8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Seventy-Nine Years Ago Today: Robert Johnson In The Studio

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On This Diety:

Seventy-nine years ago today, the legendary bluesman, Robert Johnson, made his recording debut in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas – one of only two recording sessions he would make in his short life, but whose sounds would ignite the entire post-war world …


Radio Diaries:

November 23, 1936 was a good day for recorded music. Two men – an ocean apart – sat before a microphone and began to play. One was a cello prodigy who had performed for the Queen of Spain; the other played guitar and was a regular in the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta.


Listen to this episode of the always excellent Radio Diaries:

How Well Does the Factory Model Explain Pop Music?

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The Nation:

From one musical vogue to another over the years, the notion of pop songs as industrial product has persisted, sometimes taken up by the music makers themselves as a source of pride. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records in Detroit, the then-booming home of the auto industry in its postwar V-8 heyday, had put in time on the assembly line at a Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and he modeled his whole vertically integrated musical operation on what he learned at the factory. As he recalled in his memoir, To Be Loved, “At the plant, cars started out as just a frame, pulled along on conveyor belts until they emerged at the end of the line—brand-spanking-new cars rolling off the line. I wanted the same concept for my company, only with artists and songs and records.”



Today, the pop music that’s most popular is produced and distributed by methods that, in many ways, appear to be more regimented and mechanized than the means by which any music had been made in the past. Producers generate instrumental tracks by sample-mining and synthesis, using software and keyboard plug-ins; teams of “topliners” add melodic hooks and lyric ideas onto the tracks; and the results are cut and pasted, Auto-Tuned and processed, then digitally tested with software that compares the sonic patterns of a new song with those of past hits. The world of this music is both familiar and unique, connected in elemental ways to the first popular music produced in America and, at the same time, utterly inconceivable in any era before the digital age.



[However,] a more accurate and illuminating way to understand today’s pop might be to think of it as post-­industrial, a phenomenon not of the machine era but of the information age. Music is made today by mining the vast digital repository of recordings of the past, or by emulating or referencing them through synthesis, and then manipulating them and mashing them up—with the human fallibility and genius that have always laced popular music and probably always will. Indeed, it is accessing and processing—the methods that digitalization facilitates—rather than gearing and stamping for uniformity and mass production that distinguish 21st-century pop. Like machine-age plants everywhere, the song factories have closed, and the work of the day is being done electronically.


John Seabrook’s book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory is certainly inspiring some interesting think pieces on pop music. I’m also starting to suspect that one of my most mentioned labels – Factory Records – was probably the least suitable imprint to hold that name. Motown (based on Gordy’s quote above), Tin Pan Alley, or today’s assembly line song laboratories could have really run with the moniker.

Today In History: MC5 – Kick Out The Jams

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On This Deity:

“The duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution. The duty of the musician is to make the music. But there is an equation that must not be missed: MUSIC IS REVOLUTION.” – John Sinclair (MC5 Manager)



“Brothers and Sisters, I wanna see a sea of hands out there. Let me see a sea of hands. I want everybody to kick up some noise. I wanna hear some revolution out there, brothers. I wanna hear a little revolution. Brothers and sisters, the time has come for each and every one of you to decide whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution. You must choose, brothers, you must choose. It takes five seconds, five seconds of decision. Five seconds to realize that it’s time to move. It’s time to get down with it. Brothers, it’s time to testify and I want to know, Are you ready to testify? Are you ready? I give you a testimonial: THE MC5!” – Brother J.C. Crawford

Watch on YouTube

BTW – Dorian Cope’s On This Deity is an essential daily read. Check it out.

Watch: Good Looking Records Documentary from 1996

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Here’s a fantastic find that hopefully won’t get pulled offline anytime soon … it’s a BBC documentary from 1996 focusing on Good Looking Records and LTJ Bukem, right on the cusp of their peak.

Reminisce: People smoking in clubs! All the DJs playing vinyl! Excited that you can make a track in the studio and play it out a week later, but only after the dubplate is pressed! Worried that your record sales will suffer because a shop in Japan is selling cassette tapes of radio sets! One of the hottest DJs in Britain getting “as much as £1000” per gig!

In addition to all that, the doc is a brilliant glimpse into the international DJ and independent dance label scenes in the heyday of the mid-1990s. Many things are different, many things are the same. And business manager Tony Fordham’s adventures in Asia could be a documentary series of their own. Certainly worthy of an hour of your time.


Modern Times – LTJ Bukem Documentary (1996) by junglednbdocumentary

Rise of the Synthesizer

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Here’s a fantastic article in Collector’s Weekly with a selected history of the synthesizer, focusing on Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits who just got the old name back and is restarting the brand.

This section on the making of Switched-On Bach paints a remarkable pitcture of the early days:

In a word, synthesizers in 1974 sucked. Sure, their vintage cred looks cool from 2015, but all synthesizers in 1974 were monophonic, which meant they could only produce one note at a time. That was a major headache if you were Wendy Carlos and you had made it your mission to include a composition such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3” on “Switched-On Bach.” Because her Moog was monophonic, Carlos had to play the notes for each of the concerto’s nine stringed instruments—as well as the harpsichord part—one at a time. Worse, Carlos was forced to play each note in each of the chords any of those instruments might be required to produce one at a time, too.



As if that limitation were not hobbling enough, early synthesizers, including the Moog, were notoriously bad at staying in tune, which meant Carlos typically had to work in bursts—often lasting no more than 5 seconds at a time—before the tone she had found by twisting one knob this way and another that way had degraded. Once a clean burst was recorded, the tape would be rewound, cued up, and the next burst would be added in real time. It was a painstaking procedure, requiring endless takes. In retrospect, that a project like “Switched-On Bach” was completed at all is something of a miracle.


The article is a bit of a ‘long read’ but is totally worth it.

Beyond Rip It Up: Towards A New Definition Of Post Punk

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The Quietus:

So why does post-punk work so well as a brand when its content remains amorphous? [Simon] Reynolds [author of Rip It Up And Start Again] himself defined it as “less a genre of music than a space of possibility”. Yet we can’t lose sight of the fact that the Latin qualifier means after, subsequent or later. Some limitation on duration is also necessary, though application can’t be merely calendar-defined. We have to respond to the term with some reference to musical discipline and its entanglement with punk itself. Is there a compelling argument for digesting the period 78-82 as a single musico-sociological unit? I know not of such a beast. Unless you deconstruct the repeated message broadcast from 1978 onwards that punk was ‘dead’ and that a new dawn was implicit from that point. But punk wasn’t dead. Some of its most critical interventions still lay ahead.



Punk begat vast dissonance and fragmentation. There are no means by which the wealth of music thus engendered in the period 78-84 (to use Reynolds’ own parameters) can be adequately unified. It was all too untidy (and thrilling, as Reynolds conveys well). On the basis of reactions here [at the Leeds ‘post-punk conference’], post-punk has become a little akin to the Human League’s ‘Black Hit Of Space‘, sucking everything into its orbit. Let’s look again at some of the musical subjects this conference tackled: Throbbing Gristle, Orange Juice, Hazel O’Connor, the Fleshtones, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Mission of Burma. It would make for an interesting mix tape. But you can’t imagine too many fans of each artist ever gathering in the same room.


You probably already know how I feel about ‘post-punk.’ Those bands changed my teenage life a lot more than ‘punk’ did. As for a stylistic definition, you know it when you hear it (or even see it) … that’s pretty much the best we can do though Reynolds does make a valiant stab at it in his aforementioned book. The fact that, as a genre, it’s all over the place is part of the attraction. Those were messy times, and ‘post-punk’ was a correspondingly messy thing. Admittedly, I do try to imagine the excitement of recording music in those uncharted waters every time I flick on the studio gear in this present era.

Watch on YouTube

Inside the Rise and Receding of Russia’s Music Industry

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Billboard:

Under communism, the country had just one record label, Melodiya, which was strictly controlled by the government, which made sure that only “safe” records and artists were released and promoted. FM radio simply didn’t exist. Concerts were managed by state-run agencies, and rock musicians were mostly barred from touring. It would be charitable to characterize the last century of the Russian music industry as barebones.



Over the next two decades [following Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms], a music industry was allowed to mature with little or no government involvement, eventually growing to be worth $2 billion annually by the early ’10s, and which faced the same challenges as other, more mature markets, such as the continuing decline in physical sales and the question of growing streaming revenues.



Last year brought the symbolic end of the physical format era in Russia; the segment’s contraction led to the closure of all remaining brick-and mortar outlets of Soyuz, once Russia’s biggest nationwide CD chain.



Meanwhile, companies in the digital space, especially streaming services such as Zvooq and Yandex.Music (the music service of Yandex, “the Russian Google”) appear to be doing well.



“We’ve seen local music services closing down because of [an overall economic downturn in Russia], or losing part of their catalogue, and foreign players leaving,” Konstantin Vorontsov, head of Yandex.Music, told Billboard. “However, demand for digital music isn’t declining… there is growth.”

Dream Within A Dream: The Story Of Propaganda (and ZTT)

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This online article I ran across about ’80s electronic pop outfit Propaganda also serves as a short warts-and-all early history of ZTT, Trevor Horn’s always intriguing imprint:

(Paul) Morley had begun his career as a music writer. Famed for largely spearheading the career of Joy Division through his coverage in the NME, he had, however, in January 1983, immediately prior to receiving Propaganda’s demo, abandoned journalism so that he could concentrate on establishing ZTT (or Zang Tumb Tuum to give it its full title), together with producer Trevor Horn and Horn’s wife, Jill Sinclair.



While Jill Sinclair concentrated on its day-to-day management, and Horn produced the bands on its roster, Morley was ZTT’s publicist. Responsible for its carefully-crafted image, he designed most of its early record sleeves, often adorning them with secret messages and symbols, and became eventually involved in creating a clothing range for it. He also manufactured slogans for the label and in florid prose wrote manifestos and missive statements for it and its bands.



“ZTT’s main aim is to re-establish the glory of pop records as one of the fanciest and most fascinating ways of communication in the 20th century,” Morley proclaimed in a 1983 agenda in an early example of the exhibitionism, bluster and ambition for which his label would become renowned. “And to make ZTT the most interesting, provocative, crazy, and unpredictable record label of the ’80s.”


There’s a lot more of interest here for fans of ZTT, Propaganda, or tales of massive label / artist falling-outs. Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.

While you’re at it, check out more of Paul Morley’s visual (and textual) influence on Art of ZTT … and Zang Tuum Tumb And All That is an impressive archive of all that pertains to the label.

The Elaborate Charade to Obfuscate Who Writes Pop Music

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This fascinating article from The Atlantic reads like an episode of Black Mirror:

Impressionable young fans would do well to avoid John Seabrook’s (new book) The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music. It is a business as old as Stephen Foster, but never before has it been run so efficiently or dominated by so few. We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.



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.


Orlando’s Lou Pearlman apparently has a lot more to answer for than the criminal schemes he’s presently serving time for.

Side story: in the mid-’90s I once wandered into a downtown Orlando pizza place to grab a quick slice and noticed Pearlman at a table with a large pie in the middle, and four teenage boys sitting across looking wide-eyed and attentive. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall.


Update: Vox interviews John Seabrook about his book and the ‘mega-producer’ phenomenon:

When you’re talking about the Swedes, and to a certain extent the Norwegians, there you’re dealing with a different set of cultural influences. There’s this whole concept, from a novel in the 1930s, called Jantelagen, the laws of Scandinavian restraint. The idea is that individual success is to be frowned upon in Scandinavian culture, and it’s really about the group and not the individual. That particular set of influences was very instrumental in shaping Denniz Pop and his group of disciples, of whom [leading mega-producer] Max Martin was obviously the most successful. It’s a major force in Max Martin’s career.



What’s the difference between the Beatles and Max Martin, really? You could say the Beatles’ songs are maybe a little bit better, but that’s a very subjective judgment. The real difference is that the Beatles perform their own songs and that’s why the Beatles are universally recognized as geniuses, whereas Martin never performs his own songs, and that’s why outside the music industry, nobody knows who Max Martin is. It’s a hard thing for most Americans to wrap their minds around, but if you look at it in a Swedish context, it makes a little more sense.


Update 2: Bob Lefsetz reviews Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory:

They don’t sit in studios with guitars and pianos, writing melodies and lyrics together. At best, they do that in Nashville. Rather producers come up with beats and then they have their favorite topliners create melodies and hooks on top. And if there aren’t enough hooks in the track, they start all over. They’re in the business of hit singles, not album dreck. And they know one hook is not enough, that you’ve got to grab the public instantly and continue to thrill them.



And this formula is working.



I’m not judging it, just telling you how it is.



All the people truly driving popular culture are in this book. That’s why you should read it. And that’s why you’re gonna hate it.