After kicking up something of a storm by criticizing the current crop of manufactured “musicians”, (and yes, the quotes are deliberate), I thought it only right that I should write about an earlier time, when musicians, songwriters, bands and artists made music because of their love for the music - not because a commercial company hired sound engineers, choreographers and cinematographers to exploit a specific demographic.
Click on the YouTube link below and just enjoy…
The clip is from the movie “Almost Famous”, and takes us back to a time when bands wrote their own music, played their own instruments, were written about by journalists who loved music, and listened to by fans who had not yet been exploited.
There is a poignant scene in the movie where Phillip Seymour Hoffman - playing a reclusive writer - tells his young proteg “You CANNOT make friends with the rock stars. That’s what’s important. If you’re a rock journalist - first, you will never get paid much. But you will get free records from the record company. And they’ll buy you drinks, you’ll meet girls, they’ll try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs… I know. It sounds great. But they are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars, and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it.”
He was foretelling the world we now live in - where the chief aim of the music industry is to manufacture a product - to exploit a demographic, and use every psychological trick in the book to suck you in. Music and lyrics are bought from professional writers. Instruments are played by session musicians. Voices are corrected by auto-tuners (both “live” and in the studio). Photographs are “Photoshop-ed”.
Quite bizarrely, the music industry has missed it’s biggest chance to redeem itself - with iPods, MP3 players and music download services, the music industry repeatedly tries to treat it’s own customers as criminals. You are no longer allowed to own the music you pay for.
Although painting a very bleak picture of the music industry here, I am of course only describing that which is happening to “pop music” - the music being marketed to young teens through an all out assault across the media - television, radio, movies, clothes, chocolate bars, cereal boxes. Real bands and artists do still exist. Coldplay, U2, Snow Patrol, Nickelback, Keane, Travis, Badly Drawn Boy, Stereophonics, Killers, Kasabian… perhaps the future of “pop music” - of our music - is safe in their hands.
It will be interesting to look back at the first decade of the 21st century in years to come, and see the full story of the music industry reaching it’s commercial zenith, and perhaps causing it’s own destruction. The recent resurgence in the popularity of folk music might mean it has already started.