A love song to Clive Davis.

arse_hat, I'm not sure whether you were being ironic, but when I clicked I got this message:

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by RCA Records

Not having seen the film, and unable to hear all the music, what I have to say is only tenuously topical, but it's worth saying, because somewhere, somehow, I believe it.

Folks like what they like. They tend to think that what they like best is the result of talent, and what they like least is the result of lack of talent. They're probably wrong on both counts. Much of what we think of as "talent" is a great deal of hard work and time put in to overcome a lack of innate ability.

Take, for example, lyrics. There are plenty of songwriters whose music is unremarkable, but who write lyrics that are incredibly moving to their audience. I don't know if their gift with lyrics is inborn talent, or if they are the product of good schooling (not talent), or if they were once terrible lyricists but spent years working on their craft (also not talent).

The same is true with instrumental virtuosity, which is, for some, the only criteria for what makes a good musician. Or masters of song structure, or inventive (or not inventive but perfect) harmonizers. Or a lack of any of these traits. Or an iconoclastic approach to music.

There are so many ways to approach music, and it's so individualized (why do you like the music you do? Because you have good taste? No, it's the other way around -- you have good taste because you like the music you do, and you've been affirmed in that by grouping yourself with others who share your taste, or, more commonly, by grouping others who don't share your taste in the "bad taste" category).

Which brings me around to the lamentation that talented musicians are getting the shaft, and music by untalented musicians is taking over the industry. A great deal of craft goes, as it always has, into writing top hits. Lots of work, time, and energy, and ability (from talent to hard work), goes into performing and recording them. A great number of people will dislike top hits, because it doesn't sound like what they like or sounds like what they don't like. This has nothing to do with whether the performer is talented, and everything to do with what the listener likes.

People who like Wilco may wish top forty music sounded like Wilco. People who like the Dictators may think that if you don't "get" the Dictators, you can't possibly "get" a whole host of other bands. People who think Curtis Mayfield is the sine qua non of popular music (and I consider all three acts popular music) may despise acts with a similar sound but a dissimilar lyrical thrust. People who like Britney Spears may be like, duh, all that old stuff is like, all crap and whatnot, you know? I think they're all right about their taste, and wrong about the tastes of others.

Music is particularly powerful in how we group ourselves and how we group others. Anyone who pefers Stravinsky to Bartok is a pretentious ass; anyone who loves Bartok clearly understands the Hungarian folk source material and even envisions the same idyllic lifeways I do when I close my eyes and listen. Both ideas are wrong, though by finding others who like the music I do, I strengthen my relationship with and understanding of the music I already love.

I know I'm making sense, but I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I love all the acts I mentioned above, including Britney Spears, all for very good and distinct reasons. My tastes are broad, and well-informed, but not "good," because "good" isn't a useful description beyond telling you what I like. And so many different approaches and abilities with music are mistaken for "talent" that "talented" isn't a particularly good description, either (with the exception of eight-year old piano prodigies and their ilk).

All that said, there are big problems with the music industry as it tries to staunch the tide of new music, recorded in new ways, delivered in new methods; I'm sure this documentary addresses all that very well and I wish I had a way of listening to Doyle Bramhall. What I'm saying isn't meant to negate anything or disagree with anyone, but inasmuch as it is a rather contrary stance, I'm sure it sounds like a lecture. That's not what I mean; it's just how I feel.

If it wasn't such an interesting post topic, I wouldn't have so much to say. Thanks, Miko.

H. Janus: You make it sound as if "good" and "bad" art is entirely subjective. I'm not a foundationalist, but I think that some stuff is better than others, even stuff that I don't care for.

Sorry Miko. Wow that was gone fast. Don't mess with the king of Music. I'll see if I can find another copy.

I agree that people like what they like, but some of the points the movie makes are excellent.

For one thing, you can only potentially like what you're able to hear. How are you going to hear new, untried sounds? Many of the musicians in the film talk about new sounds. Musical development absolutely lives and thrives on the re-mixing and re-creation of sounds to create something unheard before. But most people don't like new sounds. It takes about six months or so for a new sound to stop sounding weird and grating and start to replay in your mind's ear in a pleasing way. There are so many movements in musical history that put people off at first - you hear the famous stories of the Beatles being rejected by potential managers. Branford Marsalis talks about the rejection of Coltrane's sound at first. Hendrix wasn't well liked immediately. What these folks were doing just sounded weird at first, because our ears are lazy. In a world where music marketing and focus groups determine what you hear and what you'll never, ever hear, the dependence on immediate likability reduces the opportunity for the out-there genius of the soul greats or an unconventional band to even reach its potential listening audience.

The main point the musicians were making is that people need to hear a lot of music, and a wide variety of music, in order to really develop any understanding of music as a whole. The problem today is that there is a far narrower range of music available in the mass media, and the industry is seeking formula and punishing difference rather than cultivating a stable of artists with a wide range.

The movie argues a little that the record industry was better in the 70s. In some ways, it definitely was. But in a lot of ways, the music industry and radio always sucked. The mixing up of music with distribution, production technology, and advertising has always come at a price. But the movie is arguing that the music industry is worse than even before in the limited and narrow presentation of a very small range of sounds, and that they are more interested in re-creating a money-making formula by shoehorning songwriters, pop idols, and studio musicians together than by identifying and working with seasoned bands and artists who have developed a unique sound. Which I'd say is largely true.

Definitely see the whole movie if you can.

One of the fun bits (although I wish they'd done more with it) has them create a 'pop star.' They take a 45-year-old singer-songwriter, the guy who wrote Jewel's "You Were Meant For Me," and give him the title "Mama's Not Home." They give him a few minutes to write a pop song around that hook. He does. Immediately. Then they hire a model, who's game for the whole deal, and record her doing the vocals. She can't really sing so well at all. It's kind of terrible. They hire studio musicians to create the backing track, which is great, and then they have a sound engineer come in and show how with digital editing, they can fix the vocal. They take a weak, flat off-pitch warble that she hits and adjust it so it's spot on key. They throw a lot of reverb and warmth onto the vocal, and mix the whole thing into a fairly catchy and passable song. Then they doll the model up and film a video, and the finished song is unrecognizable -it's smooth and professional sounding, you can't believe the vocal sounds so good, and she looks for all the world like a pop diva. That's as far as they take it, but it's an excellent illustration of the level of manufacture going into pop music.

Is there anything new about that? Mmmm, not really. A lot of pop singers of the 40s and 50s and 60s did the same thing - sang other people's writing and played on image. But at the same time, the music industry was more willing to devote money and energy to producing a wider range of sound than they are, as a whole, today. The resources demanded by the crafting of a few huge pop stars are drained from the older formula, which was to use the big sellers in your stable to subsidize smaller-time draws while still keeping the bottom line healthy. Today, the smaller-time artists are immediately dropped, and image is far, far more important to success than it used to be.

Anyone who pefers Stravinsky to Bartok is a pretentious ass;

Anyone who dosen't like Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones or the Ramones dosen't like rock and roll.

You make it sound as if "good" and "bad" art is entirely subjective.

It depends on whether you're approaching it from a scholarly or fan point of view. Scholars will talk about good and bad in terms of 'importance' or 'influence,' fans will enthuse about how some drumbeat or symphonic movement makes the go nuts or play a song on repeat over and over again. I suppose I'm something of a scholarly fan because I find the historical stuff and chain-of-influences interesting as hell, but ultimately it's the sensual/emotional impact that decides whether a song is good or bad, at least to me.

A lot of pop singers of the 40s and 50s and 60s did the same thing - sang other people's writing and played on image. But at the same time, the music industry was more willing to devote money and energy to producing a wider range of sound than they are, as a whole, today.

Yeah, the popstar machine is nothing new (the Brill Building, Phil Spector, bubblegum pop), but back in the 60's and 70's the people running the machine actually seemed to care about music so while it was purely manufactured the standard of quality was higher.

Yeah, jon makes a good point about the people running the machine that the movie makes too -in the recent corporate model, the people making decisions don't come from a music background. Their training is in business, so their decisions are not aesthetic but market-driven.

"Subjective" is an inaccurate word, craniac. What we think of as "good" and "bad" informs our way of describing what we like and dislike, helps us group ourselves and others, and gives us insight on form and technique. It's not that "good" and "bad" are wrong, it's that they're misused, or used in inappropriate situations. Skill, precision, color, consideration, craft, and depth might all be good descriptors in the right hands, if they're thought of as continua and not as pinary choices. It is revealing to describe music as "good" or "bad," but only reveals the tastes of the observer.

I don't know for sure, I just don't think it's all that useful to say such-and-such song is better than that one. It's art. Enlightened art lovers like my nephew will tell you there's plenty to learn about what went into the art, but it all boils down to what you like and dislike, and that might be as simple as preferring red to green.

I agree, Miko, the recording industry has real problems, but there's also more music being made by more people being made available by non-industry entities, in different ways than before, and it all accumulates, and people's tastes can be more specific than ever before with all the choices they have (if they have an internet connection or a friend with one), so corporate pop music has a harder time reaching fewer listeners and is now at the point where the only weapons left to them are lawsuits and such.

And jonmc, I think "importance" and "influence" are useful, but "good" and "bad" are useless -- it's the binary thing again that's mostly there to persuade people that they're right or wrong, tastewise or knowledgewise, when observation combined with knowledge can tell the listener much more than someone telling them what's good. And the scholarly approach isn't taken by anyone who doesn't already like what they study.

Their training is in business, so their decisions are not aesthetic but market-driven.

Well, that's part of it, but all the great rock impresarios from Sam Phillips on down were interested in making a buck, too. and nobody on earth worships the art of the hit single more than I do. But the Sam Phillips, the Phil Spectors, the Leiber and Stollers, the Barry Gordys, they wanted to make a buck honestly I guess, since they actually loved the music they were manufacturing.

Today it's this instant coffee approach-find pretty girl/cute boy, dress them up, make single with canned electronic beat and vocal sweetening, then make vaguely racy video and launch clothing line. snore.

Even blatant go-for-the-bucks guys like Don Kirschner had the sense to hire session guys like Hal Blaine and Glen Campbell to play for the Monkees and RCA knew that Leiber and Stoller could write better rock and roll than anyone else they had. In those days, the suits were smart enough to realize that they didn't know what they were doing and handed it over to someone who did.

the indie scene has done an admirable job of rejecting corporatism but too often it seems to sneer at legitamite craft and skill, at least to me.

And the scholarly approach isn't taken by anyone who doesn't already like what they study.

A lot of today's music criticism (Pitchfork Media, I'm looking in your direction) would seem to indicate otherwise.

A lot of todays music critics (Rolling Stone and all your progeny, including Pitchfork: I'm looking in your direction) couldn't tell you how any act sounds without mentioning another act. That's lazy, and unfortunately, standard operating procedure.

Oh, agreed. and when they can't do that they prattle on about some vaguely related politico-socio stuff that will usually have less than nothing to do with the record itself. Which convinces me that most of them simply write criticism to have an excuse to be 'scenesters,' or something.

*tries to conjure up the ghost of Lester Bangs*

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Making a buck is a time-honored part of music promotion, and God knows music promoters have skills and abilities that musicians will often be the first to admit they don't have. The hangers-on have provided valuable services which leave musicians free to make their music - booking, PR, travel arrangements, press kits, printing, on and on.

I don't begrudge anyone making a buck by providing services to help get a good musician heard. By "Training in business," though, I mean that the decision makers are so often not music fans at all - they are actually business-school graduates who think of music as product.

The movie discusses the Clear Channel breakthrough: according to the film, Clear Channel was started by a group of people who came out of the world of auto sales and ended up with a radio station as part of their business assets somehow. They couldn't figure out how to manage it until they decided that they could treat units of airtime just like cars on a lot, and decided to essentially trade in 60-second chunks of airtime, multiplying and replicating single formats nationwide, which made selling to advertisers FAR more efficient and reliable. Advertisers no longer had to dicker and deal with thousands of independent stations, each with its own listener demographic, management, and philosophy. Imagine the ease they provided Anhauser Busch and GEICO and the like by being able to say: 'sign one contract; make one payment; sell to a single demographic in 300 markets nationwide, at once."

Great news for transnational brands; bad news for the listenership. It used to be that you could travel in this country and hear different sounds on the radio in East Texas, and New York City, and Philadelphia. No more. Sameness sells.

I hate Clear Channel for two reasons: they deny entry to good new bands and they destroy great old songs with overplay. Radio is in the toilet these days, except for Little Steven (who I still need to find away to contact).

I have just now stumbled out of bed and am still trying to wake up, so at this point I'll just say that I've seen the film in question. I had some quibbles with it - there is a fair amount of "why don't they make music like they did back in the Good Old Days anymore", and there are a couple of easy shots taken (asking 16-year-old girls outside a Britney Spears show if they listen to Bob Dylan is kinda like going duck hunting with cruise missles) - but overall I quite liked it. If you care about music, on any level, you should probably see it.

Also, I would pay to see an entire movie of Eryka Badu being interviewed. She steals the film.

I have other thoughts, but caffiene first.

Those were exactly the same nits I picked, bmarkey!

It's a good discussion starter, anyway.

OK, I’ve had a cup of tea and walked the dog. Here goes.

Yeah, the movie definitely a good discussion starter. They absolutely succeeded on that count, which I think was their main aim anyway.

While it is true that the music industry is floundering these days, it’s also true that certain aspects of it are really healthy. The flourishing indie label phenomenon is a triumph of DIY. Never before has it been as easy for an artist to record and distribute their work. You can even do a complete end-around on the whole label thing and self-release.

Getting that music heard is another thing entirely, one very well laid out in the film and deftly synopsized by Miko in this thread. I don’t think I can add much to that, so I’ll go on to point out another problem, one inherent in that DIY triumph I mentioned above: With the bar to recording having been erased and so much music flooding the market, there’s a glut of music available now. I’m certainly not pining for the day when there were only a few new releases each month, but it’s next to impossible to track everything that comes out now. And inherent in the fact of that flood is that fact that a lot of it is crap. Inevitably, there are nuggets of gold that get lost in the deluge.

That’s where critics come in. To continue the nugget analogy, a good critic is like a prospector, panning for gold in the river of music. Instead of keeping her discoveries for herself, though, she shares them with her readers. I’ve done a small amount of criticism myself, and for me, anyway, it’s all about the “hey, look what I found” moment. There are few things in this world that match being able to turn somebody on to great music they’ve never heard before.

The problem that I have with about 95% of the criticism that I read now is that it’s not all that critical. In print and online, everything just seems to be wonderful. While I certainly prefer writing about music I enjoy to picking apart something I’m not so enthusiastic about, when it’s all nicey nice criticism sorta ceases to be useful. Music bloggers are especially bad about this. I think it’s mostly due to the fact that they’re so happy to be getting free CDs that they just roll over. They’re so entranced by being part of what Joni Mitchell called “the star-making machinery behind the popular song” that they don’t really want to rock the boat. Problem is, sometimes that boat needs desperately to be rocked, if not sunk altogether. If you’re not filtering, you’re not doing your job.

As to the good vs bad thing, I agree with Hugh’s contention that music is a subjective experience. However, as a quasi-critic I say that if you take away my ability to quantify what I’m writing about, you’re tying my hands unnecessarily. If I state that CocoRosie are terrible (and I do, by the way), that’s my opinion. Anything I write is my opinion. I don’t guard the doors to the pantheon, nor does Greil Marcus or Robert Christgau (although he might argue that point) or Lester Bangs or the dopes at Pitchfork, or anybody else who writes/wrote about music. It’s just one person’s opinion. They may state it as if it were the received word of god, but I assure you that it’s not. If you dig CocoRosie, you’re gonna take anything I have to say regarding music with a grain of salt, or you’ll stop reading me altogether. And that’s the way it should be.

Wow, this is really long. Sorry about that. This is just something near and dear to my heart. I prolly shoulda just made it a blog post (and I may still do that).

Good points, and I should be clearer that when I say "good" and "bad" aren't useful, I don't mean people shouldn't use them, just that they mean and say a lot less than people think they do.

I use them all the time. I'm lazy, and I'm not a music writer, and I like to mouth off about shit, so I find them useful (being self-consciously full of shit keeps me honest).

My ideal record review would say things like: "T-Rex's drums sound like ten-penny nails landing on linoleum samples" or "Elton John's vocals sound like Joseph Conrad: sweaty and gloomy with light occasionally burning through the foliage, large unseen birds spooking the night and water like soup floating the listener along to a wasting doom" or "oh, the echo: somehow Billy Joel recorded his band live in a small New York studio while he sang along in the middle of an empty Madison Square Garden. Telecommunications miracle or studio fakery? You be the judge."

Shit like that.

Yeah, I'd read that, too. There are people who try it, but most of them can't pull it off.