Between the "Man Machine Poem" album and tour, his political activism, various public honours, and new solo albums, Downie had been so active over the past 18 months that one could almost forget that his death was going to happen sooner rather than later.
The Tragically Hip story has been told countless times, and it's always the same: huge in Canada, but never broke through anywhere else. In Canada, just to be clear, they were as big as a band can possibly be in the music industry. They sold out arenas and headlined festivals for over two decades. Almost every one of their albums were certified platinum, and three were certified diamond (the equivalent of selling ten million copies in the US). Yes, they sang about uniquely Canadian places, people, and events, which may have limited their appear for international audiences. But for a diverse array of major artists, from British classic rock bands to LA-based rappers, such introspection wasn't a hindrance in their rise to prominence.
Downie was Michael Stipe's everyman poet mixed with the manic unpredictability of an Iggy Pop. He was a unique visionary fronting a band of ordinary looking dudes who were content to let him hog the spotlight. It was not unlike the role that Jarvis Cocker played as the frontman and main creative and lyrical force behind Pulp.
Tragically Hip were hugely popular but not necessarily influential. They didn't spawn a slate of copycat bands. They were a hard working bar band that struck gold, which was improbable even while it was happening. How do you copy a formula that had already been copied in hundreds of dives across multiple countries? There's little doubt that Downie was the spark that made them different from all the other bands who never got out of playing a twice weekly residence at a small bar in their hometown. But now that he's gone, the remaining members can take the Grateful Dead route if they want it, and play "Tragically Hip and Friends" gigs all across Canada for the rest of their working lives.
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 39
"whatintheworldisthisnoisemix" -- 68 minutes
This mix is totally unlike any of the others I've done.
The backstory: a few months ago, I set about ripping some of my hundreds of CD's that are stored at my parents' house. These are kept in several large, album cases with the discs and liner notes.
But some discs don't have liner notes. Perhaps there was a printed back cover of the jewel case that has since been lost. And some discs have little or no information printed on them, and aren't recognized by CD naming software. In the years 2003-2006, I bought a lot of noise and experimental music CDs on my many visits to Berlin, but haven't heard some of them since that time, and can't remember anything about them (e.g. artist name, album title, etc.)
That brings us back to the mix ... I don't have a clue what any of this music is. I have a vague recollection of buying this album (a two CD set with 34 total tracks) but can't remember a things about it besides that. I haven't the slightest idea who the artist(s) could be. Perhaps a time track search could turn something up?
I probably never listened to the entire two plus hour collection even when I bought it. So after quickly skipping through all 34 tracks to categorize them roughly in order of noisiness, I recorded this mix. One take, no redos, no edits, just instinct.
Even after distilling this music from 130 minutes down to a little less than 70, it's still a rough, chaotic, disorienting listen. But I think it's something you can get lost in -- provided you like noise.
This mix is totally unlike any of the others I've done.
The backstory: a few months ago, I set about ripping some of my hundreds of CD's that are stored at my parents' house. These are kept in several large, album cases with the discs and liner notes.
But some discs don't have liner notes. Perhaps there was a printed back cover of the jewel case that has since been lost. And some discs have little or no information printed on them, and aren't recognized by CD naming software. In the years 2003-2006, I bought a lot of noise and experimental music CDs on my many visits to Berlin, but haven't heard some of them since that time, and can't remember anything about them (e.g. artist name, album title, etc.)
That brings us back to the mix ... I don't have a clue what any of this music is. I have a vague recollection of buying this album (a two CD set with 34 total tracks) but can't remember a things about it besides that. I haven't the slightest idea who the artist(s) could be. Perhaps a time track search could turn something up?
I probably never listened to the entire two plus hour collection even when I bought it. So after quickly skipping through all 34 tracks to categorize them roughly in order of noisiness, I recorded this mix. One take, no redos, no edits, just instinct.
Even after distilling this music from 130 minutes down to a little less than 70, it's still a rough, chaotic, disorienting listen. But I think it's something you can get lost in -- provided you like noise.
Saturday, October 07, 2017
Hit Parade Podcast: the war against the single edition
Chris Molanphy's latest edition of the Hit Parade podcast on Slate is a must for anyone who grew up listening to and buying music in the 90's. Predictably, I ended up getting lost down the rabbit hole of 90's rock playlist on Youtube in the days after I listened to it. I've heard more Collective Soul in the past week than I had in the previous ten years.
I've always appreciated the mix of sentiment and hard data that Molanphy brings to his columns. He always strives to analyze the social reasons behind what makes a hit into a hit, while supporting his ideas with data from the charts. In any era, the chart narrative can be far different from the memories of the "people who were there". That was never more true in the mid to late 1990's, and that's precisely what this podcast is about.
I didn't know that MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" was the genesis of the trend, the "experiment" (as Molanphy termed it several times) that turned into a smashing, absurdly profitable success for Hammer and (later in the decade) dozens of other artists. This podcast is as good an analysis as you'll find on the subject, but I want to turn over a few more stones:
1) By the end of the 90's, the album had largely supplanted the single. I felt this wasn't emphasized enough. The marketing of a hit hadn't changed in decades -- push a song to radio (and later MTV) by any means necessary, drive up demand, and make the product available in stores. The strategy was identical, but the product was different. Instead of running to the store to buy the single, you bought the album. It didn't matter if you were a one hit wonder or a career artist. The default format -- in fact, the only format in most cases -- you could buy in the store was the CD album.
This is why so many shitty bands with minor hits earned multiplatinum sales that only the top end superstar acts can rack up these days. The first act that always comes to mind for me in this respect is Smashmouth.
2) The airplay charts were a better indicator of the "real" number one song in the country. But they still don't give us anything close to the real story. In looking at the list of songs that spent the most time at number one on the Hot 100 Airplay chart, there are a few anomalies. You have the chart topping mega-smash hits from the first half of the decade ("I Will Always Love You", "One Sweet Day", "The Sign"), and the 21st century "iTunes" era smashes ("We Belong Together", "Uptown Funk", "Shape of You"). The first group were undoubtedly huge sellers (singles and albums), and the Airplay chart clearly corroborates what the sales charts already tell you. The second group come from the current era when airplay, Youtube views, and streaming is king, again, no surprises here. The anomalies happened in the intervening years.
"Don't Speak" was #1 in Airplay for 16 weeks. Yes, the song and video were everywhere. This translated into huge album sales, about sixteen million worldwide. That all makes sense. But the longest running Airplay hit of all time, a record that has incredibly stood for nearly twenty years, is "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls. Yes, that song was inescapable in 1998. But their record breaking success in airplay translated to only four million in album sales. And it's not like Goo Goo Dolls vanished from the radio after their one huge hit like Los Del Rio did. They were radio staples for years. Similarly, take Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn", which ruled Airplay for 11 weeks. Her sales were good (seven million worldwide) but not spectacular for the 1990's. The hit single was a number one Airplay smash, but the album didn't reach number one anywhere other than her native Australia.
So for some artists, Airplay was a predictor of strong album sales, as you'd expect. But for others the connection is far from clear. The confusion applies in the other direction too, for instance, Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill" is one of the top selling albums ever, but only "You Learn" (hardly the most popular or well remembered song from the album) topped the Airplay chart.
Those years from about 1995-1998 are easily the haziest, most impossible to interpret years for hit songs in chart history.
3) When the "experiment" of not releasing singles in the early 90's started, CD sales were still rather modest. There was a two year period between vinyl sales collapsing (or rather, being killed off intentionally by the industry) and CD sales exploding where cassettes were the top selling format. Personal note: I loved cassettes. I was a very late convert to CD's. Most of my new album length purchases were on cassette up until the fall of 1994. Whatever I couldn't get on cassette I bought on vinyl, in particular because a lot of the techno I liked wasn't easily available in any other format. And the "mix tape" is still one of the most perfect creations ever. The "mix CD" (unless mixed by a professional dance DJ) was never a thing, and the mp3 playlist holds no sentimental value for anyone whatsoever.
The master plan of the record companies only went into overdrive once the CD has almost completely ground every other format into dust. Vinyl is more expensive to produce, slower to manufacture, and more difficult to transport. Cassettes sold for about the same amount as CD, but had higher profit margins. However everyone knew it was a buggy format. The sound was inferior to vinyl, and the tapes could tear or wear out. CD's were looked upon as magic silver disks with perfect sound forever, which justified the much higher sales price. It was all bullshit. It was the cheapest medium to produce (this wasn't well understood in the days before CD read/write drives in every computer) and could be sold at an artificially high price point (despite having inferior sound compared to vinyl) with stratospheric profit margins. The plan was test driven in the days of the cassette. Only once the CD was the only medium left standing, could the industry proceed full steam ahead with their "one hit song = $18" plan. This is why so many years elapsed between the primordial days of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, and the full flowering of profitmaking evil days where even nothing artists like Chumbawamba and Marcy Playground could sell millions of albums.
I've always appreciated the mix of sentiment and hard data that Molanphy brings to his columns. He always strives to analyze the social reasons behind what makes a hit into a hit, while supporting his ideas with data from the charts. In any era, the chart narrative can be far different from the memories of the "people who were there". That was never more true in the mid to late 1990's, and that's precisely what this podcast is about.
I didn't know that MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" was the genesis of the trend, the "experiment" (as Molanphy termed it several times) that turned into a smashing, absurdly profitable success for Hammer and (later in the decade) dozens of other artists. This podcast is as good an analysis as you'll find on the subject, but I want to turn over a few more stones:
1) By the end of the 90's, the album had largely supplanted the single. I felt this wasn't emphasized enough. The marketing of a hit hadn't changed in decades -- push a song to radio (and later MTV) by any means necessary, drive up demand, and make the product available in stores. The strategy was identical, but the product was different. Instead of running to the store to buy the single, you bought the album. It didn't matter if you were a one hit wonder or a career artist. The default format -- in fact, the only format in most cases -- you could buy in the store was the CD album.
This is why so many shitty bands with minor hits earned multiplatinum sales that only the top end superstar acts can rack up these days. The first act that always comes to mind for me in this respect is Smashmouth.
2) The airplay charts were a better indicator of the "real" number one song in the country. But they still don't give us anything close to the real story. In looking at the list of songs that spent the most time at number one on the Hot 100 Airplay chart, there are a few anomalies. You have the chart topping mega-smash hits from the first half of the decade ("I Will Always Love You", "One Sweet Day", "The Sign"), and the 21st century "iTunes" era smashes ("We Belong Together", "Uptown Funk", "Shape of You"). The first group were undoubtedly huge sellers (singles and albums), and the Airplay chart clearly corroborates what the sales charts already tell you. The second group come from the current era when airplay, Youtube views, and streaming is king, again, no surprises here. The anomalies happened in the intervening years.
"Don't Speak" was #1 in Airplay for 16 weeks. Yes, the song and video were everywhere. This translated into huge album sales, about sixteen million worldwide. That all makes sense. But the longest running Airplay hit of all time, a record that has incredibly stood for nearly twenty years, is "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls. Yes, that song was inescapable in 1998. But their record breaking success in airplay translated to only four million in album sales. And it's not like Goo Goo Dolls vanished from the radio after their one huge hit like Los Del Rio did. They were radio staples for years. Similarly, take Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn", which ruled Airplay for 11 weeks. Her sales were good (seven million worldwide) but not spectacular for the 1990's. The hit single was a number one Airplay smash, but the album didn't reach number one anywhere other than her native Australia.
So for some artists, Airplay was a predictor of strong album sales, as you'd expect. But for others the connection is far from clear. The confusion applies in the other direction too, for instance, Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill" is one of the top selling albums ever, but only "You Learn" (hardly the most popular or well remembered song from the album) topped the Airplay chart.
Those years from about 1995-1998 are easily the haziest, most impossible to interpret years for hit songs in chart history.
3) When the "experiment" of not releasing singles in the early 90's started, CD sales were still rather modest. There was a two year period between vinyl sales collapsing (or rather, being killed off intentionally by the industry) and CD sales exploding where cassettes were the top selling format. Personal note: I loved cassettes. I was a very late convert to CD's. Most of my new album length purchases were on cassette up until the fall of 1994. Whatever I couldn't get on cassette I bought on vinyl, in particular because a lot of the techno I liked wasn't easily available in any other format. And the "mix tape" is still one of the most perfect creations ever. The "mix CD" (unless mixed by a professional dance DJ) was never a thing, and the mp3 playlist holds no sentimental value for anyone whatsoever.
The master plan of the record companies only went into overdrive once the CD has almost completely ground every other format into dust. Vinyl is more expensive to produce, slower to manufacture, and more difficult to transport. Cassettes sold for about the same amount as CD, but had higher profit margins. However everyone knew it was a buggy format. The sound was inferior to vinyl, and the tapes could tear or wear out. CD's were looked upon as magic silver disks with perfect sound forever, which justified the much higher sales price. It was all bullshit. It was the cheapest medium to produce (this wasn't well understood in the days before CD read/write drives in every computer) and could be sold at an artificially high price point (despite having inferior sound compared to vinyl) with stratospheric profit margins. The plan was test driven in the days of the cassette. Only once the CD was the only medium left standing, could the industry proceed full steam ahead with their "one hit song = $18" plan. This is why so many years elapsed between the primordial days of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, and the full flowering of profitmaking evil days where even nothing artists like Chumbawamba and Marcy Playground could sell millions of albums.
Tuesday, October 03, 2017
Tom Petty RIP
Perhaps more than anyone with his longevity in the music business, Tom Petty got the most out of his talent. The Heartbreakers started their career in an era of larger than life arena rock bands. "Larger than life" couldn't possibly be a less fitting description. Petty was an average looking rocker dude from Florida, who fronted a band of similarly average looking dudes. You could say the same about Springsteen and the E Street Band, but come on ... they had the Spectorian glamour from day one. They were always a stadium band stuck playing clubs until they got big enough. The Heartbreakers where straight ahead, nose to the grind, professional rockers. In another life (say, if Petty had been born fifteen years later), he might have had a career the likes of Jon Spencer -- essentially that of a pub rocker with a strong cult following, who occasionally sniffs major label success via short-lived collaborations with a hip producer, but always ends up retreating back to the underground. Most musicians would kill to have Jon Spencer's career, but Jon Spencer never played the Superbowl halftime show.
Forty years ago, could anyone have predicted how Petty's career would turn out? As the 70's rolled on, he timed his album releases perfectly with the rise of punk. Petty was rootsy enough to be liked by the classic rock crowd, and no frills enough to be liked by the new wave crowd. That dual cred was still sustaining him in the early 90's, when the previous generation of 70's and 80's rockers had been cleared out by the younger, filthier grunge and alternative stars, with the exception of Neil Young and Tom Petty.
At the end of the 80's, he looked out of place as the youngest Travelling Wilbury by far. Musically, he blended in just fine, and you'd be forgiven for thinking this would mark the beginning of the Stones/Who never ending nostalgia tour phase of his career. But the next year he released his most successful album, "Full Moon Fever". And a few years later, Petty's videos were in heavy rotation in MTV and remained so throughout the early and mid 90's, long after many of his earlier contemporaries were no longer considered relevant to the Gen-X and Y crowd.
Petty had a lot of great songs, but the most special one for me is "Learning To Fly", which essentially kicked off my mini-obsession with "repetitively strummed acoustic guitar" songs such as Kristin Hersh's "Me and My Charms", James' "Laid", and countless others. Plus it has one of the best "coming of age" lyrics ever written.
Forty years ago, could anyone have predicted how Petty's career would turn out? As the 70's rolled on, he timed his album releases perfectly with the rise of punk. Petty was rootsy enough to be liked by the classic rock crowd, and no frills enough to be liked by the new wave crowd. That dual cred was still sustaining him in the early 90's, when the previous generation of 70's and 80's rockers had been cleared out by the younger, filthier grunge and alternative stars, with the exception of Neil Young and Tom Petty.
At the end of the 80's, he looked out of place as the youngest Travelling Wilbury by far. Musically, he blended in just fine, and you'd be forgiven for thinking this would mark the beginning of the Stones/Who never ending nostalgia tour phase of his career. But the next year he released his most successful album, "Full Moon Fever". And a few years later, Petty's videos were in heavy rotation in MTV and remained so throughout the early and mid 90's, long after many of his earlier contemporaries were no longer considered relevant to the Gen-X and Y crowd.
Petty had a lot of great songs, but the most special one for me is "Learning To Fly", which essentially kicked off my mini-obsession with "repetitively strummed acoustic guitar" songs such as Kristin Hersh's "Me and My Charms", James' "Laid", and countless others. Plus it has one of the best "coming of age" lyrics ever written.
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