The Lumineers

I heard it on the radio last night followed immediately on the same station by Enrique Iglesias ft Pitbull, "I Like It"
Lol radio programming in 2013

yeah they play it between bruno mars and justin bieber out here. which is kind of interesting but mostly lol.

this is a larger question, but do you think this is a particularly bad year for top 40 radio?

YES

do you have any suspicions as to why it is so bad? i would say that music taste has become so balkanized by the internet that the radio has become exclusively the domain of un-savvy music listeners, people in high school, who don't even have an ear for good pop music. but then, why is that coming to the fore now, and not five or six years ago, or something?

I always feel like the cranky old man when i say this but I believe there are a few main culprits for the decline of decent top 40 radio:

1) Decline of music education in public schools (and probable decline in private or individual music ed too)
2) The old record label system, for all its flaws, does not have an adequate replacement in terms of something that can support an artist financially for a while while developing a record (i.e. a large advance)
3) More advanced data usage on pop music has led to the pursuit of surer hits, less risk-taking

may also be that talent is going elsewhere, big labels aren't sexy anymore, etc.

it's because of the way we consume music & the way businesses track the consumption of music

there are almost definitely 10-year-old kids listening to Lumineers mp3s who weren't even born when "New Slang" changed everyone's lives

also maybe since the decline of the album format, big labels don't want to throw their weight behind more ambitious/interesting artists, and just sort of cynically sign artists that can reproduce a predictable, proven formula, like young money style rap or bieber bubblegum or mumford-type alt country pop or whatever.

I am kind of ambivalent abt music education in American public schools; in my experience a large part of it seems to be Huey Lewis fans teaching kids to play corny regimented jazz fusion

In my experience (which was the mid-'80s), it was a Lionel Richie fan telling all of us kids to listen to real music and not that Prince crap which nobody would ever remember in 10 years. (Our marching band's version of "All Night Long" was kinda cool, to be fair.)

We did actually play Huey Lewis, too -- "Heart of Rock n Roll" was a show-stopper for the high school jazz band.

in my experience, it was someone teaching us what different instruments sounded like mixed in with learning to read music and learning to sightread

And how to tell the difference between 12 different Sousa marches.

i was in my high school jazz band as well and we mostly played adaptations of jazz standards, like salt peanuts or a night in tunisia or even like herbie hancock songs. it was sweet.

I am kind of ambivalent abt music education in American public schools; in my experience a large part of it seems to be Huey Lewis fans teaching kids to play corny regimented jazz fusion

― Heyman (crüt), Friday, April 12, 2013 12:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah but you need some vehicle or other for teaching kids to play/write passing chords and melodies that span more than three notes

i feel like knowing how to read or play music is not a precondition of having good taste though, and taste is something that is driven at the producer end. the reason top 40 radio is bad is not because there aren't good musicians out there.

shit, i meant "consumer" end.

i had to do a dance routine to "great balls of fire" for flag team in high school
i remember being conflicted because it was totally uncool but also super fun

most of my music education experiences were overwhelmingly positive. i feel like i have lots of amusing/happy memories of performances and whatnot. i did wind up getting kicked off the flag team though.

the reason top 40 radio is bad is not because there aren't good musicians out there.

There are plenty of good or potentially good people on the top 40, even. We just seem to be in one of those ruts where there's a crop of drab newbies sharing space with people who have made plenty of good music but are in various stages of water-treading or underperforming. You could have a top 40 with Justin Timberlake, Pink, Rihanna and Britney in it that was a lot better than the one we have.

(Of the established pros on the chart right now, only Taylor is at the top of her game.)

and she is pretty much uniformly terrible, ergo

None of which excuses the Lumineers and those who sail with them, obviously.

cosign on taylor swift being terrible. unless she is reading it; then i'd feel bad.

i'm not smart enough to hate this stuff on any critical level but as an old i can't hear any antecedents past arcade fire or nmh or what have you either and therefore it doesn't line up with my consumer experience of americana. i like a nice twang where is the twang. also some jangle. where are the second-hand shout-outs to mcguinn, parsons, or dick dale.

i think bluster is an accurate shorthand descriptor of the new authentic aesthetic; i tend to like ruckus music, tho. i don't hear any ruckus in new authentic.

it's like cowpunk never happened.

I absolutely loathe everything about this band.

...like Rusted Root in fucking trilby hats. Deplorable.

I will never bemoan yr absenteeism Alex as long as you show up every now and then in this ^^^ fashion

(but I do kinda miss ya)

it's like Bright Eyes happened.

xposts

i don't think this is a particularly bad yr for pop radio. the songs poll about top 10 hits so far this yr aren't even that bad

which top 10 songs this year do you like?

(be warned that if you say "Thrift Shop" a good 80% of ILM will uppercut you)

i voted for "thrift shop" as the worst on the list.

i don't know, i am not enthusiastic about any of the songs on that list but most of them don't have me reaching for the dial either. it's the sort of average that comprises 80+% of all chr programming basically every year.

Interesting that the lineage is indie rather than what we in the olde days called alt-country. Like, I don't get the sense that there's much overlap between Son Volt fans (who apparently still exist, as does the band) and the Lumineers/Mumford scene.

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Friday, April 12, 2013 11:43 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this stuff feels like roots music stripped of any roots -- like it signifies back to basics but doesn't even know what the "basics" are.

― tylerw, Friday, April 12, 2013 11:45 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it's pointing back at something but there's no through-line to follow all the way back to the origin. can't get there from here. i don't necessarily expect millenials to honor the postmodern-rocker mullet bolo-tie black-vest black-converse hightops rodeo that was specific to the 80's version of how the past was re-interpreted, but you could track who they were aping who was aping someone else who was aping whoever preceded them and so on. turtles upon turtles until you got to the ur-turtle.

this stack of turtles runs like three deep at most.

FWIW, before he produced Mumford & Sons, before he produced Coldplay, well before he produced Arcade Fire, Markus Dravs produced the Levellers.

i'm sure the problem is mine where i just can't see the turtles underneath but for example, if i go to the allmusic entry for the dream syndicate and go to the "related" section there are entries for the "similar," "influences," and "followers" categories. if i do the same for the lumineers or of monsters and men there's only the "similar" section and nothing else.

i guess i'm just angry at hats. this is probably a good example of the fallacy of sartorial intent thing that ppl are always on about. i assumed that when peter case picked up the trilby at the vintage shop and checked himself out in the mirror and thought "so i think this is the best costume for the day" he knew he was playing dress-up but he also knew who wore it before him because the previous owner wrote his name in the lining. from the lumineers i just get a "sick hat, bro" vibe and not much else?

like e.g., lone justice or social distortion could countenance the idea of a continuous lineage with covers of "fortunate son" or "ring of fire" and sound okay but at the same time "i found love" sounds a lot like "footloose" to me too so they're backward-looking and contemporary at the same time. new authentics just sound like passion pit or atlas genius w/ added banjo. mostly it's the boom boom boom salvation-army marching band kick drum thing and all the oooh ooohs. i dunno what covers these bands could do that would slot them in anywhere in time other than where there are right now and that's fine. but i'm used to hearing or at least have someone smarter point out all the vertical and horizontal connections and this seems all horizontal except the hats are telling me something different.

yeah, my basic stance wrt mumford etc has been that they're so appalling because they present a form of traditional rustic authenticity that's detached from any kind of actual tradition, so it floats around being uncanny if you let it or just awful if you don't, but it does make me wonder - where are they coming from? we can't blame arcade fire for everything, there are obvs signifiers at work here that try to extend much further than mid-2000s indie, but to where?

I wonder where the O Brother sdtk fits in this. A bunch of these folks heard their parents or older sibs copies and where like "Banjos! That's where it's at!"?

O Brother. Walk The Line. M. Ward. Neko Case. Damien Rice. The Old Crow Medicine Show. Jeff Buckley. Conor Oberst. Bob Dylan & Woody Guthrie minus the poetry and prolificacy. Nick Drake minus the virtuosic right hand. A bunch of pastoral-tinged sub-alternative-rock gibberish with very little respect for the folk song tradition it pretends to revere.

Come come come nuclear bomb

Every Band Is Like Son Volt

mm crut that list seems plausible, but all those ppl seem to have too much of a grasp on the actual tradition for the mumford leap into nothingness to really make sense. but then also mumfords are british and we have some kind of tradition of destroying our folk lineage while also honoring it, maybe they actually know the good stuff and went for the former but forgot the latter a little.

really at the end of history

it's sad, it was a history

well yeah - they have a grasp on tradition, but their followers don't necessarily. The same way a Rolling Stones fan might have heard of, say, Howlin' Wolf but not really know his music.

and I'm not saying everyone who makes music has to acknowledge their place in musical tradition, but these guys are obviously trying to cultivate an old-timey folk band image

these guys are obviously trying to cultivate an old-timey folk band image

But without any sense of the actual music that goes with it. Maybe it's not so much the soundtrack to "O Brother" as the movie itself, some vague idea that it would be fun to wear suspenders and fedoras.

And I'm not bemoaning any lack of authenticity, just trying to pinpoint the musical antecedents, which I think are separate from the sartorial ones.

the music is wearing banjos in the same way the ppl are physically wearing hats, is what i think is going on here.

i don't think authenticity is key either because revivals/ retrograde movements tend to bastardize or tinker with what they take from the past to suit their current needs and it becomes its own thing, but what they steal and corrupt is usually pretty specific and you can identify the original owner. i don't know anyone's stealing from here if they are at all; it's too generalized.

don't know what anyone's stealing

it's like Bright Eyes happened.

Haven't heard lumineers but the Bright Eyes guy has a lot to answer for in terms of inspiring so many shitty vocalists. I wouldn't mind arcade fire or all the car commercial indie as much if the vocals weren't all that awful bright eyes style warbly bleating. Like nails on a chalkboard.

The main issue with this stuff is how cowardly it is. It's the lesson learned from Coldplay above all else: why be small when you can go big? Why be subtle when you risk someone missing the point? Why go low-key when you can aim for the arena rafters?

Also, folk authenticity makes less money than arena-ready "whoa-oh-oh!"-alongs (see again: Coldplay, who for a minute there were on the cusp of doing something interesting but decided they'd rather be rich and famous, ie they're doing it for the people, man, not for critics). The suspenders and hats and banjos are pretty much all they have in common with "the past." The rest is straight up contemporary hokum.