Category: Music (Page 2 of 6)

Don’t look back, you can never look back

April 7, 2015 /

DJ Shadow’s “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt” in a Chevy ad is our generation’s Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. http://t.co/w5QgZ1dqiC

— David Wertheimer (@werty) November 20, 2014

I casually tweeted that late one night in November, having caught the commercial on TV. The thought keeps coming back to me. Not only is it a parallel moment, it’s also a reflection of how the music industry has evolved in the three decades since “Boys of Summer” dominated charts and airwaves during the rise of classic rock.

Back then, music was more entrenched in defining societal moments. Henley, the former frontman of the Eagles, a band regularly dismissed as lightweight despite selling a hundred million albums, had begun forging a more thoughtful identity as a solo artist. From his first album, Henley reached #3 on Billboard’s singles chart with the song “Dirty Laundry,” a political commentary on negative advertising that still rings true today (and which remains catchy, if dated).

Henley’s social commentary began to mesh with introspection by 1984, when “Boys of Summer” was released. Coupled with a moody, award-winning music video, the song aimed to capture the nostalgia felt by the Baby Boomer generation as it first confronted aging. Henley, 36 years old when the song was written, had seen America grow from the postwar 1950s to the Reagan era.

“Boys of Summer,” besides being a pretty big hit—a top-five single in the U.S., anchoring an album that sold three million copies domestically, and a track still spun on classic rock radio stations—is memorable for its wistful lyrics, particularly this one:

Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said,
‘Don’t look back. You can never look back.’

Henley, of course, is referring to the juxtaposition of cultures represented in this act: the counterculture and independent spirit of rock ‘n roll, a respected but decidedly fringe band and musical genre, a subculture defined by carefree living, illicit drugs and beat-up Volkswagen vans, unceremoniously showcased on the back of the preeminent American luxury vehicle. He thought his generation had sold out. The concept abhorred him; to this day, Henley doesn’t license his music, and actively combats its commercial use.

Fast forward to now. Josh Davis is 42, five years older than Henley was when “The Boys of Summer” was released. As a 24-year-old, Davis, recording under the moniker DJ Shadow, recorded “Endtroducing…,” a striking pastiche of sampled music that is widely regarded as one of the most innovative albums of the recorded music era.

Nearly 20 years on, “Endtroducing…” has sold fewer than 300,000 copies, making it a prototypically seminal work: revered, respected, imitated, yet still somewhat fringe. Not unlike the Grateful Dead in 1984, who, after 15 years of touring, were still something of a sideline in the rock pantheon, selling albums without mainstream exposure (that came a few years later, in 1987, when “Touch of Grey” became an unlikely pop hit).

Except life has changed a lot in thirty years. In 1984, the music industry had one of its boldface names singing on a hit song about the peculiar sight of an independent act getting co-opted by mainstream tastes. By contrast, in 2014, it’s the independent act that’s being co-opted—but willfully, for a payout, to sell perhaps the most mass-market automobile on the road, the Chevrolet Malibu.

The ad is still running, and every time it airs, it reinforces our comprehension of the era we’re in, while reminding us of the parallels to music history of the generation before.

Tempted to make a playlist of awesome TV ad rock tracks. The folks in agency music departments are the new rock radio program directors.

— David Wertheimer (@werty) January 13, 2015

I don’t begrudge DJ Shadow his income, and certainly, music consumption has reached a point where people are discovering songs and artists via TV commercials. (Also, “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt” is a fantastic song, so it’s a nice 30 seconds.) But it couldn’t be further away from the ideals and disappointments Henley so powerfully noted a generation ago.

Obsolete vs. useless

January 8, 2014 /

Quartz and Wired is making a big deal today out of a new survey that shows 58% of American households still have a VCR.

“It shows,” writes Christopher Mims*, “that a majority of Americans are holding onto a device designed to play a media format that isn’t even available anymore.”

But there’s a reason for this “lingering on past their expiration date,” as Mims nicely puts it: old VHS tapes.

While millions of Americans have moved on from tape formats, decades of media were created and stored on them before discs, drives and cloud storage appeared. And while it’s easy to replace that videotape of “Dirty Dancing” with Blu-Ray or a stream, doing so with home movies and one-offs taped from live TV is much harder. Many families have paid for a service to migrate their essentials; mine has dubbed its childhood videos from Super-8 to VHS to DVD over the past 15 years. But many others have not. And until they do, they’re not ditching their VCRs.

I still have roughly 800 cassettes in my possession (well, technically, they’re in my parents’ basement, to my mother’s ongoing chagrin, but still), including a number of bootlegs, one-offs, hard-to-find albums, and irreplaceable moments, from a Taj Mahal concert at summer camp in 1989 to my college radio shows. It’d be great to digitize them for posterity. But seeing how hard it is even to move all my CDs to MP3, the digitizing of my tapes won’t come for awhile. And while I wait for myself, I’m glad to have a working cassette deck, still gorgeous in its anachronistic 1988 glory.

So color me unsurprised at the persistence of the VCR. It remains peripherally useful for many, even in the rarest of moments. And so it remains, unbothered in many homes’ wall units, biding its time, and probably blinking ––:–– as usual.

* Of course, Mims is the author behind the recently infamous “2013 was a lost year for tech,” which suggests he’s in the dot-com-needling-provocateur game right now, much like Farhad Manjoo a couple of a years ago.

The best-selling albums of all time

January 7, 2013 /

Per independent research, the top 10 albums and millions of copies sold, worldwide:
1. Michael Jackson, “Thriller”: 66,200,000
2. Soundtrack, “Grease”: 44,700,000
3. Pink Floyd, “The Dark Side of the Moon”: 44,200,000
4. Whitney Houston et al., “The Bodyguard”: 38,600,000
5. The Bee Gees at al., “Saturday Night Fever”: 37,200,000
6. The Eagles, “Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975”: 36,900,000
7. Bob Marley, “Legend”: 36,800,000
8. Led Zeppelin, “IV”: 35,700,000
9. AC/DC, “Back in Black”: 35,700,000
10. Shania Twain, “Come on Over”: 35,400,000
Domestically, the U.S. top-selling albums list isn’t all that different, but it’s somewhat cheesier.
1. Michael Jackson, Thriller, Epic, 29,000,000
2. Eagles, Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), Asylum, est. 29,000,000
3. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV, Atlantic, 23,000,000
4. Billy Joel, Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II, Columbia, 11,500,000
5. Pink Floyd, The Wall, Columbia/Capitol, 11,500,000
6. AC/DC, Back in Black, Atlantic, 22,000,000
7. Garth Brooks, Double Live, Capitol Nashville, 21,000,000
8. Shania Twain, Come On Over, Mercury Nashville, est. 21,000,000
9. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, Warner Bros., 19,000,000
10. The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album), Apple, 9,500,000
Just below the top 10 in the U.S. are several of the global top sellers, plus “Boston,” which apparently doesn’t scale on a worldwide level.

What I learned today, August 23

August 23, 2011 /

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote the indelible “Hound Dog,” hated Elvis Presley’s version when it first came out.

I did, however, throw out my collection of spare jewel boxes

August 8, 2011 /

I still have roughly 500 CDs in my house. The audio kind, that is; 500 hours of music, most of it somehow not yet ripped into MP3 format, everything from the Beatles to an classical improvisation trio from Lancaster, Pa., much of it slowly being forgotten as I move inexorably away from physical music ownership.
Tonight I rekindled my project to get them digitized once and for all. A stack of CDs has migrated from my wall unit to my desk, slowly but surely making its way onto my hard drive. And I’m boggling my mind with the discs I’ve somehow never gotten onto my iPod.
How is it that I have Radiohead’s “The Bends,” and every album from “Kid A” through “In Rainbows,” in iTunes, but I never pulled in “OK Computer?” Why do I have Huevos Rancheros’ “Dig In!” on there and not Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend,” which I must have played hundreds of times in my car’s CD player in the 1990s? Actually, I only have one of my six Matthew Sweet albums on my iPod. Do I really look back that little?
Apparently so. And perhaps this is why the end of WRXP, New York’s only modern rock station, resonated so heavily with me. With the exception of two pop and a few hip-hop stations, almost every spot on the commercial radio dial in New York is stuck in the past. Sure, the past has moved up from the 1960s to the 1980s; but if I want to hear a contemporary rock song–or jazz, or metal, or country for that matter–I’m going to have to turn off the radio. I want modern, interesting, progressive music on the radio: NPR for songs. Instead, I get “Eye of the Tiger.”
So I undertake this CD-to-MP3 migration in a bit of a catch-22. I can’t move these discs out of my apartment until they’re (mostly) available on my computer, yet the vast majority of the effort is going to wind up worthless, as I go years without listening to the music I’m diligently migrating; but without doing this, I could never let go of my CDs, even as they slowly collect dust until I randomly grab one to bring into the car. (I never did replace my CD player.) Maybe I should get a Spotify Premium subscription and just move on.

Slap bass, dawg

February 25, 2011 /

How many people remember that Randy Jackson, now famous for his role as an “American Idol” judge, was a bass player with a long history in the industry as a session musician? I remember him well as Journey’s bassist on “Raised on Radio.” Check out the still-great video for “Girl Can’t Help It” for Randy Jackson circa 1986, complete with ’80s flattop and neon leather jacket.

Take off, eh

August 25, 2010 /

What I learned today: Geddy Lee of Rush guested on Bob and Doug McKenzie’s cult classic comedy routine, “Take Off, Eh,” because Lee and Rick Moranis went to elementary school together.
Me, I used to pick on Chelsea Handler on the walk home from school, but I don’t think I’m being asked on her show anytime soon.

On twentieth-century media

June 17, 2010 /

The Awl: The Golden Age Of Hipper-Than-Thou CD Fetishization Begins Now.

See, I’ve still got my old stereo, and I’ve been hoarding all the CDs I bought or burned between the ages of 13 and 24. Sure, they take up a lot of space. Was a bitch to move them out of the old apartment, too, but it’s worth it. This stuff is gold. … We remember Tower Records, man. We were there.

My son (age two) broke my CD player last month. My gorgeous, wonderful, feature-rich, six-disc Pioneer CD changer, which lasted longer in regular use than any other piece of electronics I’ve ever owned, which I loved so much that I bought a matching car CD changer so I could swap the cartridges, which was such a near-perfect device that I actually had the laser realigned in 1996 rather than buy a new one. The day it broke was almost exactly the 20th anniversary of its purchase.

Twenty years is a long time for a piece of stereo equipment, so I’m not all that saddened that it broke. Its passing has thrown me into something of an existential crisis, though.

Do I buy another one?

I mean, I’m an iPod guy through and through. Had one since they first came out. I carry a 160GB iPod Classic in addition to my iPhone. I rarely pop in CDs to listen to casually, and despite my lifelong love affair with record stores, I’ve only physically bought music two or three times in the past couple of years, and they were point-of-sale impulse buys.

On the other hand, I have a lot of discs. More than a thousand. Most of which I’ve never properly digitized, because of the daunting task of burning a thousand CDs. (I perversely burn the albums I least care about, in order to get them out of my apartment, which means my iTunes collection contains a lot of mediocre music and not enough of my old favorites.) When we moved into our current apartment, I had two wall units custom-built for our living room, one of which just houses CDs.

I have been thinking for awhile about digitizing the whole thing and just moving on. But what to do with all that music? I’m something of a collector and I don’t like the idea of throwing away the tangible jewel boxes and liner notes, especially considering how much money, and time, I invested in acquiring them.

But the reality of progress cannot be ignored. I saved 800 cassette tapes and 200 vinyl records in my parents’ house when I moved out in the ’90s, and to date, I’ve listened to roughly 30 of those cassettes and none of the records. The hoarder in me shouts, “But those thirty! And how much is irreplaceable? And what about the next time you need music and forget your iPod? And the bootlegs, man! And imagine if you had to reassemble your metal collection from scratch…!”

Thing is, I have reassembled a lot of my music collection. No matter how much I deny it, I don’t look back much: all those classic rock albums I have on cassette? I don’t even leave those artists on the radio when the local rock radio station plays their songs. We move on.

In an ideal world, I’d find myself at home with two weeks to kill and no one else in the house, and I’d spend a few days pulling all my music–cassettes and all–into a lossless audio format on a two-terabyte hard drive with dual backups. I don’t know if or when that will ever happen, but in the meantime, I may as well admit to progress.

So we’re not replacing the CD player in the component stereo. We will, instead, pop in an iPod cable, so until we get a music server set up we can play tunes without dealing with the laptop. And my son–who, before breaking it, learned how to turn on the stereo and play CDs in the old Pioneer–will be able to bring his iPod into the living room and play his kids’ tunes on his own volition, once he learns to read, that is. And at some point I’ll even purge the living room of physical CDs.

It’s not that the future has arrived. Heck, the future has been here for years. It just took a toddler’s accident for me to formally let go of the past.

On metal

November 14, 2009 /

So I’m watching the new episode of “That Metal Show” (yeah, I watch That Metal Show, and I’m home on a Saturday night, and I knew the show was on in advance and am appointment-viewing, what’s it to you? you think I’m not metal?) and I’m taken with the question Eddie Trunk posed to his panel: where is the next generation of arena rock going to come from?
Trunk asked the question as a reference point to Aerosmith’s rumored woes. The big metal bands of the 1970s and ’80s are either rapidly aging or no longer a draw for stadium-sized venues. Metallica is probably the only remaining heavy band of the era big enough to fill Giants Stadium.
The show used this question as a lead-in to Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta. One of the hosts said to Jasta, “Your band Hatebreed appeals to everyone, from metalheads to punks to hardcore.”
And therein lies the rub. Today’s metal is rarely pop music. In my halcyon quasi-mulleted days, metal was top-40, and everyone from Warrant to Winger had hit songs on Z100 and power ballads for crossover success. That doesn’t happen anymore. “I’m not gonna get a lot of radio play,” Jasta said on “That Metal Show.”
Indeed, the pop landscape is a mix of hip-hop, power pop and country crossover these days, which creates a ceiling that hard-rock and metal bands rarely cross. The Billboard Hot 100 2009 top 10 hit tally has a grand total of one hard-rock song: “New Divide,” by Linkin Park, which as a touring band spends most of its time in multi-headliner tours. Foo Fighters, for all their success, have had only three top-40 songs in their career and no top-10s.
So where does that leave the genre? A bit marginalized, I suppose, and cherry-picking its successes. Let’s not forget that Linkin Park has sold 50 million albums, although they didn’t come to mind on “That Metal Show.” Foo Fighters are a heck of a rock band, too, but point taken: Dave Grohl is 40. The show spoke of “resurrecting the genre,” which is an interesting question–it’s certainly not the mainstream force it once was, although it’s certainly not dead, either. (Just look at guys like me, holding the metal lighter, rocking hard to a talk show on a Saturday night.)
So perhaps it’s better to wonder how pop music can embrace hard rock in 2010 like it did Van Halen and the like in the 1980s. The shifting music business is always creating opportunities, it’s just a matter of being creative with them. Imagine: metal night on “American Idol!” Why not?

Headphones at the halfway point

August 16, 2009 /

My fifth headphone review went live on Boing Boing Gadgets Friday, marking the midpoint in the series I’m doing this summer. I’m penning 10 pieces covering 11 models from seven different manufacturers.

And what have I learned? More than I expected, some of it obvious, others less so:

Greatness is variable. Undoubtedly, almost all of the headphones I’m testing are great, in one way or another; the cheapest pair is a hundred fifty bucks, after all. But what defines greatness? To Etymotic, it’s pure reproduction of original sound; to Klipsch, it’s top-to-bottom balance; to Audio-Technica, it’s pumping abnormally strong bass through miniature devices; to JVC (coming next week), it’s replicating its audio style across product lines. More than once I’ve found myself thinking, really, who am I to judge?
MP3s truly are a crappy audio medium. Don’t get me wrong, I’m used to the sound, and I don’t deny progress. But the high quality of electronics in my possession exposes an MP3’s flaws and has me casting a skeptical eye on my iTunes library. Someday I’m going to switch to a 200GB iPod and a lossless audio format.
I’m a picky son of a gun. Etymotic has pure sound the likes of which I’ve never experienced. My wife swoons at the mere memory of listening to music through them. But I disliked the lack of low-end punch, which I noted, and which made my contact at Etymotic downright wistful. Maybe I should lighten up a bit.
But hey, I know what I like, which is a balanced output that brings warmth and resonance to music at low volume levels. While I remain impressed by it, I don’t need Etymotic’s hyper-clear output. Give me the Klipsch, thanks, with a side of Audio-Technica‘s mind-blowingly good noise isolation. Heck, I’d take the Audio-Technicas, too. I like bass. (I’m bringing them both on a business trip I’m about to take.)

This project has been a ton of fun, and I haven’t even written about the fancy models yet. My continued thanks go out to Rob Beschizza and Joel Johnson for giving me the platform.