. It is, in summary that, yes, all this new technology is all well and good and yes - gracious nod to Ayesha here, of course - it can enhance radio output. But, you know, let's be frank, it's all a bit of a diversion and, most of all it's all diverting an awful lot of cash from the real business of radio: making shows.

Now I appreciate that Mr Gardner has to bang the drum on behalf of his organisation's members and, believe me, as a former employee of both <a href="http://www.somethinelse.com/">Somethin' Else</a> and the BBC's (then) Radio division I have every sympathy with program makers trying to make excellent radio content on ever-shrinking budgets.

But many of the things Mr Gardner said really do not help advance either his cause or the general debate about the future of the medium. When one questioner in the audience said how much he enjoyed the choice of radio stations available online  - tens of thousands, the questioner said - Mr Gardner grudgingly accepted but couldn't help make an aside about that being alright if you really wanted to listen to "Uzbekistani punk rock shows (what, as opposed to Money Box Live? Count me in!)

And then there was the casual insistence that, you know, all this texting and blogging and interactive stuff, it's alright for the kids but it's really not for a mainstream audience. Tell that to my 75 year old aunt on Facebook, or to my "mainstream" working class mum emailing me every bloody day she's on holiday about what a fabulous time she's having. Or, indeed, try telling it to Ms Mohideen's digitally-enhanced TMS listeners (or, indeed, "users").

But what really got to me - and brought to mind the interview with Mr Sharkey and inadvertantly led to this post - was the line that we (meaning radio producers and, I presume some of their bosses) "have to pay the mortgage, have to pay the bills". There it is again, the "we're owed a living" sentiment. Now again, I don't think that radio producers shouldn't get paid for their work, any more than I want to see musicians starve... but... just as in music, we may have to accept that the new technological paradigm(s) lead(s) to further partial amateurisation of content making. Because, let's face it, there's less and less money to spend on more and more stuff, even if some of that is Uzbek punk. One can bemoan that all one likes (and indeed, one audience member sided with Mr Gardner and accused the radio industry of running scared, bowing in to the pressure of UGC unnecessarily) but, I'm afraid, things change, have changed. I spoke to another former BBC colleague after the event and cheekily suggested that we might be last generation to be able to buy three bedroom houses off the back of a career in content-making; I was being tipsily provocative, of course, but I'm not sure that I didn't mean it.

* Anyone at the event will note that I have neglected to mention Professor Ivor Gabor, but then anyone actually there will know why.