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Idle Chatterby George Ziemann -- May 22, 2009 Over at CNN, "Little" Stevie Van Zandt is saying that rock is almost dead because kids these days aren't doing it right. He might be right, but there's a little more to it than that.
Other theories from other music-types are offered, which include laziness, "square peg in round hole" syndrome, not enough money spent on artist development and, probably something else I forgot. Go read it. I tried to step back and distance myself, in order to find my true opinion of this. In part, Little Stevie is right. I really don't want to go there, but it's only part of it. There are some other factors at work that no one quoted in the article mentioned. First of all, part of the reason that kids don't appear to be doimg cover songs is that they can't put their video of it on YouTube, but if they use their own song, no problem. We now turn to Time magazine's interview with author Greg Kot, which begins with the following paragraph:
I saw an ad somewhere recently for a contest, wherein if you could sell 100 songs in New York or L.A., they would let you play at a club in one of those cities and guarantee you'll make $100. That if you win. I played clubs for years. I can't believe how little bar bands are paid now. In Tempe, the bars are shuffling through five bands in a night. No idea what the pay is, but you get one short set and that's it. Some Phoenix bands get 10 songs together, do a 30 or 40 minute set and that's all they have. They think they should be a touring band. They think they're done. Tucson likes country and heavy metal, not much in between. In Prescott, country or blues -- none other need apply; Flagstaff used to be blues and a few eclectic acts (like Joe Myers). Not a lot of mainstream rock going on anywhere, as far as I can tell, and fewer full-night gigs. This is not a surprise. The last 10 years has been a steady decline in the amount of fun you could have per capita. Having emerged from a bar parking lot is now enough to get you stopped. If you answer anything but "Zero," to the "On a scale of zero to 10, zero being completely sober and 10 being extremely drunk..." question, you've got a felony DUI. And now that the smoke is gone from the bars, the smells that it covered up are emerging. Say no more. The place we played last week probably had 100 people within the club's serving area. About half of them were outside on the patio, where they could smoke. Most of the other half was in the adjoining room, where they had karaoke going at about 3 times the volume we were allowed to play. We played to Orlee (which I'm sure is spelled wrong), a woman Manny works with; a guy that recognized Carl from being in bands in Tahoe in the 80s; Carl's cousin, whose name I forgot; and about a dozen or so people at the bar -- the non-smokers. We got to play about an hour and a half. A 200-mile drive was involved. That's not a complaint. It's just the way it is. Playing is so much fun for me that I ignore most of the peripheral stuff. If no one is there tonight or no one is listening, I don't care, as long as we get to step on stage (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and play. That same day, we had 651 downloads and 83 streams from our music page. I don't know how many people that translates into, or what it means, but someone is downloading our music -- we'll be passing the 400,000 mark any minute. That's what tells us to go ahead and write another song. All those people out there on the Internet that we can't see, don't know who they are, but they keep coming and taking more music. I don't think that I have any particular point to make here, other than to agree with Greg Kot that the Internet has changed music forever. And I hope Steven Van Zandt is right, too, because we've been learning cover songs for decades. And I know a little about music history. Up until now, that's never counted for much. |
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