Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Turn your radio on
Radio is not dead, but radio’s effect on music is nothing like it used to be. If we want to think about the evolution of music over the 20th century, that has to be part of the discussion.
Commercial radio began in 1920, and before television became the core broadcasting entity in the 50s, radio was the mass market. It wasn’t just music, of course. There was drama and sitcoms and news and just about everything you can think of. I tend to connect the rise of Swing music with the preeminence of radio in the 40s, “coming to you live from the Yadda Yadda ballroom.” Even in my lifetime, dramatic radio was a presence; my mother would be doing her chores in the kitchen when I was knee high to the proverbial, and she’d be listening to Gunsmoke. The radio was always on, and there was a lot of talking coming out of it. As everyone knows, early television in the late 40s and 50s was as often as not the visual version of an existing radio program, i.e., radio with pictures. All the dramatic structures, and commercial breaks, were already in place. They just shifted the medium.
Radio did not die, replaced by television. Old media don’t necessarily die when new media are born; if they want to survive, they adjust. AM radio adjusted, becoming mostly a news and music medium, which makes sense when you remember that, along with a television in every living room following World War II, there was a car in every garage, and a radio in every car. One didn’t listen to the radio because it was 8:00 and your show was on; one listened to the radio because one had a ten minute drive to the store. News and songs, the sort of thing it doesn’t matter when you jump in, worked perfectly. Not to mention that AM radios became cheap and portable (transistors), accessible to the growing Baby Boomer market. AM Top Ten Radio eventually ruled the airwaves. And in some markets like New York, it wasn’t just one station. There were some serious contenders out there battling it out. They were playing those 45 rpm records, and kids would buy those records as a result of hearing them played over and over. (The payola scandal was about bribing DJs to play certain songs.) As far as popular music was concerned, AM radio was it. AM was the medium of Motown, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly” and “The Monster Mash.” I have no idea who was buying the father-daughter “Something Stupid,” but when it came out it was inescapable and became one of Frank’s biggest hits ever. Really. “Strangers in the Night” was no doubt up there as well; at least Nancy sat that one out.
Listening to the radio in the car was one of the memes of the times. A song would come on the radio. You would decide in an instant whether to listen to it or not, and as quickly as that, if the decision were negative, you’d press the dial to the next station. Again, the decision. Again, if negative, the next station. There were times when you would hear one great song after another, although not necessarily the whole thing, via the clicking of the dial. There were times when you would click and click and click and click, and it was nothing but something stupid, or worse, “Something Stupid.”
“Don’t touch that dial!” we were warned. Something good was coming. If we ever listened to a commercial, it was a miracle. “Can’t you just leave it on one station?” the parent would inevitably moan. Parents listened to radio stuff like the news where one station would suffice, whereas kids clicked away the minute the news came on. There was plenty of good radio, of course, that had nothing to do with any of this, like Bob & Ray and Gene Klavan and Jean Shepherd, but they were the exceptions. For my generation, it was about the music, and on AM, the music was all about the hits. And the hits were Soul, British Invasion, Blue-eyed Kid-Pop and oddball stuff like Sinatra and Armstrong. And all of it was singles, 45 rpms, if we wanted to hear these songs at home.
That was the nature of free music until roughly the mid-60s, when FM hit its stride. There was suddenly, although I don't think it wasn’t called that yet, Album-Oriented Rock. This was music beyond the hits, although over the subsequent generation a lot of it became hits, now known as Classic Rock. Now you could hear music that was, perhaps, less commercial, and discover new music. FM was the breeding ground for Classic Rock. Everything starts somewhere. WNEW-FM in New York was the main station around here. Hendrix, the Doors, CSN, Cream, Traffic, Airplane, etc.—AOR is where we first really learned about them, until someone bought their albums and we sat down and listened at home.
Radio was important for a long time for my generation, first hooking us into pop aimed at us with AM hits, then taking us deeper into what rock could do with musicians who would ultimately become iconic, and whose music is still listened to. We got all of this initially from the radio.
I’ve never stopped listening to rock, but nowadays it is only one of the kinds of music I enjoy, and no one would ever say that I keep up with what’s going on. Rock got sort of boring in the early 70s and I began to get serious about classical music and theater music and then jazz and cowboy swing and various “world” musicians, until by now my iPod is something of a marvel even to me. Random play for me is really random. In the 70s, FM radio helped me out with all of this, because there were solid commercial stations playing just about anything you might want to hear. Most of which, as far as I can tell, has gone away, and I’m not quite sure why. Certainly in the present environment, internet music has replaced the radio, but the falling off of radio predated the arrival of ubiquitous internet music by many years. Part of this may have to do with the nature of music itself, at least popular music. Rock fragmented into pop and country and punk and hiphop and so forth, and instead of one mainstream music from different founts, now if you liked X you listened to X and the hell with the rest of it. This has always been true, of course, but people who listen to classical not listening to bluegrass is quite different from people not liking country rock listening to punk rock. The former are both music, a broad base, but the latter are both rock, a narrow base. Whatever. The narrowing of interests in our present culture goes a lot further than just music. Our technologies progressively allow us to more easily stay behind our particular firewalls, because apparently that’s what most of us want. And so we do. It’s absolutely true of television, where literal broadcasting is apparently on its last legs, and its true of music.
Curiously, I started all this thinking because of my belief that movies lately were too broad, i.e., too much concentrating on the biggest potential income earners in a saddening display of non-creativity. Maybe that’s just an example of the lowest common denominator visible in all mass entertainment. The most popular movies aren’t the most interesting or creative; the same is true of books and music and theater. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by it, and what’s most interesting is that any mass market survives at all, given all the firewalling technologies mitigating against the broad and pushing toward the narrow. Our challenge in all of this is to keep moving and to avoid falling irretrievably into the trap of the familiar and the comfortable. If you eat nothing but macaroni and cheese every night you end up eating nothing but macaroni and cheese. Watch nothing but Hollywood blockbusters and you watch nothing but Hollywood blockbusters. Listen to nothing but pop hits and you listen to nothing but pop hits. Read only bestselling pulp fiction and you read nothing but bestselling pulp fiction. The resulting deadening of the soul is predictable and, perhaps, irreversible. Please don't try this at home.
Commercial radio began in 1920, and before television became the core broadcasting entity in the 50s, radio was the mass market. It wasn’t just music, of course. There was drama and sitcoms and news and just about everything you can think of. I tend to connect the rise of Swing music with the preeminence of radio in the 40s, “coming to you live from the Yadda Yadda ballroom.” Even in my lifetime, dramatic radio was a presence; my mother would be doing her chores in the kitchen when I was knee high to the proverbial, and she’d be listening to Gunsmoke. The radio was always on, and there was a lot of talking coming out of it. As everyone knows, early television in the late 40s and 50s was as often as not the visual version of an existing radio program, i.e., radio with pictures. All the dramatic structures, and commercial breaks, were already in place. They just shifted the medium.
Radio did not die, replaced by television. Old media don’t necessarily die when new media are born; if they want to survive, they adjust. AM radio adjusted, becoming mostly a news and music medium, which makes sense when you remember that, along with a television in every living room following World War II, there was a car in every garage, and a radio in every car. One didn’t listen to the radio because it was 8:00 and your show was on; one listened to the radio because one had a ten minute drive to the store. News and songs, the sort of thing it doesn’t matter when you jump in, worked perfectly. Not to mention that AM radios became cheap and portable (transistors), accessible to the growing Baby Boomer market. AM Top Ten Radio eventually ruled the airwaves. And in some markets like New York, it wasn’t just one station. There were some serious contenders out there battling it out. They were playing those 45 rpm records, and kids would buy those records as a result of hearing them played over and over. (The payola scandal was about bribing DJs to play certain songs.) As far as popular music was concerned, AM radio was it. AM was the medium of Motown, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly” and “The Monster Mash.” I have no idea who was buying the father-daughter “Something Stupid,” but when it came out it was inescapable and became one of Frank’s biggest hits ever. Really. “Strangers in the Night” was no doubt up there as well; at least Nancy sat that one out.
Listening to the radio in the car was one of the memes of the times. A song would come on the radio. You would decide in an instant whether to listen to it or not, and as quickly as that, if the decision were negative, you’d press the dial to the next station. Again, the decision. Again, if negative, the next station. There were times when you would hear one great song after another, although not necessarily the whole thing, via the clicking of the dial. There were times when you would click and click and click and click, and it was nothing but something stupid, or worse, “Something Stupid.”
“Don’t touch that dial!” we were warned. Something good was coming. If we ever listened to a commercial, it was a miracle. “Can’t you just leave it on one station?” the parent would inevitably moan. Parents listened to radio stuff like the news where one station would suffice, whereas kids clicked away the minute the news came on. There was plenty of good radio, of course, that had nothing to do with any of this, like Bob & Ray and Gene Klavan and Jean Shepherd, but they were the exceptions. For my generation, it was about the music, and on AM, the music was all about the hits. And the hits were Soul, British Invasion, Blue-eyed Kid-Pop and oddball stuff like Sinatra and Armstrong. And all of it was singles, 45 rpms, if we wanted to hear these songs at home.
That was the nature of free music until roughly the mid-60s, when FM hit its stride. There was suddenly, although I don't think it wasn’t called that yet, Album-Oriented Rock. This was music beyond the hits, although over the subsequent generation a lot of it became hits, now known as Classic Rock. Now you could hear music that was, perhaps, less commercial, and discover new music. FM was the breeding ground for Classic Rock. Everything starts somewhere. WNEW-FM in New York was the main station around here. Hendrix, the Doors, CSN, Cream, Traffic, Airplane, etc.—AOR is where we first really learned about them, until someone bought their albums and we sat down and listened at home.
Radio was important for a long time for my generation, first hooking us into pop aimed at us with AM hits, then taking us deeper into what rock could do with musicians who would ultimately become iconic, and whose music is still listened to. We got all of this initially from the radio.
I’ve never stopped listening to rock, but nowadays it is only one of the kinds of music I enjoy, and no one would ever say that I keep up with what’s going on. Rock got sort of boring in the early 70s and I began to get serious about classical music and theater music and then jazz and cowboy swing and various “world” musicians, until by now my iPod is something of a marvel even to me. Random play for me is really random. In the 70s, FM radio helped me out with all of this, because there were solid commercial stations playing just about anything you might want to hear. Most of which, as far as I can tell, has gone away, and I’m not quite sure why. Certainly in the present environment, internet music has replaced the radio, but the falling off of radio predated the arrival of ubiquitous internet music by many years. Part of this may have to do with the nature of music itself, at least popular music. Rock fragmented into pop and country and punk and hiphop and so forth, and instead of one mainstream music from different founts, now if you liked X you listened to X and the hell with the rest of it. This has always been true, of course, but people who listen to classical not listening to bluegrass is quite different from people not liking country rock listening to punk rock. The former are both music, a broad base, but the latter are both rock, a narrow base. Whatever. The narrowing of interests in our present culture goes a lot further than just music. Our technologies progressively allow us to more easily stay behind our particular firewalls, because apparently that’s what most of us want. And so we do. It’s absolutely true of television, where literal broadcasting is apparently on its last legs, and its true of music.
Curiously, I started all this thinking because of my belief that movies lately were too broad, i.e., too much concentrating on the biggest potential income earners in a saddening display of non-creativity. Maybe that’s just an example of the lowest common denominator visible in all mass entertainment. The most popular movies aren’t the most interesting or creative; the same is true of books and music and theater. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by it, and what’s most interesting is that any mass market survives at all, given all the firewalling technologies mitigating against the broad and pushing toward the narrow. Our challenge in all of this is to keep moving and to avoid falling irretrievably into the trap of the familiar and the comfortable. If you eat nothing but macaroni and cheese every night you end up eating nothing but macaroni and cheese. Watch nothing but Hollywood blockbusters and you watch nothing but Hollywood blockbusters. Listen to nothing but pop hits and you listen to nothing but pop hits. Read only bestselling pulp fiction and you read nothing but bestselling pulp fiction. The resulting deadening of the soul is predictable and, perhaps, irreversible. Please don't try this at home.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Put another nickel in...
Speaking of movies and telephones, one of the key suspenseful scenes in Argo requires that a character be present to answer a telephone, and it seems as if half the movie up to that point has people talking on big old honker phones the size of shoe boxes just to set that idea of answering the phone for viewers who don’t know what a landline is. (Everyone in the movie also wore eyeglasses that took up every bit of their facial landscape from cheekbone to widow’s peak, and had bad hair. Ah, the 70s.)
The evolution of music is another technology worth thinking about. (There’s a wonderful word in a collection of critical Disney essays I’ve been reading: technostalgia.) While we have obviously long ago moved into a mainstream where one need not be in the presence of musicians to hear music, there are ramifications to that that are worth considering. Part of the establishment of the Great American Songbook was predicated on the existence of pianos in the average household, and presumably people who could, to some degree, play those pianos. The software (?) for those pianos was sheet music, mostly songs simplified for amateur players (not a lot of tunes in F#, for instance, whereas E flat was coin of the realm, which I have only understood intuitively in that I find it easy to play in E flat, but maybe that’s because so much music is published in that key: chicken or egg?). Sheet music was sold by song pushers in stores who would play the tunes live, and then you’d buy the music and take it home and play it yourself. Some songs were enormous hits (e.g., Gershwin’s “Swanee” was, according to Feinstein, the biggest success of his career) long before there were people playing them on the radio, much less buying them on records. Recorded media stretches back to Edison, but it was live music that ruled at the beginning of the 1900s.
Recorded media changed over time in great leaps, and each leap had its effect. Records, i.e., vinyl, has its various technostalgics today, but listening to LPs beginning in the 50s and into the 60s, when they really took off, was not the high-toned sonic experience one might imagine. Cheap needles quickly turned the most pristine vinyl into a scratchy, pockmarked and occasionally gauged disk, not to mention that a key feature of many players was a record changer that stacked multiple disks for play one at a time, rubbing them up against one another along the way (and, eventually, forcing the needle to navigate not the level flat of a disk but the wavy oooh-aaaah-oooh-aaaah of a stack of disks). The listening experience required the ear to erase all the extraneous noise to pick out the music underneath. Then of course there was the broken record broken record broken record one never hears anymore, or that sound at the interval between songs pre-echoing the song to come (it was some kind of recording leakage), and worst of all, if you had an album you liked and played it often enough, you could never hear a song on that album again without hearing the next song in your mind. Random play of CDs, when it finally arrive, turned a lot of music fans raised on records into raving lunatics. And, of course, there was a physical limit to the amount that could be recorded on one side of a record, not to mention that if you wanted to hear a whole record, you had to get up and flip it over. Many albums were considered one-sided, that is, one really good side and one stinker side. There was no such thing as skipping a song, short of getting up and lifting the needle and putting it down at the next song (which was clearly differentiated).
It was records like these, played this way, that was the medium of the Beatles, and every other musician from the 50s up through digital recording. That and, on the charts, 45 rpm records. These were little disks about seven inches in diameter, the immediate descendants of the 78 rpm records. (Obviously rpms was meaningful in sound reproduction, the fewer being harder to master technically. Some record players had 4 speeds, from 78 down to, if I remember correctly, 16. I never saw a 16 rpm record.) 45s, costing less than a dollar, were the stock in trade of the youngest record buyers, and maybe if you look at Billboard hit songs for, say, 1968, the youth of the buyers will be in evidence. If you had the $3 (when they were on sale), older kids would buy albums. Parties for teenagers were run with stacks of 45s on the turntable; people might bring their own to add to the mix. That was what they were playing at the hop.
Buying and playing one song at a time has its advantages and disadvantages, but it presages modern music buying for a lot of people, i.e., one song at a time. I think that phenomenon is restricted to the very young still, to tell you the truth. I might like a single, but I buy albums because if I like some of your music, I’ll want to hear some more of it. Maybe there’s some other dynamic at work there; I really don’t know, and can only speak for myself.
The late sixties saw the arrival of tape, and a whole new way of listening arose. Reel-to-reel was ultimately too ungainly, although you could have three full albums on one reel. 8-tracks came out then, but I never saw many of them except in cars. And then cassettes came along, and eventually the Walkman. Music had been portable for a long time thanks to transistor radios, but music players? Not so. Cassettes were a real revolution in listening, allowing you to hear your own music wherever you wanted to. In the case of boom boxes, it allowed everyone within a hundred mile radius to also hear your music, want to or not, but the Walkman solved that for everyone but street buskers. So the Walkman introduced private music, but at a cost. Simply put, mass-produced cassettes sucked. We replaced snaps and pops with tape hiss, which was ubiquitous and made everything muddy. Not all cassettes were bad, and if you made one yourself from an LP, it was fine, but it was a cursed medium in general. At the point where a tape got snaggled and you were in there with your pencil trying to straighten it out, or worse, if it outright snapped, combined with its second-rate fidelity, it was doomed. But it did get the idea of personal player into everyone’s mind. By the end of the cassette run, you couldn’t swing a cat without seeing a cheap player on the shelf of every conceivable store. But the clarity of CDs were the fidelity kiss of death on non-digital tape. (Digital tape never really caught on except with professionals, for cost reasons if I recall correctly.)
Audiophiles were up in arms when CDs first arrived, bemoaning the loss of warmth one heard in analog recordings. The first CDs and players were expensive to boot, so it took a little time for the format to catch on. But catch on it did, as more and more catalogs were digitized and the prices became relatively reasonable. The thing is, they sounded (and sound still) perfect. No hiss, no snaps, no skips, no nothing. I’ve gotten maybe three defective disks in my life, after acquiring thousands. Most people hear them and think they sound great. And you could put a lot more music on them than on a record, which meant that performers and producers could think longer form. (Tapes also could go longer, but seldom did unless you made the tape yourself.) There was no more Sides A and B. You could store a lot of them in a small space (unlike records, which are big and weigh a ton).
There was a problem with personal CD players, in that if you jostled them, you got skips, so CDs and cassettes sort of coexisted for a while. But if you taped your CDs, they did sound great, and then you could pop them into your Walkman and go for a run, and you were quite satisfied. I would bet that the CD age was pretty golden for album sales, because everybody had to update their White Album, plus older or less popular stuff could fill the disk up to the brim (I’ve got all sort of compact compilations). And it all sounded great. A disk played over an hour before you had to get up and change it (much less flip it) and then multi-disk players came along. You never had to get up again.
The greatest joy in all of this, for music fans, was the music store. In the evolution we’re discussing, that store or department went from private piano rooms where you could try out the music (I remember doing that) and song pluggers, to layouts of records to, finally, the megastores where there were thousands and thousands of albums for you to look at and think about, and all kinds of listening stations, and interesting music being blasted (in the appropriate genre) while you were browsing. I would figure a minimum of an hour in any Tower Records, back in the day, and that I would exit with a bagful of goodies. The experience was, obviously, analogous to bookstore shopping (although as a general rule the superstores for books were never as satisfying as smaller, more specialized stores with a mind behind the stocking of the shelves).
MP3s changed all this again. Fidelity is fair to middling in that you can only squeeze so much data into that size of a file, but most people don’t care, if they can even hear the difference in the first place. MP3s offer portability and good price, and on top of that, instant availability. Want a song? You can have it on your iPod in a minute, signed, sealed and delivered. Goodbye music stores, welcome back singles.
I started this by comparing the way changes in telephone technology have changed our lives to the way changes in music technology have done likewise. Once, you had to make your own music, and home pianos were ubiquitous. Now they’re rare. Who do you know who buys sheet music? When was the last time you were told you sounded like a broken record? When was the last time there was a music phenomenon that stopped everyone in their tracks because a given performance was the only way to share in it (from Sinatra at the Paramount to the Beatles on Ed Sullivan)? When was the last time you were at somebody’s place and sat thumbing through their record/CD collection? When was the last time you read the liner notes? What’s a liner note? What’s a liner? Have you had the tactile pleasure of removing an LP from its sleeve by the edges, laying it on the turntable, swiping it clean with a special brush and fluid made just for that purpose?
Has the immediate availability of all music had an effect not only on our personal playing but on our pursuit of the playing of others? Do we go to as many live events, not just arena events but local clubs? Is there a pianist in the background of your favorite spot, or just a lite playlist coming over the speakers? Do as many of us really learn to play instruments (aside from the forced playing in schools that is simply the grammar school’s revenge on the parents for all their kids’ misbehavior prior to the annual concert)?
I really don’t know about a lot of the ramifications of what I’ve been outlining here, and I certainly can’t make too many value judgments. In a way, we are probably in what will be an ongoing golden age of music insofar as it’s accessibility (although I could do without social apps that tell me that Joe McDoakes just listened to Lady Gaga: may they both rest in peace, out of range of my hearing, but then again, I have no interest in any social apps that tell me what my friends are doing willynilly). Good music will be made and distributed, and we can all tune into whatever we like pretty easily, and discover new things to like pretty easily as well. I am, personally, enjoying that immensely. This morning, my gypsy music station on Pandora. Tonight, my obscure 60s rock podcast. What’s to complain about? If I’m lucky, I’ll even find some time to play a Gershwin tune or two on my home (digital) piano. I’m only documenting how much it has all changed. You can decide for yourself if it’s teleological.
The evolution of music is another technology worth thinking about. (There’s a wonderful word in a collection of critical Disney essays I’ve been reading: technostalgia.) While we have obviously long ago moved into a mainstream where one need not be in the presence of musicians to hear music, there are ramifications to that that are worth considering. Part of the establishment of the Great American Songbook was predicated on the existence of pianos in the average household, and presumably people who could, to some degree, play those pianos. The software (?) for those pianos was sheet music, mostly songs simplified for amateur players (not a lot of tunes in F#, for instance, whereas E flat was coin of the realm, which I have only understood intuitively in that I find it easy to play in E flat, but maybe that’s because so much music is published in that key: chicken or egg?). Sheet music was sold by song pushers in stores who would play the tunes live, and then you’d buy the music and take it home and play it yourself. Some songs were enormous hits (e.g., Gershwin’s “Swanee” was, according to Feinstein, the biggest success of his career) long before there were people playing them on the radio, much less buying them on records. Recorded media stretches back to Edison, but it was live music that ruled at the beginning of the 1900s.
Recorded media changed over time in great leaps, and each leap had its effect. Records, i.e., vinyl, has its various technostalgics today, but listening to LPs beginning in the 50s and into the 60s, when they really took off, was not the high-toned sonic experience one might imagine. Cheap needles quickly turned the most pristine vinyl into a scratchy, pockmarked and occasionally gauged disk, not to mention that a key feature of many players was a record changer that stacked multiple disks for play one at a time, rubbing them up against one another along the way (and, eventually, forcing the needle to navigate not the level flat of a disk but the wavy oooh-aaaah-oooh-aaaah of a stack of disks). The listening experience required the ear to erase all the extraneous noise to pick out the music underneath. Then of course there was the broken record broken record broken record one never hears anymore, or that sound at the interval between songs pre-echoing the song to come (it was some kind of recording leakage), and worst of all, if you had an album you liked and played it often enough, you could never hear a song on that album again without hearing the next song in your mind. Random play of CDs, when it finally arrive, turned a lot of music fans raised on records into raving lunatics. And, of course, there was a physical limit to the amount that could be recorded on one side of a record, not to mention that if you wanted to hear a whole record, you had to get up and flip it over. Many albums were considered one-sided, that is, one really good side and one stinker side. There was no such thing as skipping a song, short of getting up and lifting the needle and putting it down at the next song (which was clearly differentiated).
It was records like these, played this way, that was the medium of the Beatles, and every other musician from the 50s up through digital recording. That and, on the charts, 45 rpm records. These were little disks about seven inches in diameter, the immediate descendants of the 78 rpm records. (Obviously rpms was meaningful in sound reproduction, the fewer being harder to master technically. Some record players had 4 speeds, from 78 down to, if I remember correctly, 16. I never saw a 16 rpm record.) 45s, costing less than a dollar, were the stock in trade of the youngest record buyers, and maybe if you look at Billboard hit songs for, say, 1968, the youth of the buyers will be in evidence. If you had the $3 (when they were on sale), older kids would buy albums. Parties for teenagers were run with stacks of 45s on the turntable; people might bring their own to add to the mix. That was what they were playing at the hop.
Buying and playing one song at a time has its advantages and disadvantages, but it presages modern music buying for a lot of people, i.e., one song at a time. I think that phenomenon is restricted to the very young still, to tell you the truth. I might like a single, but I buy albums because if I like some of your music, I’ll want to hear some more of it. Maybe there’s some other dynamic at work there; I really don’t know, and can only speak for myself.
The late sixties saw the arrival of tape, and a whole new way of listening arose. Reel-to-reel was ultimately too ungainly, although you could have three full albums on one reel. 8-tracks came out then, but I never saw many of them except in cars. And then cassettes came along, and eventually the Walkman. Music had been portable for a long time thanks to transistor radios, but music players? Not so. Cassettes were a real revolution in listening, allowing you to hear your own music wherever you wanted to. In the case of boom boxes, it allowed everyone within a hundred mile radius to also hear your music, want to or not, but the Walkman solved that for everyone but street buskers. So the Walkman introduced private music, but at a cost. Simply put, mass-produced cassettes sucked. We replaced snaps and pops with tape hiss, which was ubiquitous and made everything muddy. Not all cassettes were bad, and if you made one yourself from an LP, it was fine, but it was a cursed medium in general. At the point where a tape got snaggled and you were in there with your pencil trying to straighten it out, or worse, if it outright snapped, combined with its second-rate fidelity, it was doomed. But it did get the idea of personal player into everyone’s mind. By the end of the cassette run, you couldn’t swing a cat without seeing a cheap player on the shelf of every conceivable store. But the clarity of CDs were the fidelity kiss of death on non-digital tape. (Digital tape never really caught on except with professionals, for cost reasons if I recall correctly.)
Audiophiles were up in arms when CDs first arrived, bemoaning the loss of warmth one heard in analog recordings. The first CDs and players were expensive to boot, so it took a little time for the format to catch on. But catch on it did, as more and more catalogs were digitized and the prices became relatively reasonable. The thing is, they sounded (and sound still) perfect. No hiss, no snaps, no skips, no nothing. I’ve gotten maybe three defective disks in my life, after acquiring thousands. Most people hear them and think they sound great. And you could put a lot more music on them than on a record, which meant that performers and producers could think longer form. (Tapes also could go longer, but seldom did unless you made the tape yourself.) There was no more Sides A and B. You could store a lot of them in a small space (unlike records, which are big and weigh a ton).
There was a problem with personal CD players, in that if you jostled them, you got skips, so CDs and cassettes sort of coexisted for a while. But if you taped your CDs, they did sound great, and then you could pop them into your Walkman and go for a run, and you were quite satisfied. I would bet that the CD age was pretty golden for album sales, because everybody had to update their White Album, plus older or less popular stuff could fill the disk up to the brim (I’ve got all sort of compact compilations). And it all sounded great. A disk played over an hour before you had to get up and change it (much less flip it) and then multi-disk players came along. You never had to get up again.
The greatest joy in all of this, for music fans, was the music store. In the evolution we’re discussing, that store or department went from private piano rooms where you could try out the music (I remember doing that) and song pluggers, to layouts of records to, finally, the megastores where there were thousands and thousands of albums for you to look at and think about, and all kinds of listening stations, and interesting music being blasted (in the appropriate genre) while you were browsing. I would figure a minimum of an hour in any Tower Records, back in the day, and that I would exit with a bagful of goodies. The experience was, obviously, analogous to bookstore shopping (although as a general rule the superstores for books were never as satisfying as smaller, more specialized stores with a mind behind the stocking of the shelves).
MP3s changed all this again. Fidelity is fair to middling in that you can only squeeze so much data into that size of a file, but most people don’t care, if they can even hear the difference in the first place. MP3s offer portability and good price, and on top of that, instant availability. Want a song? You can have it on your iPod in a minute, signed, sealed and delivered. Goodbye music stores, welcome back singles.
I started this by comparing the way changes in telephone technology have changed our lives to the way changes in music technology have done likewise. Once, you had to make your own music, and home pianos were ubiquitous. Now they’re rare. Who do you know who buys sheet music? When was the last time you were told you sounded like a broken record? When was the last time there was a music phenomenon that stopped everyone in their tracks because a given performance was the only way to share in it (from Sinatra at the Paramount to the Beatles on Ed Sullivan)? When was the last time you were at somebody’s place and sat thumbing through their record/CD collection? When was the last time you read the liner notes? What’s a liner note? What’s a liner? Have you had the tactile pleasure of removing an LP from its sleeve by the edges, laying it on the turntable, swiping it clean with a special brush and fluid made just for that purpose?
Has the immediate availability of all music had an effect not only on our personal playing but on our pursuit of the playing of others? Do we go to as many live events, not just arena events but local clubs? Is there a pianist in the background of your favorite spot, or just a lite playlist coming over the speakers? Do as many of us really learn to play instruments (aside from the forced playing in schools that is simply the grammar school’s revenge on the parents for all their kids’ misbehavior prior to the annual concert)?
I really don’t know about a lot of the ramifications of what I’ve been outlining here, and I certainly can’t make too many value judgments. In a way, we are probably in what will be an ongoing golden age of music insofar as it’s accessibility (although I could do without social apps that tell me that Joe McDoakes just listened to Lady Gaga: may they both rest in peace, out of range of my hearing, but then again, I have no interest in any social apps that tell me what my friends are doing willynilly). Good music will be made and distributed, and we can all tune into whatever we like pretty easily, and discover new things to like pretty easily as well. I am, personally, enjoying that immensely. This morning, my gypsy music station on Pandora. Tonight, my obscure 60s rock podcast. What’s to complain about? If I’m lucky, I’ll even find some time to play a Gershwin tune or two on my home (digital) piano. I’m only documenting how much it has all changed. You can decide for yourself if it’s teleological.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Eurovision 2013
We seem to be nearing the finals!!! Who knew that another year had passed in pop hell?
Go to this video for links to everything. Strong recommendation: watch with the sound muted.
Go to this video for links to everything. Strong recommendation: watch with the sound muted.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
How's the folks? What's new?
This has bothered me for maybe 40 years now. In the Gershwin song “The Babbitt and the Bromide,” there is the line, “Ta-ta, olive oil, goodbye.”
What?
Last night I read in Michael Feinstein’s new book that he too had thought this had something vaguely to do with Popeye, but that Ira, whom he worked for, told him that in the twenties, olive oil was a slang version of au revoir. Aha!
Here's some decent performers giving the song a try:
Of course, completists want the originators of the song to perform it. No video here, alas.
If you’re a digger, you can find recordings of Fred and Adele with George himself playing accompaniment. If you happen to be a piano player (and maybe even if you're not), listening to George play is mesmerizing.
There aren’t a lot of extant recordings of George playing, unfortunately. There are piano rolls, but I get the feeling that some of those are sort of multiple-tracked, to use a modern metaphor. I mean, not even Gershwin could play that many notes at once. Although maybe I'm wrong: if anyone could, it would be him. And there’s some scratchy recordings of radio performances and a Porgy rehearsal and maybe a couple of other items I can’t recall offhand. This set looks like a good, available collection of it.
So why am I bringing this up now? What does this have to do with debate? Well, nothing, I guess. But if you come into the tab room and wonder what that music is, this might be of some help.
What?
Last night I read in Michael Feinstein’s new book that he too had thought this had something vaguely to do with Popeye, but that Ira, whom he worked for, told him that in the twenties, olive oil was a slang version of au revoir. Aha!
Here's some decent performers giving the song a try:
Of course, completists want the originators of the song to perform it. No video here, alas.
If you’re a digger, you can find recordings of Fred and Adele with George himself playing accompaniment. If you happen to be a piano player (and maybe even if you're not), listening to George play is mesmerizing.
There aren’t a lot of extant recordings of George playing, unfortunately. There are piano rolls, but I get the feeling that some of those are sort of multiple-tracked, to use a modern metaphor. I mean, not even Gershwin could play that many notes at once. Although maybe I'm wrong: if anyone could, it would be him. And there’s some scratchy recordings of radio performances and a Porgy rehearsal and maybe a couple of other items I can’t recall offhand. This set looks like a good, available collection of it.
So why am I bringing this up now? What does this have to do with debate? Well, nothing, I guess. But if you come into the tab room and wonder what that music is, this might be of some help.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Musical interlude: The Hollies
I'm rather fond of the Bedazzled website; they're always digging up interesting old rock tracks. I'll link to their post, rather than just posting the video here. Stay on board for this one till the end, with the last little insert: On a Carousel.
And meanwhile, humph. I just checked my library. I have absolutely zero Hollies music, none, nary a note, ixnay on the ollishay. This needs to be remedied immediately. Who says that providing free music doesn't lead to people going out and buying stuff?
And meanwhile, humph. I just checked my library. I have absolutely zero Hollies music, none, nary a note, ixnay on the ollishay. This needs to be remedied immediately. Who says that providing free music doesn't lead to people going out and buying stuff?
Friday, March 22, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
I now understand why Steely Dan took so long to get into the R&R Hall of Fame
I crashed while watching this, so I lost the via link. Too bad. I want to remove that site from my feed. Forever. And then some.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
None better
She's one of my favorite singers (the others being Louis, Fred and Frank, in no particular order). This just happened to pop up today, via Open Culture.
Curiously enough, this popped up while the Zombies were singing the exact same song, but not quite the exact same way. I continue to beaver away on my British Invasion station on Pandora.
Curiously enough, this popped up while the Zombies were singing the exact same song, but not quite the exact same way. I continue to beaver away on my British Invasion station on Pandora.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
I want the 60s back. Or maybe not.
Who knew that the Batman could sing? Or more to the point, who knew that the Batman couldn't sing?
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
The last Steve Buscemi video you'll ever want to see
Assuming, that is, that you wanted to see this one. Remind me not to look up Diana Krall videos again any time soon.
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