*Justin Bieber breaks both The Beatles and Drake chart records

Who cares?

 

Ewww. I'm so mad and angry!!!! GRRRRR!!!! !!!!!!!!





!!!

 

Again with this. You do. Know how I know? You clicked into this thread, you read at least some of it, and you commented. Not as cool as you thought you were, huh?



Ed

 

Justin's investment advisor.

 

LOL!

 

Dead. ROFL!!

Ed

 

Exactly.
I am a guitarist, a songwriter, producer, engineer as well as playing other instruments.
When I write and/or engineer something I am creating something and being an artist.
When I do cover tunes I am merely reciting what someone else has created.

"Real" artist? As opposed to an artificial artist?

They are artist when the write the songs. Not when they perform them. Again, then they are entertainers. They are not being artists, they are entertaining others with what has been created, whether by them or someone else.

I just returned home, it is 3 a.m. from entertaining people. I got paid to perform, not to create. None of the material I was involved with tonight was my creation.
Tonight I was an entertainer, not an artist.

 

So Pavarotti was not an Artist?
Elvis was not an Artist?
Paco de Lucía was not an Artist?
De Niro is not an Artist because he does not write his own scripts?
"They are artist when they write (the songs)" makes no sense to me.

 

People use The Beatles and Elvis as a flawed metric by which to measure the success of a current-day artist. If someone can break one of their records, it is brandished as some sort of accomplishment that places the artist in an upper hierarchy of musical history.

If people had been been able to individually purchase or stream every Beatles song in the 60s, they would have likely held 30-40 of the top 100 songs chart. (In 1964, nearly every song from Meet the Beatles, Introducing the Beatles, and The Beatles Second Album would have likely charted.)

 

40 years ago a hit was made by the public. Labels would crank out a bunch of music, some stuck to the wall, some didn't.
What did got the attention of the label who would promote heavily anything they thought the public was gobbling up.
Now hits are obviously largely fabricated. Stars are being created by the industry by repeated and incessant media exposure.
I think it is far easier to make a hit record today in that the media knows ahead of time what is likely to make it and what not ( being as the best way to make a hit record now is to copy what someone else did last month) and marketing music has become an exact science, not a crap shoot.
It is easier for the labels because they have had decades of trial and error to create a method to market music successfully.
During rock and before, there was such a huge thirst for music that the labels knew that simply getting that first airplay was a make or break situation for an artist.
The job of artists now is to let the industry know they are pliable enough to allow themselves to be made into stars, not because they are talented enough to garner attention from the music buying public.

The industry has found the same thing out that the rest of the marketing world has discovered, if you shove something in peoples faces long enough and relentlessly, they will eventually buy it based on familiarity.

 

Elvis did indeed create something. He put a band together and created a different sound, so in that respect he arguably is an artist.
But in general, they are all performers.
Acting is a craft, just like learning to site read music. I wouldn't think that actors and actresses are a fair comparison to music performers, simply because actors are often part of the creative process. Evidenced by how many actors become directors.

But again, in general artists create, performers entertain. There are no doubt grey areas.

Another example is , when I was a child often there would be a piano player in church who had taken music instruction and could sit at the piano and read what was in the hymnal and play it, as long as that sheet music was in front of them. But take the sheet music away and they are helpless to do anything.
Of course many singers and instrument players are not like that and can play or sing without the lyrics already available to them or the music. Scat singers are an example.
But the fact is, when they quit following the script and inflect their own into it, they are no longer merely performing the created, they are creating.

 

Ok. Let's just say I disagree and my definition of an artist is different from yours.

 

What's your position on the "Rock Era" and the epitome of a rock band?

 

Personally, I think that is an odd question to have, but I guess we all have different viewpoints. When I started paying attention to music in the late 60's and then into the 70's (as a teenager) I considered Elvis to be for the old folks. I wouldn't have been caught dead with an Elvis album or single...and wasn't aware of anyone in my age group, or just above, that was an Elvis fan. It never occurred to me that Elvis would be a cultural icon 40 or 50 years later, but if it had it wouldn't have mattered one whit.

Similarly, the "will this be listened to 40 years from now", question wasn't important to me in regards to The Beatles (despite being a fan). I doubt I ever thought about such a possibility.

 

I think that the people listening to Bieber in the future will largely be the people he picked up as fans in the past, just like Elvis. The career trajectories of modern pop stars are calculated to evolve in a way which retains as many early fans as possible while bringing on new ones. They start out as "tween idols" and then their content is evolved by their teams into a more "mature" format geared towards an older and more "sophisticated" demographic. Brittany Speers is a good examples of this.

You might be able to make an argument that the Beatles continue to pick up new fans after the fact but I think that would be a much tougher argument to make for Elvis. I would think his role is more of a touchstone to be explored by people interested in the history of rock music as opposed to a current and vital force.

D.D.

 

So you're arguing that a sound engineer is an " artist" while a singer interpreting the music of a songwriter other than themselves, say Janis Joplin covering Summertime is just an entertainer ? Using the "picture-hanger" analogy which you seem to favour or even the "picture-framer" analogy used by someone to reinterpret your analogy, that's a pretty specious argument. The singer is taking the song and interpreting what the original songwriter wanted to get across and then presents it to the audience. You say there is no artistic merit in this. Meanwhile, an audio engineer ( assuming that is what you are referring to as "engineering" as opposed to what an audio technician does ) does exactly the same thing for all intents and purposes and this is art by your definition ?

No sale, Rocky.

D.D.

 

What a charming and romanticized view of the history of pop music. It's as if the Brill Building, Denmark Street, Motown, payola and all the rest never existed. A time where art was unsulllied by commerce and pop was pure and true and good and the populace "thirsted" for real music made by artists who shouted "NO ! " to the manipulations of the industry.

The mind boggles...

Scotty Moore tells it a bit differently, but he's dead now so don't let that stop you - not like he was an artist or anything, anyhow. just a performer. It's like Stupid Human Tricks, I guess. A trained monkey kinda deal. But with people...


D.D.

 

I don't really understand what you're going on about here. After all, when someone performs a song, they're putting something into the mix that wasn't there before. A good performer is going to interpret the material and do something more than just mechanically recite it. Each performance itself is a creation of a new rendition of that song, since there wasn't that performance five minutes earlier. Sure, it might be very similar, but who said that art has to be completely unique.

I think you're undercutting what a great singer can bring to a song. Take Aretha Franklin's take on "Respect." Even before you get to the "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" hook, she brings something else to the song. She takes a song that originally was a man telling his lover that she better not mess around when he's at home into an anthem for women demanding to be taken seriously. Or what about "Hurt?" Johnny Cash completely changes the song, to the point that Trent Reznor acknowledges that it isn't his song anymore. "Hurt" goes from being a junkie's lament to be an old man looking back on life with regret. If you're saying "Hurt" was just a performance, then I don't know what to say.

I think you're romanticizing the past, because a lot of what's happening today has always been happening, to some degree. After all, payola's always been a part of the industry. There were great acts who received no promotion from their record label, like Fanny, who failed to score a hit, and there was plenty of dross that was rising to the top of the charts. Or are we to believe that Donny Osmond's popularity had nothing to do with the promotional push he received. Stars have always been "created," because it's always been about marketing and content. Part of the Beatles success can be attributed to how they were managed and marketed. Gary Puckett and the Union Gap got airplay because some DJ was a Civil War buff and thought the cover was worth a play. You're trying to pretend that it was only about the music, and for most people, it's not true. Marketing has always played a huge role.

Remember, the 60s was the era of the Monkees. And don't get me wrong, they did great music, but they were part of a huge marketing push.

And it's never been true that the public hasn't been involved in making a hit. Carly Smithson (I believe) was a great example of this. Her record company spent a lot of money promoting her and her album only for it to sell about 300 copies in its first week. Nobody was interested, and nobody was buying. Lady Gaga wouldn't have been huge if "Just Dance" wasn't a great song.

 

I'm not sure why you think my question was an "odd" one. It's pretty simple in that will the chart topping music of Justin Bieber be relevant 30-40 years from now. In other words maybe JB broke the Beatles chart records but will his music still be played and bought 30-40 years from now as the Beatles music is right now.

My daughter was a huge JB fan a few years ago and now she can't stand him. So she wouldn't be buying his music now or anytime in the foreseeable future. Not many "tween idols" have actually evolved into "mature" artists that people are actually interested in IMO.

Bill

 

I did say we have different viewpoints. Other than on this forum, I have never met a single person who used this "will this music be played and bought 40 years from now" as some kind of criteria (for buying? for determining whether it is good?). When the millions and millions of people bought Frampton Comes Alive I doubt anyone cared. When the few thousand bought the first Big Star album, I doubt they cared at all about whether another generation (or two) would embrace it.
I have absolutely no idea whether Beiber's music will last 40 years from now. I don't think that is important.

 

But they have the chance to purchase any track by The Beatles right now (they could stream The Beatles, but not being on Spotify really puts a dent in their streams). So why aren't The Beatles, Rolling Stones, or any other 60s/70s act at the top of the charts? Perhaps because the younger generation perfer their own music.

 

Will future generations be listening to Do You Feel Like We Do ? Perhaps not, but there are those among us who feel that future generations will be listening to Come Sail Away...

D.D.

 

Bieber, like Madonna before him, understands how to manipulate the entertainment media, and even to a lesser extent, the hard news media, although those are now blurred dichotomies.

The current 24/7 media machine, especially the entertainment division, props up acts like Bieber, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus etc way past the shelf lives of the Shaun Cassidys and Tiffanys of previous generations. The media craves these teen idols and will keep them alive as long as they provide the continuous manufactured "outrageous" antics that give the media easy stories to pass off as "news".