Does this make sense?
There is a specific connection an audience has to a live performer that cannnot be fabricated. Thus, it is in the best interests of the current leadership of the music industry to ELIMINATE live music from local settings, reducing participation for a live audience to shows by the producer's own vested ensembles in overpriced festival settings.
I don't know about your town, but all we have now are DJ's.
posted by TheAdequateDer @ 10:35 PM
6 Comments:
I had the pleasure of seeing Keith Emerson perform at NEARfest in June, and before he and the band played "Lucky Man" he talked a little about the organ solo at the end. It turns out the version on the recording was his test take from more or less just fooling around in the booth, and everyone else liked it so much they insisted on keeping it ("I've had to live with that fucking thing for thirty years"). But of course, when they stated playing it live, audiences wanted to hear the version on the album, so he had to learn it from the transcription someone had done for Keyboarder magazine...
As a musician, this underscores a couple of truths for me: one, that a great deal of composition involves improvising and then figuring out what you just did; and two, that the fetishization of musicians that Robert Fripp talks about does indeed have some odd consequences for live performances.
Which is a tangent from your post, of course, except in the sense that the music industry is not at all interested in the dynamic that happens between performer and audience; the music industry is interested in packaging the album experience with the fetishization of the performer to sell tickets to big stadium events.
OTOH, this often means that live local music has the potential to thrive in genres that the music industry doesn't care as much about. My quirky, experimental prog-folk ensemble isn't much of a competition for the kind of thing that gets booked at the Big Venues. (Of course, it helps that none of us care much about making money doing it, either.)
I would expand on my idea this way: any change in the aesthetic status quo would have to come from either an internet movement or a grassroots local following. The commonality is both situations allow for the participants to exchange information, feelings and word of mouth without any A&R filter. The more local opportunity there is, the more that pesky chaos comes knocking on your vestiture.
Prog-folk, huh? What open-minded Cibola allows such selections to be performed? We have a small contingent of such unusual manifestations here and it's called Conncept. They have long ago been relegated to the status of Mega D&D Gamer Geek around here. There is certainly no place in Hartford to anything that off the beaten path. Maybe a morning coffee house in Bozrah...
You have anything posted online? Music-wise, I mean...
and so it begins...the unholy alliance...
Thus, it is in the best interests of the current leadership of the music industry to ELIMINATE live music from local settings
do you think it's a conspiracy? do you think it's done on purpose or just sort of a happy accident for the powers-that-be?
I do have a page of my solo work up, which doesn't necessarily sound like what the band's doing; so far there are one or two solo demos of that material, with some more substantial stuff in the works.
We play these days at a local coffeehouse where I run an open mic. Someday we'd be happy to expand our prospects, but seeing as we all have Real Grownup Jobs and live in different states, we're happy at this point to have a venue at all.
any change in the aesthetic status quo would have to come from either an internet movement or a grassroots local following.
Yes, exactly; which is, of course, exactly why those options (singularly or in combination) are where it's at for non-mainstream acts these days. But the internet in particular has been a boon for artists who don't fit comfortably in the popular aesthetic. It's much more fun, I imagine, to be a non-pop musician these days than back when the only place to get weird music was in some record store in a back alley open unsightly hours.
As to whether it's a conspiracy: I kinda doubt it. Local music seems to be a casualty of Big Giant Capitalism, certainly, but I'm willing to think it's not deliberate. There's just not a lot of profit in running a small-time performance space, sadly; there are issues of time and effort that have to be a labor of love if you're going to do it, because the tangible return is small. Not to mention there are things like licensing fees that make it hard for small places to keep the gigs going.
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