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”:
1957
Buddy Holly - Oh Boy
Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue
Buddy Holly - That’ll Be The Day
Buddy Knox - Party Doll
Danny And The Juniors - At The Hop
Diamonds - Little Darling
Elvis Presley - Jail House Rock
Everly Brothers - Wake Up Little Susie
Fats Domino - Walking
Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls Of Fire
Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lot Of Shaking
Johnny Mathis - Chances Are
Nat King Cole - Stardust
Patsy Cline - I Fall To Pieces
Patsy Cline - Walking After Midnight
Platters - I’m Sorry
Sam Cooke - You Send Me
There is no reason to get attached to any one popular music “artist”, they’re dime a dozen, and Americans Idle is proof of that. Virtuosos are in other music genres. Guitar players? Check out Jerry Miller who plays with Eilen Jewell, or the guy who played with the Sound Outside. Bass players? Check out the dude playing with Imelda May. Drummers? Check out Filigar. Also the keyboardist in that band. Vocal? Red Wanting Blue, Imelda May. And so on.
Lyrics should have stanzas that rhyme.
This is an objective standard that should apply to every generation, genre and taste.
We should want to sing, hum, foot-tap and dance to music. It should be memorable.
These characteristics do not apply to the vast majority of music that is forced on the public today. There is no lack of talented musicians. Technology has made a musician's craft easier and their music more accessible, particularly on an Indie basis.
Our culture, however, oppresses musicians, discouraging them from producing quality music through the almighty dollar. There are hundreds of fine jazz musicians, graduates for example like Gaga of The Berkeley School, who are scrapping out a living in the lounges across the country.
Read about Gaga's background. She is classically trained and tried to "make it" in jazz. It took subjecting herself personally to the punk/drug culture to vault her to stardom. That says a lot about our culture.
We get the music, and the politicians, that we deserve.
Looking over that chart, I can see why I stopped listening to Top 40 that year. Nonetheless, there were some golden nuggets among the sludge.
Reminds me of Johnny Carson’s Art Fern skit: Take the Hollywood Freeway to the Slauson Cutoff; get out of your car and cut off your Slauson. Still funny.
Trite lyrics seem to rule the day.
But nobody can do disgusting spew like Gaga does disgusting spew!
The top 10 of country music in 2013 were all about pickup truck, country road, night time, drinking, extramarital sex. I saw a video a critic put together to prove it. If country is that bad imagine how bad the rest.
The Hollywood Freeway goes nowhere near Slauson.
It did in the Art Fern skit.
It was cutoff..... : )
There’s a difference between being a star and being an artist. Artists create something original, IMHO.
BTW, Elvis did write over 50 gospel songs, though he didn’t record them himself. The Colonel insisted he not write songs for himself since the top songwriters of the day all wanted to write songs for him.
I have to come clean....I never got the Tony Bennett thing. I guess he has an OK voice but he just never impressed me.......Not that would be any great thing!!!!
>> The top 10 of country music in 2013 were all about pickup truck, country road, night time, drinking, extramarital sex. <<
What exactly is wrong with pickup trucks and country roads?
And as to drinking and extramarital sex, most country songs “regret” them, not “glorify” them.
Le Freak was awesome. Chic was a pioneering band and still influential.
Le Freak is thin and monotonous. Lots of bands are influential, the question is the quality of their influence. Chic’s is showing that 8 words worth of lyrics and a pedestrian beat can make you rich.
If you like disco at all, Chic and Donna Summer were the high points of the genre.
The term “singer/songwriter” didn’t come into common usage until the 1960s, when Elvis and Sinatra were already well established stars. I’d been unaware of Elvis’s gospel songwriting...
Then after Bob Dylan erupted into view, the singer/songwriter became the higher artist and the rock world was flooded with multi-talented stars.
It used to be that there was a strict line between Tin Pan Alley, where the songs were built, and the sound stages where many different singers could cover a song. No doubt it’s all just another consequence of the relentless improvement of technology in the playing, recording, and transmission of music. Today anybody can play. I’ll bet there were very very very few singer/songwriters making a living at it in 1814, for instance.
I see disco as primarily bad funk, it builds from funk beats but they jettisoned all the layers that make funk interesting, turning it straight forward and “danceable”, and dull. The early stuff, that was closer to its roots, was good, they added pep, but the further the genre went the thinner it got.
Lolz. Overall, he's right though. As far as Top 40 goes, I think the high point was the mid-sixties through the early seventies.
I think of absolute jewels like "Touch Me in the Morning" by Diana Ross, "Say a Little Prayer" by Dionne Warwick, and countless others. Nothing comes close today. It's mostly synth dance/trance music. And rap barely qualifies as music.
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