Posted on 03/22/2014 2:13:41 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Tony Bennett doesn’t have much patience for most modern music. The legendary singer, 87, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today program that most modern songs lack a “lasting quality.”
“The songs that are written today, most of them are terrible,” he said. “It’s a very bad period, musically, throughout the world for popular music.”
He added that today’s 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 don’t care whether the public likes it or not,” he said. “They think the public is ignorant, so their attitude is, ‘Don’t give them anything intelligent, because it won’t sell.’”
He also criticized what he sees as the music industry’s bias toward younger listeners.
“Today, record companies are failing because they are putting their accent just on the young, and I think that’s rather silly,” he said.
Bennett is a huge fan of one young pop icon, however; he’s collaborating with Lady Gaga on a new jazz album, Cheek to Cheek.
“She’s one of the best singers I ever heard,” Bennett told Parade.com in 2012. “She also plays great piano and dances very well. She’s an all-around great performer…I’ve met so many people in show business over the years and I’m very impressed with her. She’s one of the great talents coming up. She’s going to always surprise everybody with her artistry.”
Watch Bennett and Lady Gaga perform “The Lady Is a Tramp”:
Heh!
Bob Dylan sang it. Yeah, he went pretty far.
Dylan can’t sing.
(Just thought I’d beat everyone else to it)
No, not by Nashville. Try Steve Earle.
He's a Commie.
Yeah, but he can sang! Met him in Dallas one night. Told him I was a conservative fan. He said, “Aww. That’s okay.”
Bennett does not impress me , he is a eco fascist, liberal socialist elitist and as money grubbing as anyone on earth, also he has confirmed his alzheimers with his comments about the twisted gaga.
I didn’t say 1957 was a bad year for music. I said there was bad music in it. That’s the thesis, there’s always bad music, and there’s always good music.
You’re on the web, go to youtube, find out. Instead of being all shouting and rude and condescending, learn.
Mainstream = lowest common denominator. Don’t try to impress me with your lists of mainstream bozos, point me to an undiscovered talent out of the left field. Spare me your Woodstock taste.
With exceptions, mainstream sucks.
My husband and I attended a Tony Bennett concert at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis as part of a season series of concerts.
It was the only one we walked out on.
Orchestra Hall has great acoustics. For some reason (he’s getting deaf?) he had humungous speakers set up on the stage. The sound level was deafening. That, plus the fact that Tony Bennett has only a single style for singing any song, which made the whole concert monotonous and boring. We couldn’t leave fast enough when intermission came.
So I think I’ll ignore whatever he has to say about present day performers. He’s an over-rated has-been.
IMHO, there isn’t a singer I’ve heard that can compare with Czeslaw Niemen.
He was a bit Proggy and Pretentious at times, but his vocals literally could bring tears to my eyes.
I don’t disagree, but the man was lost to pretentions after the initial period when he could have been another Van Morrison, unfortunately
One of my favorite albums was one he did of Russian and Ukrainian Folk Songs.
I haven’t heard it, must check it out. He was born and raised in what is now Belorus.
I saw on TV Polonia a real documentary of him.
I literally broke into tears when I heard he passed.
You may have a point.
So true. Hendrix was a total student of the blues and also a master. I'm listening to a vinyl copy of the Hendrix :blues album right now. Something I realized a few years ago is that my favorite rock guys all had something in common, namely that they could play a convincing blues. To me the most interesting players are the ones who spent their formative years locked in their rooms playing blues albums over and over again to pick up the nuances. By the way, I'm sort of an "old soul" too, musically. I was Zep, Hendrix, Cream, Floyd in high school (early 90s), then started branching backwards from there. In college I was wearing out Freddy King and Albert King tapes.
When I first got into Hendrix I was young and liked reality loud so I was all about the tooth picking and guitar burning, and that stuff is still pretty exciting. But as I’ve aged and quieted down a bit his renditions of “Red House” and “Hear my Train A Comin” loom much larger in his catalog for me. Sometimes you have to age into music.
Amen
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