Revision 10/19/2006 10:45 am
Jim Wrote "I wonder what the difference is there?"
I'm sure it was the drive to rock hard following in the successes of the Cream's, Zepplin's, Nuggent's, Aerosmith's, Cactus, & Hendrix. To rock hard in main 'rockstream' you had to have lyrics & obviously someone singing them.
So I've been on this interesting journey since I started doin' this blogg thing. The journey was inspired by brother Steve, aka Glopman, who randomly & out of the blue sent me the link to the YouTube-good luck there Google with all the legalisms-of Eddie Van Halen jammin' Panama with Paul Shaffer & Letterman band dudes. This began the journey of returning to roots of things of music for me. Looking back I, along with every other young teen guitar wannabe, listened to things of Halen or whatever the most popular guitar riffing maniacs was & mainly it was to listen to the guitar carnage spewing forth in incomprehensible ways. For me none of it had to do with the lyrics nor the image or look of the bands. So as I have been returning to the roots of things of Halendom I realize now how stupid the lyrics are to most of their songs and how 1 tracked minded the lyrical content is. I never really even read what the lyrics were until I started doing so in this day & age. The second thing I realized is that for a band, seeking to invade the world, it is almost better for the band to look good & have their image than it is to sound good. You had to have the image first, then you have to have lyrics that conform to the standard of being about sex, drugs, rock & roll, & just maybe about cars or motorcycles. I recently watched part 3 of MTV's review of Heavy Metal days of the 80's & 90's. As big hair & stupid outfits got more bigger & more stupid, bands came along to crack that misery such as Metallica & Guns & Roses.
so if you take away image & take away the conformity in regards to lyrics & a band's success & popularity were based entirely upon musical content alone, yeah dream on John, what kind of music/songs would they put out instead? Would Van Halen have needed a singer ever in this scenario? One example is that Eddie & Alex were nominated for a Grammy for the instrumental track they did for the movie Twister. Even Vai & Satriani had to move into the realm of putting lyrics to their music to attract more to buy their music. And that’s mainly that non-musician types need lyrics to relate to a song because they can't relate to just an instrument playing.
so a band has a choice to be just a bar/party band & play what they want how they want or they start to write way cool & awesome backing music but they stick crud in front of it in the form of the conforming lyrics & they start to create their image & attitude. And when they sign a deal they get stuck in that realm of just being a sell out money making pawn for the business of music. Eddie tried to break away from some of the control of the business of music by building 5150 studios. But they still had to put out the sell out type of genre of music that the very nature of the business of music dictated.
Does the business of music interfere with the art of music? Of course it does. It is better to look & sound the way the business wants you to than it is to look at & sound the way you want your art to. It must be impossible to stand one's ground in that realm.
Until later comes, I'll be listenin' to more of the Blue headed peoples.
2 comments:
There's a ton of jazz musicians that are extremely famous for songs that did not have lyircs in them. I wonder what the difference is there?
And the Ventures, boyz -- the Ventures. [google mosrite ventures to find out about their guitar]
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