Head of A&M's A&R: "Don't give us any more [rock] bands"

I just found an interesting article ... as a reaction to the "Don't Give Us More Rock Bands" by James Oldham (article The Telegraph Newspaper UK). Here's a copy paste:


Neil McCormick
Neil McCormick is the Telegraph's lead music critic. He is a best-selling author and a television and radio pundit. His memoir of a misspent youth as a failed rock star has been filmed as 'Killing Bono' (out next year). You can follow him on twitter @neil_mccormick.

February 13th, 2009

Rock and roll is dead, as I reported earlier this week. At least according to Rick Carnes, head of the Songwriters Guild of America, who said “The genre was played out by the mid-1970s but it has survived in a zombie-like fashion for 30 years past its expiration date.”




White Lies go to number one with a rock and roll album

He is just giving voice to a particular consensus amongst elements of the music industry that it is time for a change. This, after all, is a year where critics and other pundits loudly trumpeted the future would be female and playing a synth. A leading A&R man (James Oldham at A&M) was quoted as saying: “Don’t give us any more bands, because we’re not going to sign them, and they’re not going to sell records.” Another A&R man recently explained that this was coming from pressure from pop radio stations (notably Radio One), who have been privately telling record companies they are not going to play guitar bands.

So what was the first big number one album of the year? ‘To Lose My Life’ by White Lies, a young male three piece guitar band singing epic rock songs about death and despair.

I guess I have to place myself in the Rock and Roll Will Never Die brigade. I know the basic musical format is old and simplistic, yet it is precisely because it is such an easy to grasp form that it still draws in young creative people seeking out a vehicle for self-expression. And the electric guitar remains unsurpassed as an instrument of simple, brutal, primitive yet exquisite expression. I don’t see kids in their hordes rushing out to buy ‘Synth Hero’ games for the Wii and standing in the mirror pretending to play a keyboard. But to survive as a genre, rock has to move with the times and not just stay locked into a pastiche of what worked before.

Well, I have been listening to a trio of albums by heavy hitters who fill me full of hope for the future of rock.

First up is the new U2 album, ‘No Line On The Horizon’ (you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?). To me they have always been the definition of a future rock group. I think, because listeners have become familiar with the constituent elements of their sound, the voice and the way the musicians play their instruments, it is all too easy to dismiss them for sounding like themselves, rather than looking at the bigger picture and noting how unlike anyone else they sound. The Edge is a sci-fi guitarist, and together with producer Brian Eno he conjures up glittering soundscapes, vivid with colours and startling ideas. Their rhythms and bass lines are rarely predictable, and keep physical movement at the centre of the picture. There is a boldness to all their music as it subverts expectations and strikes out for new sonic ground. And they drape this around songs of meaning and substance, a combination of melody and lyric that inspires singalongs. Seeing a stadium of 70,000 or more joined together through the power of a song is something to behold, and, to date, no musical format does that better than rock, and no rock band does it better than U2.

But I have also been listening to Depeche Mode’s forthcoming album, ‘Sounds Of The Universe’ (which will be out on Mute in April). Depeche are absolutely not a guitar band but they have been almost singularly effective in taking many of the most primal and anthemic elements of the rock format and show and translating them to a world of electronica. I haven’t always been their biggest fan (at times the lyrics have been clunking, the voices robotically un-expressive, the imagery reeking in self mythologizing narcissism) but this album has got me pinned to my chair. Electronic bubbles of sound cascade around, spinning off on melodic tangents, while the beats drive straight through you, and the songs have a rich, bluesy, almost soulful flavour, with age and experience having slowly humanised Dave Gahan’s voice. It has the tone of an updated 21st century ‘Violator’, and is delivered with take-no-prisoners confidence.

And last, but by no means least, come the young(er) guns, Kasabian (whose new album will be coming soon from Columbia). There has been a strong clubland sci-fi element to Kasabian’s anthemic rock since they first made an impression with Club Foot back in 2004. Back then there was talk of them being an indie-electronica version of Oasis. Well, their new album takes that concept and sends it spinning into outer space. Songwriter and producer Sergio Pizzorno is a bit of a Pete Townshend figure in his conceptual thinking about what you can do with rock and sound, and here he has teemed up with LA hip hop maverick Dan The Automator. Between them they push the sonic envelope while rooting the listeners experience in pop hooks and melodic structure. Imagine The Kinks and The Who in orbit around the rings of Saturn with an alien at the mixing desk …

Rock is not dead. It is evolving.

And by the way, Bob Dylan has got a new album of original material ready to go. It’s not all about the future, you know…

 

That's our loss.

 

...and thus when Genesis, Yes, ELP came out, they were a breath of fresh air. Great!
Fast forward 5 years and it's 1977, and those bands have passed their peak (Pink Floyd will last for just a few more years before starting to fall apart) and punk rock kicks in, and it's a breath of fresh air.
1982, and punk rock is not doing well, while its offspring - be it Siouxsie or the Talking Heads, Nina Hagen or Oingo Boingo - is doing great stuff.
All of a sudden, it's 1984, and Nina Hagen is starting to slowly descend into insanity and Boingo are about to, as rabid fans put it, sell out with Dead Man's Party, but luckily west coast hip hop is about to be all over the place...

If you wanna have a great time, use these very words to describe hip-hop to your friend who is a devoted fan of Pendragon and IQ and watch him foaming.

As opposed to "last year's thing"?

 

It could be worse.


It could be rai... ehr, you could have publicly-funded propaganda.
Or public funds going to self-styled artists who happen to be... uhm, good acquaintances of politicians.
Am I, perhaps, ringing any bells?

Don't be too hard with your country and its values, for they eventually made a truly beautiful and great nation out of a wild land and the flesh and blood of a handful of adventurers, slaves and refugees from old Europe and Africa.

It's been quite an accomplishment, to make America the beautiful.
Most definitely, it was worth it.
Even if she has a few wrinkles and the occasional wart.