Category: Music

Is Old Music Killing New Music? – by Ted Gioia (substack.com)

The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music. The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Police.

There’s good music every decade but it’s true that the 70s/80s/90s are kind of peak quality because it was in those decades that the “music industry” was the most powerful and cared about music, developing artists, sounds, etc.

The industry cared because music in those decades music was like video game skins today: shit was hot and lucrative as hell. They would gamble on a new artist and immediately sold out his/her/their albums.

Now? Music executives have to make up pointless numbers with streams, which are a useless metric. The “industry” doesn’t exist much or let’s just say that music is everywhere and doesn’t really need a strong business arm like before. Artists sell on different platforms, people consume from free to subscription-based to buying vinyls. Whatever.

But yeah, a 4mn song with four chords or more, a bridge, a duet of voices and about 20 different instruments, has a lot more leg than a 2mn beat on a 15s loop with one high pitched chopped voice sample and one auto-tuned line. skrrt.

James Mtume passed away. He was a musician’s musician, without the stigma attached to it.

James was free. James, due to the times he was born in, was always at the intersection of fascinating things like free jazz and black liberation in the 60s. Or the intersection of funk and the emergence of the home studio and drum machines in the 80s.

Always extending.

He hooked up Herbie Hancock with eastern philosophies and programmed one of the best beat ever made, propelling 90s and 00s major hip-hop songs on dance floors, making millions of people sweat and smile.

That is such a beautiful achievement. Love you, James Mtume.

Pearl Jam’s album Ten —their first is one of those albums where the music just flows from track one to track eleven. 53 minutes of impeccable 90s rock with a bit of a thin sound, but great, memorable songs. Nothing to throw away.

This adds to my belief that the perfect album length is around 10 songs and under a hour long.

Just coming up on my sound system (I use a giant playlist on shuffle).

A great album. A great song and memories.

Like Herbie Hancock and Emmett Till, George Clinton turned 80 this year.

It’s extremely difficult to assess how special this man is to black men, would they know it or not.

It’s hard to think about a freer brother than George. From cutting hair in New Jersey, to  driving back and forth to Detroit to record little things at Motown, to filling stadiums bigger than anyone on this planet at the time, to re-inventing himself in the 80s in a way that is still mind-blowing, to all the deals and backstabbing in show business that he had to deal with, it’s a miracle that he’s still here. Also of course, drugs.

It’s always jumping in my head that Prince and Maurice White were vegan and ultra clean in terms of lifestyle, and that it didn’t stop them from dying early. George has barely retired from touring (!!!), was still on stage before the pandemic, after all the crack he smoked for 30 years.

We will need to study his body thoroughly, we might find the key to limitless energy or some shit.

But obviously it’s on the music level that I kind of can’t with George and the dozens of musicians who were on the ship with him. Parliament Funkadelic albums are so insane, so good, so different, to this day. The mix of influences is still unmatched. P-Funk is where most western music since the 70s took its influence from. Definitely one of the fountain of inspiration.

Take claps for instance. P-Funk had the biggest claps on record. A young Roger Troutman, leader of a new band called Zapp, was extremely impressed by those thunderous claps. He practically vowed to himself to create even bigger ones.

Zapp claps are the biggest in music history. So big, that every single hip hop producer who needed some claps would automatically use a version of those, sampling them.

George managed a bunch of black hippies to record claps in the early 70s, and then for almost 5 decades the entire world bounced and nodded on his legacy. It’s amazing.

I’m still pretty bad at listening to lyrics but George is a beast at those too. I’m starting to get the references and play on words more and more, and it’s hilarious and often clever. Bow wow wow. Automatically iconic.

Speaking of iconic, the clothes! From Kiss to Lil Nas X, George and his friends influenced everyone and tore it UP:

This man, while lucky, could have given up a million times. He never did, just doing his thang until the end of whatever.

George Clinton, y’all.

I really like this woman. Her voice, production choices, her writing skills, her musicianship, dope.

I love her Slide song, listening to it since last fall. She’s all  bluesy, poetic and stuff:

We should take a trip up to the moon
Get a room

Then YG comes up with:

I need a baecation
I need my bitch in an apron
Booty all out cookin’ bacon

This shit is infuriating to me. The lack of effort! The “crashing the dreamy vibe”. I hate it. Like, go for the sexual connotation but sprinkle some subtlety, goddamn. Let me try:

I need a baecation
You & I in da space station
We sure ain’t watching no Knicks
I’m eatin’ you bitin’ yo lip

I don’t know, something different that fits H.E.R. I’m available to ghostwrite if you need help y’all.

Sure, R&B is associated with Hip-Hop, Hip-Hop is dudes’ market and dudes’ market means Sexism Starter Kit (for fun!). It is the music industry. This is also why Chris Brown is on her album. Sigh.