Thoughts
From The Beach
----------------
By Beppe Colli
July 14, 2008
Thinking about today's widespread use (still on the rise) of modern
"personal listening systems" can only lead to the conclusion that
by now the whole great debate about the introduction of new, technologically
advanced systems for recording/reproducing sound such as SA-CD and DVD-A
can be consigned to the dustbin of history (at least, when it comes to the
part concerning their mass appeal). It goes without saying that "Progress"
won't stop, and there will still be many heated discussions about
"lossless compression". But at this moment the framework is the
one that's typical of the life of somebody who's always "on the move",
busy with a thousand activities. Whereas the hi-fi system, hopelessly grounded
to a physical place, increasingly looks like a thing of the past. Sure, there
had been portable systems such as the Walkman (with its tape) and the Discman
(with its CD); but they were both systems that had to have an inseparable
physical companion/counterpart of a "solid" nature. While today,
the object we call "file" appears to make music "immaterial",
contributing more than a little bit in making it a "disposable" kind
of entity which often presents itself as a mere appendix of the mysterious
(and Free) vastness of the Net.
Doing a Web search about the release of
new titles remade/remodeled using those new high-end formats (such as the
SA-CD and the DVD-A), and their reviews, immediately tells us of the failure
of an industry paradigm: the one that tried to sell "the Catalog",
with new bells and whistles added, at a new, higher price, yet again; something
that had worked to perfection at the time of the transition from LP to
CD.
It still happens, once in a while, that
one can read something interesting about the "translation" of
a format into another, especially when it comes to famous groups that have
already moved a lot of copies. This being the case of a (relatively) recent
interview with sound engineer Nick Davis at the time of the release of
the whole Genesis catalogue on SA-CD. Titled His
Own Special Way, the interview was conducted by Christian Gerhardts.
Though these facts are already quite well-known,
learning that the original mixes, still used in the editions called Definitive
Edition Re-master, will disappear forever as a consequence of their
being replaced by the new SA-CD editions, doesn't make for nice reading;
so, those who were interested in listening to the original mixes better
not sell the original CDs!
But what about vinyl?
So spoke Nick Davis: "I don't think the first CDs are good. The remasters
are generally better. Some fans still favor the vinyl, that it's better
than the CDs, maybe they cared more when transferring to Vinyl than transferring
over to CD, I don't know. The first batch of Genesis CDs was just awful."
Having promised to
myself not to forget to remember about something that I personally find
quite troubling ("how come nobody talks about this 'disappearance
of the originals'?") I decided to think a bit more about this (supposed)
"return to vinyl".
That the current (faddish?) infatuation for vinyl
has a lot more to do with a "love for the object" than with matters
concerning "sound" or "warmth" I think we can take
for granted, given the fact that at least 99% of
all LPs released nowadays which were originally recorded in analog come
from a digital master. (Which digital master? Well, this is really an interesting
question.)
Of course, one cannot really be surprised
if vinyl becomes a source of income - though a "niche" one -
for somebody while we wait for the ship to sink completely. But I recently
recalled one time when I used to receive vinyl re-releases to review (as
part of a job): I found myself puzzled by the lack of proper credits on
many an album when it came to the names of composers (of both lyrics and
music), and the publishing. Of course, one can always conjecture about
a previous agreement which included the paying of a lump sum of money going
to those who had composed the tracks, but this fact (of which I had become
aware almost by chance) looked quite strange indeed. It goes without saying
that there is a long tradition of bootlegs and counterfeits. But how can
it be that I appear to be the only one (that I know of) who finds that
having hundreds of vinyl re-releases licensed from Russia, of all places,
on sale everywhere is a bit too strange?
Those who like to experience first-hand the damages that an empty rhetoric
can cause need look no further than the heated controversy about the price
of the CDs, the evil record companies, the de facto legality of unauthorized
free downloading, and the like. As I've already written in the past, record
companies are really indefensible. Unfortunately, this fact hides the fact
that without a model of compensation whose future existence we can take
for granted today it's not only the future of the "big names" that's
in doubt. In fact, the opposite is true. But we all know about this.
Likewise, we all know that Gene Simmons
from Kiss likes to court controversy, since he's perfectly aware that all
that's "controversial", not "banal", accounts for a
lot of free publicity. Having read quite a few interviews with Simmons
in the last twenty years - he's always ready to take something to its most
controversial extremes, while showing the link to most people's common
sense - when I read those he granted this year I thought I knew what to
expect. I have to admit I was surprised by how much I agreed with him when
it came to the topic of
"industrial relations". Readers are invited to search the Web for
the interview titled Gene Simmons: Into The Belly
Of The Beast, by Elmo Keep for fasterlouder.com, which appeared on 20 February,
2008.
Just a few quotes by
Keep appear below:
"We're deep into
an argument about the future of the music industry. I'm in the camp favouring
the digital revolution and everything it symbolizes: the death of the record
label, the power put back in the hands of artists." (...) "So
if Radiohead is doing this - doing away with their label. However much
money EMI would have put into recording and releasing and promoting their
new album, 10 million - however much money it is..." (...) "However
much money it is. That money is now free to be invested in new artists,
is what I'm saying. They can now invest that money in new talent." (...) "Perhaps
this revulsion with paying so much for CDs" (!!!) "stems from
the fact that record labels have been getting away with murder for so long."
But what if the real point in the end proves
to be not that something costs too much, but that the predominance of a
"cultural bulimia" makes not paying for something a highly desirable
condition?
"About
the only time I listen to a CD is when I'm inserting it into my computer
drive to rip it. Tell me all you want about sound quality, physical artifacts,
I'll tell you about convenience. About having thousands of tracks a click
away. About listening to more music than ever. And reading more news than
ever online."
It's a fact: Bob Lefsetz
can speak loud and clear (the sentence quoted above comes from a piece
of his, titled Lee Abrams/Tribune, which appeared semi-recently on his
blog). And it's thanks to the clarity of this sentence that the problem
of what's in store for newspapers brutally appears.
It was apparent to
all that, more circles forming in parallel to the growing availability
of affordable broadband, with the multiplication of (free) choices regarded
as
"empowerment" in the background, the issue "music" would
be followed by the issue "movies". But who could have predicted
a
"news bulimia"?
We all know about the
increasing costs (paper, transportation) for the Press, and that a lot
of ads (sales, personals) increasingly migrate online. Qualified observers
talk to us from an "insider perspective" (there
is a nice weekly column by Jon Fine, Media Centric, appearing on Business
Week; there was an interesting article about the future of the dailies,
The Daily Shrinking Planet, in the issue dated June 23, 2008). But news
have a cost, and having an increasing amount of news inside a framework
of decreasing revenues is not really possible. Here it's quite apparent
that everybody is playing it
"by ear", with dailies offering free TV pieces, read news, podcasts,
movie trailers, and blogs galore, which are obviously designed to cultivate
a faithful readership.
But what kind of readership? If the crux
of the matter is that we're talking about a different "platform",
there's no problem at all: we'll pay for a "virtual" newspaper
just like we pay for a "physical" one. If it's a free newspaper "paid
by our sponsors" that we're talking about, things are quite different.
Here the scenario of the Western TV, the financial restrictions suffered
by the Public Service, the attacks on it, are all well-known. And it should
be easy to think about the complexity, and the costs, of a well-done program
investigating
"While the price of oil just went up again".
Just to scare readers, it's possible to
trace a quick parallel between the fate of those magazines that deal with
music and those giving us news, with the former category having long abandoned
critical accuracy for "the avalanche" ("300+ reviews!")
that refuses to make any choices (I'm touching this topic with a very light
touch).
Now it's the time for a brief intermezzo of a "funny" kind (better be careful, though,
and keep those anti-ulcers at hand). If one has a certain familiarity with
music mags one will notice that:
a) after so many years of consensus, calling
What's Going On Marvin Gaye's "legendary masterpiece" gets boring;
it can be substituted by Let's Get It On or (bravest only) Here, My Dear;
b) there are so many groups today that
are considered to be "unfit for publication" (one good example
being Jethro Tull), but there are so many pages to fill every month; a
nice trick is to freshly evaluate "an underappreciated album",
saying mirabilia about This Was - the Mono edition!
c) sometimes it comes the time to say nice
things about an album that - despite the circumstance that the artist was
a somebody - nobody seemed to appreciate at the time of its original release;
a good example being the first solo album by Walter Becker released fourteen
years ago - which gets to be properly appreciated today, just at the time
of the release of his new solo album;
d) nobody has fewer things to say than
the person who calls a track or an album "impossibly rare".
By now we're all quite aware of the magnificent
potential for communication and dialogue of the Web.
Not everybody appears to be equally conscious of the potential for banality
for communication itself.
It goes without saying that in a world
bursting with facts the only chance to get noticed is to create a bigger
fact. Hence, those groups getting back together recreating their legendary
repertoire, trying to convince themselves - and others - that time has
not really passed.
But in the age of reality shows and of
the
"confessions in public", the real risk is that of having countless
"Road Diaries", "quick impressions from my trip", "the
facts behind the songs", "I write these words while eating a baguette
in Venice", "my first divorce", and the like - with the complicity
of the potentially fatal rope that's having one's page on MySpace. Meanwhile,
there are those who believe it necessary to donate to the public as many
demos, B-sides, unreleased tracks, soundchecks, and written words, as possible
(there are those in the audience who are ready to call an artist that doesn't
behave like this, stingy).
I'm not advocating the return to old patterns
of communication as practiced by such nobodies as Dylan, Beatles, Stones,
Zappa, Fogerty; patterns that I hold dear, but that maybe won't work today.
But can an art that gets totally exposed to the light ever become
"larger than life"?
© Beppe Colli 2008
CloudsandClocks.net
| July 14, 2008
