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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Re: An audacious challenge - part 2 - the hard part |
| Date | Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:37:54 -0400 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: <mmyers1446@yahoo.com>
>They had a HUGE radio hit on their own with No Matter What... their
>own version of Without You is astounding (I love the variation
>between sweet and gruff harmonies), and of course Nilsson had an even
>bigger hit with that song.... there are great rockers and wonderful
>ballads... but this only points to where I'm going with my quest for
>more information.
>Badfinger hit big on AM and FM radio... they had hits... when their
>albums came out, those were somewhat newsworthy events... most people
>on the street would at least recognize one or more of their songs...
>so what changed?
Well, number one, I think you're kinda overstating how big Badfinger
was in the popular imagination. The only Badfinger song that "most
people on the street" would recognize is "Without You," and 80% would
say "Oh, the Mariah Carey song?" and 20% would say "Oh, the Nilsson
song?"
According to my handy Whitburn, Badfinger had four hit singles. So as
a commercial hitmaking force, they were roughly as big as, say,
Bananarama. Don't get me wrong, I love Badfinger (for that matter, I
love Bananarama), but particularly after 1972, they were not a
particularly huge band. Note, by way of example, that the first band I
was going to mention in this paragraph was Roxette, who I remember as
having three or four really big hits: turns out they had nine Top 40
singles, five of which hit either #1 or #2. But nobody these days
thinks of Roxette as a major act either commercially or artistically.
In fact, as much as I liked several Roxette singles, particularly
"Dressed For Success," I'm looking at these song titles here and I
swear I don't remember the songs "Joyride" or "Fading Like A Flower"
at all, and they were two of their biggest hits! Hit singles are
ephemeral things.
>- is it that radio has marginalized this music?
>- is it that music styles have fractionalized to the point where our
>tiny subdivision has gotten lost?
>- has the average music lover lost appreciation for melody/harmony
>such as found in our favorite songs?
>- is it something personal for us, that we seek out the obscure lost
>nuggets?
What it really boils down to is that there are exponentially more new
releases in 2009 than there were in 1971, the year NO DICE came out.
A huge subset of Audities readers ourselves have released albums, and
the means of production are such that any teenager with a Macbook and
a Myspace page can potentially have a worldwide audience. (See: Bo
Burnham, Julia Nunes, etc.) There is no such thing anymore as an
across-the-board hit single that *everyone* knows, which is kind of a
shame, but the tradeoff is that there's as much interesting music
coming out now as there's ever been if you have the patience to sort
the wheat from the chaff.
As for the idea that "the average music lover lost appreciation for
melody/harmony such as found in our favorite songs"...well, the Jonas
Brothers are a power pop band. And anyone who's horrified by that
statement should replace "Jonas" with "Hudson" and reflect that the
more things change...
S
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