This was sent to me by Simon, of Potential Falcon fame. I've never heard of Danny Barnes, so I won't pretend that he's worth listening to simply because of how amazing he is. Rather, it's worth a read because, to me, it seems like good advice.
I always tend to trust people who say "have interests outside of your art".
Hipster Runoff have their list of "The Most Authentic/Relevant/Successful Artists of the Decade (The Best Albums/MP3s/Songs/Artists/Bands/Humans of the Decade)". It's huge, but there's a lot of gold in there. Of course, it's always hard to tell how deep the joke is, but it's certainly a more entertaining best-of-decade list than most.
A sample line:
I feel like Grizzly Bear is the Most Authentic Band of the second half of the decade. Some how, their latest album ‘charted’ at #6 on the mainstream charts. That seems pretty successful. I feel like the thing most music critics hold against Grizzly Bear is ‘not being from the first half of the decade.’
David Byrne, on discovering that a new production of Wagner's Ring Cycle has been budgeted at $32 million writes:
Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys.
It's Byrne's typical line, because, for him "it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare". Fairly provocative stuff, and definitely worth a read.
Music is unlikely to bear the brunt of internet filtering in the same way that literature might, but that doesn't mean that it's not an important issue for music lovers. Where does the Labor government stand on "Cop Killer?". Are there any bands that might have their websites put on a blacklist because of the lyrical content of their songs?
Another list. Everything I said last week still applies. Posted here because it reminded me of another thing about these sorts of lists: I pretty much only read the reviews of tracks that I've heard. So basically I'm just... doing what? Finding justification for my own taste? Finding words to describe stuff I've been listening to?
[UPDATE] Stereogum have also published Pitchfork's list and, like I pointed out in my earlier post, noted that there's no metal. There's also no jazz or classical, but hey, those genres are dead anyway aren't they?
This is the first of a series of posts I'm putting up that relate to the recording process. Since spending a bit of time in the studio recently, I thought I'd deal with a few of the things that happen there. This first piece is about click tracks. It's a little bit long.
Most modern popular music is recorded using digital recording software - generally Protools. Even though many rock albums are, at some point, mixed to the older medium of reel-to-reel tape machine, this is essentially an effect: all the songs are stored as multitrack recordings on computer and later, once the stereo mix is completed, the song is sent out to run through a tape machine to get some of the sound quality associated with using tape, before being fed back into the computer once again to be mastered and made into an album.
The advantages of using digital recording software are many. Unlike old tape systems, there is no limit to the number of tracks you can have in a song. In older analogue systems you would eventually run out of spare tracks, and if you wanted to add any more parts you would have to perform mini mixes, in which you would combine, say, all of the drum tracks into one stereo pair. After this, you would never be able to alter the levels of the drum sounds individually: you would be stuck with that drum mix for good. This sort of restriction was no doubt the catalyst for a lot of creative recording ideas – restrictions are always a great spur for creativity – but the freedom of limitless multi-tracking is largely irresistible to bands unsure about the direction they want their song to take in the initial recording stages.
One of the features of digital recording software is that it becomes incredibly easy for a skilled operator to combine different sound files together seamlessly. This generally means that an artist is able to perform several takes of a song, and then the recording engineer picks the best parts from all of the takes and edits them together into a "perfect" track. Again, this was always possible with analogue equipment, but the ease and versatility of the digital medium means that it's a lot less time consuming – and therefore much less costly – which has made the practices almost mandatory.
Of course, in order to combine tracks together, it helps if they were all recorded at the same speed. While speed alteration is vastly more sophisticated than it used to be (it is now possible to speed up entire pieces of music without changing the pitch, and often without a noticeable reduction in sound quality), it is something most engineers are reluctant to do, particularly for sustained sounds. Of course, singers can keep time to the drums, but, when recording several takes of the rhythm section, what does the drummer keep time to? The click track.
The click track is an incredibly important part of modern pop music, though it goes largely unheralded, due to the fact that it never gets included in the final mix. Simply put, a click track is what it sounds like: a track which consists of a simple metronome (the clicks, which often a cowbell sound, or some other sharp percussive beat) beat set to the desired tempo, and played through the headphones of the musicians recording the initial parts of the song. Assuming the drummer is relatively competent at his or her parts, it only takes a few run-throughs to ensure that the recording engineer will have enough material to assemble a drum part that adheres to the click for the entire song. Having the click also means that other instruments can be recorded at the same time as the drums and also edited, without worry that if, say, the guitar part from take 3 is used over a piano part from take 6, they won't be in tie with each other.
At the same time, digital recording software goes hand-in-hand with electronic music that is generated by hardware synthesisers such as keyboards, software synthesisers often run within the recording software, and sampled sounds that are stored on a hard drive. Most modern synthesisers use a language called MIDI: the much-maligned (but now retro-chic) acronym that simply stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. MIDI is not a sound, as many people would believe, but a set of instructions used for triggering sounds created by a variety of sources, like those described above.
Now, when I was describing assembling drum parts to adhere to clicks, a lot of people might frown in disgust, probably for two similar, but separate reasons. The first is that this method would appear to be a very big safety net for drummers who aren't very good. Suddenly, as long as they get something near a good take, and engineer will be able to make a good track from their many attempts. This is true, and it's why sometimes bands that sound great on record aren't so good live. It's quite possible to see live clips of modern bands where they completely ruin the timing of songs, seemingly unable to play in time together. This is a fair point, but it tends to exist mainly as a premise for the second argument: that using a click track kills the "feel" of a song. On his blog, Musical Machinery, Paul Lamere decided to test some songs to see whether or not they were using a click, by using a piece of software to analyse tempo variation – reasoning that songs with little variation were likely recorded to clicks. It's an interesting idea, but you can see where he stands on the issue fairly early on, when he says that "some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile, that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song". Later, when describing Britney Spears' ". . . One More Time", he says that "(i)t seems that most pop music nowadays is overproduced, so my suspicion is that an artist like Britney Spears will record against a click track.". It's pretty clear where his loyalties lie. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I think he's got it wrong though.
The thing is, since the advent of electronic music, listeners have become incredibly familiar with completely even tempos. Sequenced music stays at exactly the same tempo for hours on end unless the programmer makes it change, and we have become adapted to it. Dance music would sound simply wrong if it were played with the sort of tempo changes that were common in earlier rock songs (disregarding more long-term changes, in which a song is sped up at an even rate as it reaches a climax, and other variations like that). And, as the lines between dance music and rock blur, there are many more instances in which the sounds and aesthetics of one genre inform the other. This is particularly evident in modern R&B: electronic samples and synthesisers prevail, and these are all sequenced to a set tempo. Any live band that wishes to sit well with these elements have to play to a click, particularly if they're recording their parts before the electronic instruments are added – a common occurrence.
For Plastic Palace Alice, who just finished recording a new album, the choice was an easy one. While we ended up recording one song without a click, the rest of them simply worked better with one. It wasn't a question of whether or not we wanted the "feel" to be there, it was a matter of what feel we were going for – in our case our songs often have heavy disco influences, where you want that constant tempo that a click track provides.
On the other hand, Potential Falcon didn't record to a click at all. We played until we got a good take, then we overdubbed a lot later. The interesting this is that the Plastic Palace sessions felt more "live" when we were recording them than the Potential Falcon ones. We all played together for each take, and several of the vocals that will make it on to the album were recorded during this tracking process, rather than as later overdubs. Yes, some of the tracks are likely to be fairly heavily edited to fit the "grid", but in our ears it's improving the sound of the songs. Yes, there are certainly situations when music suffers a little because people use a click when they probably shouldn't, but this, like autotune or anything else, is a matter of correct use of tools.
If you read music blogs at all (and if you don't, why are you reading this?) you've probably read at least a couple best-of-decade lists. It's always an entertainment mix of affirmation and frustration reading them, or is that just me? For me, I either get unnecessarily happy when I see a favoured album on the list; disappointed when one doesn't get included; and a little bit embarrassed when an album I've never listened to gets described as some sort of era-defining cultural artefact. It's all a bit silly, of course, but that's how it goes.
I suspect that the main purpose of a best-of list is to serve as a kind of manifesto for the publication. If we look at Pitchfork's top 20 of the decade, this seems fairly accurate: it's largely made up of successful indie-rock acts, with a smattering of hip hop and dance. There's no metal or country, let alone jazz, classical or "world" music, which isn't surprising, but these genres aren't mentioned as being deliberately excluded. The list isn't simply constructing a history but a future as well: it's making a statement about the kind of music that Pitchfork deems to be interesting and worthy of comment.
In fact, this is probably the list's most important function, as I'm not really sure what else to do with it. The other day I read through the list with the intention of seeing if there were any albums I hand't listened to which maybe deserved some attention. However, it wasn't as helpful as I expected (or at least hoped). Of the 20, I already owned ten of them, so, other than reminding me how much I want The Avalanches to release a new album, those weren't much help as a shopping guide. Of the remaining ten, there were a couple that I knew I wanted to buy. The first was Spoon's Kill The Moonlight. As readers of this blog might know, I'm a bit of a fan of Spoon, but I'd never gotten around to buying any album other than their most recent Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga – Kill The Moonlight was an obvious choice for an album purchase, and I wasn't disappointed. Ghostface Killah's Supreme Clientele fit into this mould too: I love Fishscale and his work both with the Wu-Tang Clan and on Raekwon's Cuban Linx albums, so this was a nice reminder to get Supreme Clientele (and I think I'll bypass his most recent effort for now).
Other than that, however, I have some conflicting feelings. The problem is, I can't really think of a good reason to start getting into, say, The Strokes, at this point of my life, rather than bands who are slightly more current. And this holds for a lot of the albums in the list that I already own as well. I'm not denying that White Blood Cells is a good album, but it wouldn't be something I'd excitedly give someone now. Even Kid A, deservedly ranked as the best album of the decade (not that there aren't other, equally deserving albums) isn't necessarily something I'd recommend above Radiohead's more recent In Rainbows.
I guess my main problem is that these albums are too recent. In saying that, I don't mean that we need some sort of distance in order to work out what should rank in the canon – quite the opposite. Rather, to me, the albums that are coming out now that are showing the influences of ten years ago sound better than their parents, but, at the same time, I doubt I'll have the same feeling in ten years. This could be partly because I'm one of the few people you'll hear constantly saying "I prefer their new stuff". Classics are great, and we'll always have them, but on a day-to-day basis, I'd rather listen to what musicians are coming up with now, than what they were doing ten or twenty years ago.
Like I've said before, I don't really have any intention of turning this blog into a tour journal, which goes some way to explaining why posting's been so light-on the past couple of weeks. However, Potential Falcon's own Simon Connolly has posted a few highlights of our tour over at our website. If you're interested in what the tour's been like, check it out. Don's taken some lovely photos, so it's all quite pretty.
I finally had a chance to read through the research by Demos, that I mentioned below. After reading it, I'm much more convinced that Helienne Lindvall was right in her scepticism. This is not to say that the general theme - that people who download music illegally spend more on music than those who don't - is wrong, but that it's impossible to draw any credible conclusions from this survey. Here are some highlights that I noticed:
Of the 1008 people surveyed, only 74% (746) people paid for any music at all.
The survey claims that the majority of people who download music for free say that they spend more than or "about the same" as they otherwise would on music, as a result of being able to download for free. However, only 27% of them actually said that they bought more music, while 47% said that it was about the same. In other words, of the people who download music for free, the most common claim is that their spending habits are unaffected.
Only 9% of respondents said that they knowingly download music illegally. There are two problems with this figure: the first is that it's hard to believe; the second is that it makes the sample-space of illegal downloaders in this survey horribly small: 91 people.
The fact that this sample space is problematically small is revealed in some of the responses for that group. According to the survey, 46% of people who download illegally say that they do it "because they can", but an improbably large 25% say that they download music they have already paid for physical copies of. This might be a problem with the question (many people who download music would own physical copies of some of the stuff they download, after all), or it could be the sample-size. Either way, I find it hard to take at face-value the idea that 25% of people who download music for free only download that which they've paid for in some other way.
I've contacted Demos to try to get a copy of their full survey, so I hope I'll be able to update this with some more interesting data in the future.
Update: You can now download the full report from their website here(download will start: it's the only permalink I could find)
It has often been suggested that the people who download music illegally still pay more for music than those who don't. This piece in The Independent - from a press release by Demos - seems to support this claim. However, as Helienne Lindvall notes at the Guardian, it's hard to say that the survey really proves anything at all. She goes into detail as to why the survey is somewhat suspect, so I won't linger on those issues. Assuming, however, that there is a kernel of truth in the Demos study, what are the implications?
The problem that I can see is that people tend to have a slightly odd perspective on this issue. When hearing that illegal downloaders spend more on music than others, people tend to take it as evidence that downloading isn't having the negative effects that record labels claim. After all, they're still making more money from illegal downloaders than they are from those who only purchase music legally. However, this isn't really a useful comparison. The real question is how much these people were paying for music before they started downloading it for free. It's likely that the people who download the most music are those who, ten years ago, would have been the music industry's biggest customers anyway, and that they would have been spending a lot more money in order to be. The fact that they remain the biggest buyers of music now is likely little comfort to record labels, who were used to seeing music lovers spend much more of their income on albums.
Of course, this could partly explain why live revenue has increased so much in recent years, as I dealt with in my previous post, from this piece in the Times Online. Perhaps the amount of money that fans spend on music is the same as it was ten years ago, but, because they download much of their music for free now, much more of that money goes to seeing live performances. If this is the case (and I can't find any data to support this hypothesis), this is probably good news for nearly all musicians. If a fan forgoes paying for your album, but uses that money to see your gig instead, you're better off.