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| From | Gregory Sager <hochsalzburg@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: audacious challenge, pt. 2 |
| Date | Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:54:28 -0700 (PDT) |
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Mike, I think that your premise is a bit off. Power pop, and the mid-Sixties British Invasion music that inspired it, has been off the popular music radar for the most part since ... well, since the mid-Sixties. You correctly cite that Badfinger had some hits (four in the U.S., to be exact) in the late Sixties and early Seventies, but Badfinger was not a "tastemaker act" in the same sense that their contemporaries Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Yes, Carole King, and Philly soul acts such as the O'Jays and the Spinners (to use five examples off of the top of my head) were. In other words, Badfinger wasn't a phenomenally successful band in the sense that it left the masses who listened to popular music clamoring for more bands of its type, and there were no Badfinger-inspired bands that went out and conquered the charts after "No Matter What", "Day After Day", and "Baby Blue". The same could be said for Badfinger's American counterpart, the
Raspberries. Both bands, in fact, were pigeonholed as "Beatles imitators" and were seen as unabashedly retro at a time when it was widely perceived that pop music was moving onward and upward in exciting *new* directions.
In retrospect I think that that early-Seventies zeitgeist led to a lot of unsatisfying dead ends, but that's a matter of personal taste. The important point is that the Raspberries and Badfinger, for all of their hits, were considered to be both derivative and atypical, and they left no mass impact in their wake. In fact, one can argue that the most important and influential power-pop band of that era was Big Star, whom nobody heard at the time because Stax/Volt's impending collapse and weak distribution network kept the band off the radio and out of the record stores.
What impact power pop *did* manage to have upon popular taste was well after the period (and band) you cited. To be specific, it crested in terms of popularity in the late Seventies as a part of the New Wave movement, particularly when the Knack's "My Sharona" became a massive hit and bands that reflected essential elements of power pop such as the Cars and Cheap Trick became million-sellers. But, again, that was a momentary spasm in popular taste (and it was dwarfed by disco in terms of units moved and airtime accrued), and the public soon moved on.
In essence, I'm not sure that your thesis that Badfinger represented something substantial in terms of impact among the masses is a credible one. Lots of people loved their songs, but lots of people also considered them to be a Beatles knockoff and several years out of style at the time, and they left no lasting mark upon the industry in terms of big sales, memorable tours, or influence upon big-selling heirs.
But, to be fair to you (especially since you've engineered such a thought-provoking Audities enterprise, for which you have my thanks!), I'll answer your questions, anyway:
> - is it that radio has marginalized this music?
Yes and no. While radio's influence in the purchasing decisions of the public has persisted since long before the dawn of rock'n'roll, I'd argue that radio long ago became less of a tastemaker and more of a taste-reflector. That's especially true in light of the consolidation of the radio industry into homogenous megacorporations operating off of strictly-confined playlists. But I think that the most important point here is that power pop and its antecedents have been a minority taste -- a *decidedly* minority taste -- for decades. Power pop is self-marginalized by its classicism, its genre-faithful rigidity, its reliance upon a strict guitar/bass/drums presentation, and its devotion to two elements of modern music, melody and harmony, that simply aren't in vogue as much as they used to be.
> - is it that music styles have fractionalized to the point
> where our tiny subdivision has gotten lost?
There is some of that, too. Popular music has long since fractured into several genres and formats that have relatively little crossover in terms of hits (unlike the pre-Beatles era, f'rinstance), and the advent of downloaded music and the corresponding decline of the radio have atomized it even further.
But even within the format that seems to be the most friendly towards power pop (and the one that shows power pop's influence the most), so-called alternative rock, power pop is definitely a minority taste favored by specialists.
> - has the average music lover lost appreciation for
> melody/harmony such as found in our favorite songs?
Aye, there's the rub. The combination of hip-hop and urban/R&B (following in the same general vein as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, etc., back in the Eighties), plus the self-contained nature of electronica and DJ/producer emphases, have made rhythm the dominant element in popular music by far. Not that the artists I named didn't value melody and harmony -- they definitely did -- but the trend has been away from those musical values and more towards rhythm. That trend started with James Brown's move to minimalism that revolutionized R&B in the Sixties, accelerated with the beat-heavy disco craze in the late Seventies, and really took hold once hip-hop became so huge. Popular music is all about the bottom now; it's about moving asses on the dance floor and rappers having enough sonic room in the mix for their flow.
> - is it something personal for us, that we seek out the
> obscure lost nuggets?
I can't speak for anyone but me in this regard, but, yeah, it's personal. The vast majority of my friends don't share my obscure musical tastes; the vast majority of them couldn't even identify long-term minor hitmakers such as Matthew Sweet or the dB's, and while they remember "Closing Time" and "Stacy's Mom", only the trivia specialists among them could name Semisonic and Fountains of Wayne as the two bands behind those hits. For all they know, Cliff Hillis, Mike Viola, Eugene Edwards, Jason Falkner, and Bob Kelly are the five guys in accounting who were let go in the last round of company layoffs.
And that's fine with me. I don't need to have my tastes validated by the masses. I'm not opposed to seeing an artist or a band I like become big -- I was tickled to death when the Goo Goo Dolls became big stars, even though I thought that their music went downhill once they started using schmaltzy ballads as their meal ticket, a la Bob Seger -- but it won't make any difference to me one way or the other. I *know* that my music is "not lame" ... whether my next-door neighbor and the checkout girl at the local supermarket know it as well is not important to me.
Gregory Sager
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