(director Andrew Sharper and producer Joel Rassmussen, still mulling over an adaption of “Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty”)
Not content with bashing poor old Dave O’Brien or trashing Ben Franklin, the Guardian’s Steve Wells turns his withering worldview to the documentary “Before The Music Dies”, a film that purports to show how “a once radical art form has been reduced to a marketing tool for tampons.”
It’s not that B4MD (as it cutely calls itself) doesn’t do a good job teaching your granny how to suck eggs – the sections on the deregulation-driven homogenization of US pop radio is particularly chilling. And its impossible to fault the film’s argument that capitalism destroys the very culture it seeks to exploit. It’s just that nearly all the “real” musicians it trots out as the credible alternative to the likes of Ashlee Simpson suck like a prolapsing white dwarf star.
The featured performances are – with a few exceptions -awful. Horny-handed sloggers like the Dave Matthews Band, North Mississippi AllStars and Dave Hidalgo trudge through nightmarishly long retro-rock jam sessions.
But the most irritating part of B4MD is when it sneers at the fans of manufactured music. “Has Ashlee Simpson ever inspired you to do anything?” the interviewer asks a brace of teenage girls. Has Dave Mathews? To do what? Buy a shed?
The film-makers then prove how easy it is to make a manufactured pop hit by getting a beautiful teenage girl to record a tune casually bashed out by a 45-year-old male songwriter. The result is mediocre. But with the exception of performances by a young Billy Preston and the wonderful Erykah Badu, it’s the only music in the movie that doesn’t make you want to stick pencils in your ears.
Before the Music Dies is Grumpy Old Men for musos. The film’s largely unexamined assumption that music is going to hell in a handbasket puts one in mind of an old Ray Lowry cartoon: Two aged sex-goths in Rancid Hell Spawn and Alien Sex Fiend T-shirts stare in disgust at young girls flocking to a Take That concert. “I remember when it were all Fields of the Nephilim around here,” says one.
Of course, the rock jokes were much better back then.
I believe we’re at a crossroads in music like experienced around 1969. Back then the teen clubs, the NYC songwriters, the mafia booking agents and nightclub singers were getting replaced by converted halls and ballrooms in pre-gentrified neighborhoods, drug-dealing hippy organized crime (or Kray Twin mod mafia), and college coffee shop co-ops. Right now the kids devalue music from something sought out and treasured (who among the nearly 40 yr olds here doesn’t remember reading an album’s liner notes over and over again) to something instantly available en-masse from online sources.
The internet and file sharing has made life very easy and increased the availability of everything that collectors have longed for, but removed the passion from it and removed the scarcity from it. As such it seems to have convinced a generation that musicians should not be paid for music. Jello Biafra called these kids (in the 1980s!) who abused musicians for their own selfish goals, “The Flintstone Kids” who only know two words, “Gimme” and “F You.” Musicians, these grabby kids appear to say, should be glad that I WANT to download their tracks for free as if a free flow of ideas would pay rent in the Lower East Side.
I had a coworker who listened to trance all day every day. I asked him what we were listening to once (it sampled some 1960s stripper music) and he said it was “Jamz FM” or something. What was the artist, I asked? He had no idea. (I later found out it was Bentley Rhythm Aces) Well, when you buy cds, what artists do you look for? He didn’t buy music, he only listened on his computer. How many cds do you own, I asked him? It turns out he burned them all to mp3s and sold them all to make rent one month. He had no music he owned himself yet listened to music every day. Trance is a style of music made to not be cared about- the artists don’t tour, DJs play nameless records in clubs where live musicians are held in low regard. It’s music made not to interrupt one’s attention.
No music fan could be fooled to think that Britney or the other new Britneys are any different from 1960-1963 Philly crooners, novelty singers or interchangeable girl groups. Fabian Forte could not sing. The producers of this film are wildly off-base.
Earthiness is not the only interesting style of music and the above documentary has made a fool of the producer and director by suggesting that. I always suggest listening to music as if you’re 16, just got your drivers license and are in front of your school waiting at a light while a buddy guns his engine next to you- do you want that song on the stereo when the light turns green? That’s how I judge music. But the truth is that kids today do not lookup to rock and roll heroes with the same enthusiasm as they did from let’s say the Frankie Sinatra craze, through Elvis, the Beatles, 1970s guitar gods through Nirvana. They like music, they’re into music, but the dynamics have radically changed and the money has changed.
By focusing on the styles and music industry, the producers ignored the power that the Consumer Electronics Association and internet billionaires have had in shifting money away from entertainment businesses and into the hands of tech companies. MySpace is a great place to find out about someone’s lame college band, whoop de doo, let’s hope new websites like Critical Matters can help people wade through the juvenile dross.
Don