Posted on 03/22/2014 2:13:41 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Tony Bennett doesnt have much patience for most modern music. The legendary singer, 87, told the BBC Radio 4s Today program that most modern songs lack a lasting quality.
The songs that are written today, most of them are terrible, he said. Its a very bad period, musically, throughout the world for popular music.
He added that todays music industry leaders are more concerned with making money than making quality music.
The corporations took it over and they want to make so much money and they dont care whether the public likes it or not, he said. They think the public is ignorant, so their attitude is, Dont give them anything intelligent, because it wont sell.
He also criticized what he sees as the music industrys bias toward younger listeners.
Today, record companies are failing because they are putting their accent just on the young, and I think thats rather silly, he said.
Bennett is a huge fan of one young pop icon, however; hes collaborating with Lady Gaga on a new jazz album, Cheek to Cheek.
Shes one of the best singers I ever heard, Bennett told Parade.com in 2012. She also plays great piano and dances very well. Shes an all-around great performer Ive met so many people in show business over the years and Im very impressed with her. Shes one of the great talents coming up. Shes going to always surprise everybody with her artistry.
Watch Bennett and Lady Gaga perform The Lady Is a Tramp:
Not in Jerry Vale’s league.
Gays are probably at most 2% of the population, but that could be a buying audience of 8 or so million, so they do add up.
He was just a vagabond lover, but he wooed her.
He lost me when he came out for gun confiscation after the Newtown massacre & called NRA members “nazis”.
Look up “Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga Reversed” on youtube. It’s a hoot.
I googled Amy Winehouse after seeing his duet with her. What a tragic early death.
Sorry, but that is so UNTRUE!! MOTOWN...almost ALL OF IT was FABULOUS!! EVEN disco was pretty good....and the 50’s were FAB!!
She puts out what people buy. Just like Rush Limbaugh. And she has competitors, like Miley Cyrus
Sorry but it is true. You’re picking genres and ignoring that there was other stuff (and frankly most of Motown was the same old indistinguishable girl band crap over and over).
Here’s the top 100 for 1967 http://www.musicoutfitters.com/topsongs/1967.htm generally considered a very good year in rock and a big Motown year, and the number 1 song of the year is Lulu with To Sir With Love... pap.
You call out disco, here’s 1979 http://www.musicoutfitters.com/topsongs/1979.htm big winners are My Sharona (OK not horrible, not great either), Bad Girls, Le Freak, do You Think I’m Sexy, and Reunited... crap.
1950s, http://www.bobborst.com/popculture/top-100-songs-of-the-year/?year=1957 well #1 in 1957 was a half way decent Elvis song, then Pat Boone gets his highly synthetic fingers on #2 AND #6, good year for Pat, bad year for music.
Sorry reality is reality. You REMEMBER the great stuff from that era (or it’s been remembered by enough people for you to find it if you’re not old enough to have actually been there), but there was plenty of not great you (and/ or others) have conveniently forgotten.
Yeah, I have to say the quality of her voice astonished me. I’ve only heard her normal pablum which doesn’t in any way expose how talented her voice actually is. It’s actually a shame that she is wasted on the normal crap she put out.
So what songs from the past 20 years are going to be remembered 50 years from now?
From what I read, these albums will involve Lady GaGa doing classic jazz standards. Tony Bennet’s comments were about the quality of the music and not necessarily the talent of the performers.
Just asking....how old are you??
you can’t spell ‘crap’ without ‘rap’
Considering her net worth is now well over $190 million, I don't think she's worried about what the Puritans think.............
As a side note, is the great Mr. Bennett, three times married, ex cocaine and drug addict, the epitomy of YOUR hero worship? And is it necessary for me to bring up the great Frank Sinatra, notorious wife beater and his mafioso buddies?......LOL!
I couldn’t care less about either one.
You make some good points.
I still love ‘80s music, though....good and not-so-good. ;)
“Get off my lawn you lousy brats!!!!”
Who knows. I can give you plenty of songs that SHOULD be remembered, like most of Nick Cave’s catalog even his bad albums are pretty freaking amazing. David Bowie’s 3 most recent album are some of the best of his career, Johnny Cash’s final 6 are some of the best albums of anybody’s career. Last year was amazing all around (Cave, Bowie, Suicidal Tendencies, Megadeth, NIN, Planet P Project, Black Sabbath, Martin Barre, Monster Magnet, I’m sure I’m forgetting some) I’m still finding great stuff that got released and I missed it (just found out about Martin’s album last week).
The industry (like all of entertainment) has gotten so fractured now it’s hard to imagine any of it being remembered though because even the “hits” have sales that are tiny in the overall picture and it’s so easy to avoid hearing stuff you don’t want to. Off the top of my head I don’t think I could even recognize a Lady Gaga song, I have no idea what her voice sounds like and don’t know if I’ve ever heard her at all, presumably I have but I don’t know which songs. And probably most folks on this thread don’t know who half the bands I named off are. We now get to live in our own bubble, we don’t all watch one of the same 3 TV networks and don’t all listen to one of the same 5 types of radio stations anymore. That small distribution system kept us all on the same page, even if you didn’t listen to country you heard country because your town had a country station and place you went played it, so if something really big happened in country you became aware. Now that store that played country has picked one of the dozens of country stations on XM and you don’t even know if the stuff they’re piping in is from this decade.
It’ll be interesting to see when they start making period movies about this era. That’s really when you start seeing an era’s lasting mark. I don’t know what music directors are going to do, while the era has great music I don’t think it has defining music.
Mr. Bennet is way, way overrated.
44 but musically I’m a lot older because I got into 60s and 70s classic rock as a pre-teen so when I was “supposed” to be listening to 80s music as a teen I was memorizing Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and knew what a Wall of Sound is. I often joke that I was the only 11 year old in the country that knew who Aretha Franklin was when “Hey 19” (Steely Dan’s song about being culturally separated from the young hot girls they wanted to hit on).
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