OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

Obviously it's silly to say that digitally stitching things together doesn't involve "artistry."

that's not what the article says tbf

"In a manifestation of deep seeded..."

you get a prize when you do this.

uh, no, this is what the article says:

"Where is the artistry when a producer digitally stitches together a vocal track, syllable by syllable, from dozens of takes?"

kinda think there should be a ban on sites like whatever the hell randomnerd is though. on this thread. i doubt they have editors. or standards. or whatever.

i agree and i hesitated tbh. It showed up in factcheckingcuz's music eblog though so i read it more or less accidentally and felt the need to inflict further.

the writer is talking about the performer's artistry:

In the music industry, the performers are called artists, while the people who write the songs remain largely anonymous outside the pages of trade publications. But

can a performer be said to have any artistry

sorry bbcode

In the music industry, the performers are called artists, while the people who write the songs remain largely anonymous outside the pages of trade publications. But can a performer be said to have any artistry if, as in the case of Rihanna, her label convenes week-long “writer camps,” attended by dozens of producers and writers (but not necessarily Rihanna), to manufacture her next hit? Where is the artistry when a producer digitally stitches together a vocal track, syllable by syllable, from dozens of takes? Or modifies a bar and calls it a new song?

cool sentence diagramming, really enjoying those sixth-grade flashbacks, but given that the next sentence talks about modifying a bar, something that producers do (and something the writer calls out Luke for elsewhere), it's fair to say that refers to the producer

god, this is overly pedantic even for me

sorry

was referring to myself

also max martin's not bald tbf

it's ambiguous to me -- in context it seems more likely that it refers to the singer than the producer, but at the same time it's not hard to believe that the author of the piece also thinks that about the producer.

it is not a bad piece but i also don't it is very good. it has this "let me blow your mind" tone that is kind of lame esp since these conversations about corporate pop machinery have been happening for a long time. the piece also ended much much sooner than i thought it would and i left thinking "that's it?"

he also doesn't go into any detail about why some stars are more successful than others, why someone like rihanna has been able to cultivate an individual presence as an artist while other stars fail despite both relying on similar teams of songwriters/producers

it is also not hard to extrapolate from the piece the hackneyed judgement that an artist writing & performing their own songs is somehow superior or more "authentic" than an "artist" relying on max martin and other producers

It's more abo

I decided not to post what I was going to post so let "it's more abo" be the whole of my opinion

it is not a bad piece but i also don't *think* it is very good.

typo sorry

but maybe he is... ARTISTICALLY BALD

xp

lol

re: carl's piece, which is fine, but

And both Tesfaye and Jepsen also collaborated with another Swede, Peter Svensson, formerly of the band the Cardigans, who were already somewhat of an ’80s throwback in the ’90s.

this links to a video that's been deleted, so i really have no idea what he's talking about

you guys need a good laugh.

"Before Dead Boys and Pere Ubu was Rocket from the Tombs, the Cleveland protopunk favorites Rocket from the Tombs raged through tracks that would eventually become “Sonic Reducer,” “Final Solution,” and others, changing the course for music as we know it."

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/rocket-from-the-tombs-coopy-video

oh noiseybot 3000, you never fail us....

In the music industry, the performers are called artists, while the people who write the songs remain largely anonymous outside the pages of trade publications.

this is like exactly how it was in the 50s and 60s during the heyday of tin pan alley and the Wrecking Crew and all that

yea i thought about that too

the world is as it is

Travis Blanchard • 2 hours ago
And this is why almost every pop song for the last 15 years has been complete crap. Today's music is in a sad state. Pop stars are not musicians, they are barely performers. They are figureheads used by record execs to make money. Unfortunately, the way the music industry is today has contributed to the overall decline of the quality of music. Very little good music across any genre has been made in the past decade.

Fabian to critics: Drop Dead!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/1959_Fabian_Forte.jpg

Pop stars are not musicians, they are barely performers. They are figureheads used by record execs to make money. Also, that's not even Michael Nesmith's real hat.
http://t4.kn3.net/taringa/0/6/2/9/1/4/Uter_Zorker/39C.jpg

#whoa #wow

Where is the artistry when a producer digitally stitches together a vocal track, syllable by syllable, from dozens of takes?

I don't really see what the difference is between a producer digitally stitching together a vocal track from dozens of takes and a producer manually cutting together a vocal track on tape from dozens of takes. Vocal comping has been happening for decades and has been a bog-standard studio technique for decades... are there really people out there who think that every vocal on every "classic" song/production ever was sung live in one take? Idiots.

you take that back about michael nesmith's hat

this is like exactly how it was in the 50s and 60s during the heyday of tin pan alley and the Wrecking Crew and all that

― Ma$e-en-scène (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, September 16, 2015 12:27 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This came to my mind too. In fact didn't Phil Spector basically believe that he was the *real* artist and the girl groups he used were just kind of disposable instruments in his hands?

Although to clarify, the heyday of tin pan alley was most certainly not in the 50's and 60's. Maybe you mean Brill Building?

OTOH I wouldn't take that comparison too far, because I think that there were well-known songwriters in the era before most artists *wrote their own songs.* I mean I think Tin Pan Alley composers, for example, were pretty well-known. People bought a lot more sheet music back in those days, and the sheet music credited the songwriters.

yah brill building i meant

still i bet there were a shitload of teenagers who didn't give a fuck who doc pomus or hal blaine were

yeah the backing musicians seem like another story, I think it really wasn't well known who those people were. They weren't even credited most of the time. According to the doc it sounds like a lot of said teenagers probably really believed that it was the Beach Boys or the Association or whoever playing on their own records.

also, in a lot of cases, the "artistes" who wrote their own stuff back then were just as produced and arranged and micromanaged by a hundred people as anyone else.

When one of my bands had a brief affair with Big Deal Music Industry Manager, he asked us pretty early on how we'd feel about having someone else "work on our songs" with us, or something to that effect. I almost wish we had gotten to that point because I was curious to find out whether said *someone* was just going to lightly edit them or completely reshape them into country-pop hits or something.

His Atlantic magazine editor didn't seem to question the lack of clarity on music history.
This paragraph, where he acknowledges the existence of earlier hired tunesmiths, seems a little questionable too, both on its own and in the manner that it does not quite fit in with his later arguments:

The music has evolved in step with these changes. A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Tin Pan Alley and Motown had to write only one killer hook to get a hit. Now you need a new high every seven seconds—the average length of time a listener will give a radio station before changing the channel. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, a co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”

That doesn't even sound internally consistent, unless intros, pres, choruses, and bridges each last no more than seven seconds.

That doesn't even sound internally consistent, unless intros, pres, choruses, and bridges each last no more than seven seconds.

If super-hooky grindcore became the new thing, I would totally start listening to the radio.

Motown songs only needed one hook?!? Has he heard any Motown songs? A lot of the time the intro's a hook before the singer's even turned up.

I like Nathaniel Rich btw but he wouldn't be the first smart, talented writer to say dumb things about pop music.

WTF does he think the Be My Baby drum intro is?

The first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony is pretty much one hook after another, for that matter, just relentless hooks.

"You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”

Sounds great. More memorable melodies. Thanks, short attention spans.

If super-hooky grindcore became the new thing, I would totally start listening to the radio.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Wednesday, September 16, 2015 4:49 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Can't say we didn't try...

https://open.spotify.com/album/3yByFtADzRS96I3j4l5v9s

I wish songs had more boring, meandery, unmemorable sections

boring meandering music kinda rules tbh