You know the world has been turned upside down when a pop star is winning the “Best Artist of The Year” award for just singing and dressing in faddish skimpy clothes. The Teen Idol pop sensation has never written any of her songs. Is this the women that we want to put in the same room as Eric Clampton or the Beatles. We want to put her punk arm warmers next to BB King’s guitar in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame? I am waiting for the world to implode from the inside now.
But before you start tearing apart my first paragraph I have something interesting to share. At first I was skeptical after a discussion with a friend. We were joking about Clarkson’s new triumphant win when he questioned my comment about her not writing any of her songs. I myself was not 100% sure so I checked it out for myself. I did a google search on the subject. Oh the vast useless information I can find. I came across an interview with her I found on a pop culture website. In the interview she was asked about the completion of her second album Breakaway and when asked about how it was produced the article said this about her reply:
…she’s been careful about what she produces. For her second album, she says, she wanted more control. “To be totally honest, the problem was I wanted to write a lot of my own songs on Breakaway. Nobody else wanted me to. So there was a big ol’ fight,” she said. She ended up splitting the difference with producer Clive Davis, writing six of the songs on the record. He says, “I always encourage people to write their own songs, but in the pop arena, where the career is totally dependent on hits, you get skeptical.”
Clive Davis might be skeptical for a good reason. Maybe she cant write and she is just marketable. This does not mean she should get a Grammy for it. But in my line of business you learn that marketers are only interested in the bottom line and are blinded from everything else. At the moment they are making tons of money off of what people think is talent. The Grammys have become the Golden Globe of the music industry. I can see that pop music is obviously not about popular music anymore. Its more about making music popular.
But pop music was not always like this. Probably the biggest pop stars of all time where the Beatles. During their music career and even after they have gone their separate ways they have never stopped producing hits and are still talked about the same way they where three decades ago. Does Kelly Clarkson fall into the same area?
The most interesting thing I found was the more research I did, the more bands I found that I should be pointing the finger at. Bands like Eric Clampton, Bruce Springsteen, Led Zepplin, and even Neil Young where guilty of having some of their more popular songs written for them. Even Elvis’s most popular where written by another guy.
But the thing that interests me the most is the history of The Monkees. theirs is a very interesting story for the pop genre. Being first assembled more for a TV series instead of an album, everything was done for them. They were not allowed to play any of their own instruments or write their own songs but when the public caught ahold of this information they were less than pleased to know such information, causing the band to start doing everything themselves. They did a pretty good job for a few albums but they were behind the times and were less innovative than the music of their time causing their music to go from pop to unpop.
The interesting thing I find in the story about The Monkees music career is not the events that happened after they were booted out to be on their own but how the public reacted when they found out they were fake. The group had to prove they were as talented as what all that extensive marketing portrayed them as because the public knew that they were being cheated out of their money and were ready to lynch The Monkees. Just like how the public destroyed Milli Vanilli after they were accused of lip-syncing. Milli Vanilli actually had their Grammy taken away. Brittany Spears and Ashley Simpson do it in their live performances and yet the public still buys their records. I think the public needs to challenge these new pop sensations the same way they challenged The Monkees. Would Brittany Spears be able to stand on her two feet after being forced to be on her own? It’s more apparent today that the public is being taken advantage of even more than it ever has but they are still shoveling out the money.
But all this research is not helping me at all. I am finding that very few popular bands of all time are guilty of my accusations. Its starting destroy my optimism on the world because the people that I once looked up to seem to be just as fake as Kelly Clarkson. So where do I draw the line? From my experience as a graphic designer I have learned the the line where art separates the bottom-line is to far over on the bottom-line side. It is obvious that the same problems do exist in the music industry. Led Zeppelin and singer Eric Clampton still wrote most of their songs, its probably safe enough to say they have written more than 80 percent of their songs. But Kelly Clarkson has only written 6 of the twenty four songs that she has performed. Thats only twenty-five percent. The bands that I have mention earlier have been considered the pioneers of what we listen to today and they have proven themselves more than enough to be able to hold there own. There might be more to the reason why some of there songs where written for them. Maybe it was in the contracts or a safegaurd for the music label but it was only one or two songs an album and they still proved that they were talented enough to write their own music and perform it. However the mechanics of the music business have evolved so much since then and its clearly getting a little out of control. So I draw my line at how many songs the artist has really written and performed because a true artist can write, perform, and sing. Not just perform.
We should also consider how long the bands popularity lasts as a deciding factor for drawing the line. The bands that I have mentioned before are still well known but when was the last time you’ve heard of Lindsey Lohan or Hilary Duff? Where did their albums go? Just some examples of some pop singers that did not make my cut.
It is still gratifying to know though that artist like Bob Dylan and Micheal Jackson existed building there success on all of their talents. Not to mention some the best bands today are unknown staying underground in the indie scene. Mainly staying out of the limelight for the same reason that I am writing about. Those are the people we should be looking up to and praising. At the rate the music industry is going though, how much longer before what we decided was good music is being decided for us?
For more on lipsyncing check out my post here
