NDIM 09/22/2021

RS 500 Greatest Songs!?!, Don Everly, 'Get Back' News, KLF

Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time—Not so much

So last week Rolling Stone released its 500 Best Songs of All Time list, revising it for the first time since 2004. Despite the fact that most people with an interest in music no longer look to Rolling Stone as any kind of arbiter of taste, there is still an explosion of bitching that takes place whenever such a list is released. 100 Greatest Guitarists, Best Bands, Greatest Albums....the publication of every such list brings out the music critic in everyone...it's all so exhausting.

It should be noted that the same is true of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Everyone says that it is a totally fucked up and meaningless institution, but they still lobby ceaselessly for their hero to be inducted. Because deep down we are all fans and we are all competitive in terms of our favorite music. 

There are myriad problems with the list, but perhaps the biggest problem is this concept of ranking. Why do we do this? One reason is that is helps us process a large amount of information quickly. In addition, even though most rankings are fairly subjective, they seem to feed a need in our psyche. In any event, there is a lesson for marketers, and that is that it's better to be the last in a group that ends in a zero (Top 10, Top 20) than to be the first in the next group. Even though the distance between number 10 and number 11 is the same as that between number 9 and number 10, it is perceived to be a greater division. 

But music is meant to be a leisurely activity, so why do we need to learn about top albums of the '80s, for example, using a list to help us categorize and memorize them?  It's a helpful tool for music writers, historians, industry analysts, radio people, and trivia buffs, but for the average person, is it that helpful? We've all seen the layered lists for various artists: Top songs, B-sides, deep tracks. I'd rather hear other people talk about their favorite tracks and albums from performers because that's how I get redirected towards things I may have overlooked or find out about artists I may not be that familiar with. 

The amount of recorded music released on various storage media in the world is a finite number, but it is vast. Add to that live versions, remixes, and edits made for various compilations and you can hardly imagine that there is a lack of music to listen to, document, and discuss. Yet we center ourselves on the same 100 or 500 albums, songs, and artists. These really don't need to be ranked as their pervasive nature in our culture is well established. 

But culture changes, and what was once considered indespensibly classic may some day no longer be so. One Twitter account posted a number of tweets comparing specific classic rock artists and the songs they had listed on the 2003 list vs. what is on the current list. Artists who held a half dozen or more spots on the earlier list now were cut to one or two songs. One reason for this is obvious--the longer span of time that is covered by the list, the more new items there are to be considered for inclusion. This happens all the time--we still consider Shakespeare to be of cultural significance, but Alexander Pope's stock has fallen considerably.

In fact, the notion of a stock market-like index of cultural significance is precisely what can be gleaned from lists like this. Doors stock? Down. Kinks? Up and rising. Beatles? Still blue chip. And with the song catalog purchases made in the past year by companies like Hipgnosis and Primary Wave Music,  influencing cultural perceptions of an artist's catalog is already becoming the work of marketing departments and public relations firms. Keeping songs popular and in the public's minds helps keep the underlying assets of these investment brokers valuable, ensuring we'll hear them in commercials, movies, television programming, games, and more uses that haven't even emerged yet. 

Another thing worth noting about the Rolling Stone Greatest Songs list is that its really more about performances than it is the song itself. What should be listed here is the song and the songwriter(s), because if we are celebrating the song, it should not be singer-specific. Doing this quickly demonstrates two things. First, a lot of songs listed on the Top 500 are songs that are unlikely to be reproducible by another artist. Take 'Bohemian Rhapsody' for example. Is it a song that others have covered or will cover? A great deal of what we celebrate about the record relates to the performance and the creation of the track--Freddie Mercury's voice and the labor intensive multi-tracking that that the band constructed. It's an undenieably great recording acheivment, but is it a great song? Maybe, maybe not.

The second thing you will discover if you look at the songs and their writers is that the days of the lone singer-songwriter are gone, at least as far as the charts are concerned. Top of the charts records that are written by a single individual are shockingly rare these days--Ed Sheeran's "Perfect" and Pharrell's "Happy" are some of the most recent (going back to 2018 and 2014). This is not like having a collaborator, such as Bacharach/David or Elton John/Bernie Taupin. The average number of collaborators on songs from the U.S. market's streaming Top Ten hits for 2018 was 9.1. That's not collaboration, that's songwriting by committee, and the resulting songs are less interesting and less likely to be listened to in twenty or thirty years. 

Of course, Rolling Stone gets what it most wants from these lists: it wants us to discuss and argue about it, to write op-ed pieces like this one about it, and generally react to it, and we happily oblige. Just keep in mind that the list tells us much more about where we are headed and whose stock is rising than it does about which songs are keepers.

Remembering Don Everly and his solo records

Don and Phil Everly were two kids from Kentucky , who played Gibson hollow body guitars and sang together in close harmony that became influential in the rock and roll era. They themselves were influenced by a line of sibling duet groups like The Collins Kids and, most famously, the Louvin Brothers. The Everlys were able to have the pop music career that the Louvins had enjoyed until they were guilted into returning to the gospel music of their youth.

As the seventies beckoned, the duo was increasingly tired of the constant touring–they were still popular in the UK and Europe–and releasing records that didn’t sell very well. They were also tired of each other. Brother acts in rock and roll have a long track record of relationships that go usep and down, often spilling over both on record and on stage. Ray and Dave Davies. The Gallagher Brothers. The Robinson Brothers.

Don already had one solo album under his belt. 1970’s self-titled album was a strangely stilted affair. Split between country western standards and original songs by Don, it featured a band that included Ry Cooder, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Jim Keltner, Chris Ethridge, and Spooner Oldham. It’s a album with its own charms recorded while The Everly Brothers were still a going concern. Read More

Get Back News

I'm definitely getting excited about seeing Peter Jackson's new take on the Let It Be recording sessions, Get Back. The documentary will be released on Disney+ only and runs in three parts from November 25--27. Jackson says it's not an 'MTV-style' documentary and that there is more talking in it than music. But rest assured, we'll be treated to an official album soundtrack release, and tracks from that are being teased already. 

Let It Be (the album) will be released on October 15, 2021 and will include the complete original album plus unreleased session recordings, rehearsals, and studio jams. Oh, and you'll also get the unreleased Glyn Johns mix of Let It Be. This should put the album on par with the other late stage Beatles albums that have been reissued with significant additional unreleased tracks, including The White Album and Abbey Road. For me these releases have sometimes altered my perspective on the albums, songs, and history of the band and have deepened my appreciation of the original albums. 

So, I'm definitely looking forward to another round of Beatles nostalgia. 

There's No Real Name for this segment of the newsletter

I've been thinking about The KLF lately, in part because I'm reading JMR Higgs' book KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, and that took me back to some of the recordings. I have to admit to liking the energy of stadium house, a sound that they pioneered along with ambient house. In addition, the spectacle and deliberate courting of controversy put me in mind of nothing so much as Kanye's recent Donda 'listening parties' that were more like fundraising events for an unfinished product. Anyway, I leave you with JAMS (another aka for the KLF) single 'The Queen and I' which so outraged ABBA that it was quickly withdrawn. The band traveled to Sweden in hopes of meeting the pop supergroup, but to no avail. They burned many of the remaining copies and dumped others in the ocean (anarchists are not so environmentally concerned, it would seem), making it a rarity.

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