I am one of about two or three people I know who loves a band called the Jayhawks. While I was reading Paste magazine online today, I ran into an article saying that their two chief songwriters, Mark Olson and Gary Louris, have come together again and are going to be recording their first album together since 1995's Tomorrow the Green Grass. This has me stoked. I also stumbled upon a New York Times article about the Jayhawks' 2000 album Smile called "What If You Made A Classic and No One Cared?"
This article got me to thinking about how fickle the music industry is and how many great artists languish in relative obscurity because of the Top 40, hit-single driven drivel that dominates the airwaves, not to mention the collective conscious of the majority of music listeners . I have said this before and I will say it again: the album, as an artistic statement, is dying. In an era of digital music and iPod playlists, where you can buy what you want and discard the rest, most music consumers are not concerned with whole albums. I also believe that the time of "career" artists is essentially over. If U2 had come out with Boy or October (their first two albums) in the current climate, they never would have gotten out of the gate because neither of the albums really had a hit single--they were definitely albums with a theme, not collections of ear candy designed to get them played on CHR (contemporary hit radio) nor excuses for making elaborate music videos. They would be dropped from their record label faster than you could say MTV!
The state of the music industry and our consumption of music is sad, really, but I don't see it changing. My only prayer is that ambitious musicians who are starting out are given the time to grow and mature artistically so that they are able to produce great art without the pressure of having to produce a hit single or conform to a ridiculous image. Is this a naive pipe dream? Absolutely. But hey, I am allowed to dream...
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4 comments:
given the blog title i thought this post was going to be about how awesome it will be to be unemployed during march madness, and that you are a die hard kansas fan....apparently not.
dude - while i agree with the gist of your post, i gotta ask: are your copies of boy and october missing "i will follow," "the electric co." and "gloria?!"cos if those aren't single-worthy tracks...
it seems to me that independent music is less affected by this trend, since most of it never gets played on CHR anyway. also, music downloaded via bittorrent usually comes as full albums, although it's certainly easier to delete unwanted mp3s than it is to remove tracks from a cd.
Thanks for posting the NYT link. The Jayhawks were and are a greatly under appreciated band as the article states. I've just never been able to understand how this great music can continue to go unnoticed by the mainstream. My conclusion? Most people wouldn't recognize good music even if they were paid to listen to it.
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