by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Over the last two nights I’ve watched some of PBS’s “Fall
Arts Festival” programming on pop music, particularly the last two episodes of
the Soundbreaking series, “Sound and
Vision” (about the rise and, as far as music is concerned, the fall of MTV) and
“I Am My Music” (about the various formats recorded music has been packaged in,
from 10-inch 78’s to 45 rpm singles to LP’s to CD’s to downloads and now
streaming services). The “Sound and Vision” show introduced Tom Freston, the
executive who was picked to run MTV (the initials stood for “Music Television”
but today there’s almost no music on MTV, thanks to the curse of tacky
“reality” shows that were put on originally to supplement its programming and
later replaced videos) because he previously knew nothing about TV — a
management philosophy that seems to have produced our next President. When the
corporate overlords of MTV decided to launch a music channel they had virtually
nothing to put on it — just a few videos from Europe, where music videos were
already an established format, including endless ones of Rod Stewart, sitting
in front of a fireplace strumming an acoustic guitar as his hits played in the
background. (In 1981 Yoko Ono did a memorial video for John Lennon, based on
his song “Woman,” and when Barbara Walters aired it on ABC she had to explain
to the audience what a music video was!) The show offered a brief history of music on film, including a clip
from the spectacular “Shadow Waltz” number from Busby Berkeley’s film Gold
Diggers of 1933, but it ignored the
so-called “band shorts” that had actually been the first talking films ever
made in the early 1920’s (among Lee DeForest’s experimental films to test his
sound-on-film system in 1923 were three-minute performances by Eddie Cantor and
other “name” entertainers and bands of the day) and by the mid-1930’s had developed
into an art form of their own. Duke Ellington’s A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935) are artfully staged performances that
anticipated the music videos of the 1980’s in their attempts, not merely to
depict a band performing, but to show images that communicated with the music
was about. In the early 1940’s a
company called Sonoco invented a self-contained projector called a “panoram”
and used it to show “Soundies,” three-minute clips of popular big bands and
entertainers (including Liberace, who made his film debut on one) which you
could watch by dropping a coin in a slot and selecting the film to project — a
sort of video jukebox.
The MTV show leaped forward to the way rock music was
presented on TV in the 1950’s, with American Bandstand and its imitators; though Bandstand was presented as if the musicians were performing
live, they weren’t. Instead they were simply lip-synching to their recordings,
and often you could tell because their electric instruments weren’t plugged in
to anything. The real start of rock music videos came, as with so much else in
modern rock, with the Beatles, who once they stopped performing life in 1966
decided to make short films accompanying their songs which could be shown on TV
as promotion for their records — and I can vividly remember what a sense of
occasion surrounded every time a new Beatles video was unveiled, like the night
they picked the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour as the venue by which they would introduce the U.S.
to “Hey Jude.” The Beatles’ movies not only pioneered the use of video as a way
to promote music, they also established the filmmaking style that would come to
dominate rock videos: elaborate productions, quick cutting and an abstract
presentation instead of any attempt to simulate a live performance. Once MTV
launched — with a defiant gesture, a song by Thomas Dolby called “Video Killed
the Radio Star” — they scrambled for material, especially since Freston and the
other people running it had decided that their core audience was young white
rock fans who wanted to see young white rock musicians … and no one else. Not until CBS/Sony Records
threatened to pull all their
videos from MTV if the channel didn’t start playing Michael Jackson did MTV
start playing Michael Jackson — whose videos became so incredibly popular they
helped launch his album Thriller
and push it from just another successful record to a phenomenon. (Actually I
suspect Thriller was launched as
much from Jackson’s famous “moonwalk” performance on “Billie Jean” from the
Motown 25th Anniversary Special than from his videos getting on MTV
— though one Black musician and producer recalled stopping whatever they were
doing in the studio every hour because MTV had the full 14-minute clip of
“Thriller” on at the same time every hour, and he and his band loved it so much
they insisted on breaking off their own work to watch it whenever it was on.)
The basic thesis of “Sound and Vision” was that the existence of music videos
and MTV as a showcase for them not only changed the audience’s understanding of
music — one anti-video holdout, Tom Petty, said he resisted making videos for a
while because he didn’t want his listeners to be locked into an association of
a song with one and only set of visual images — but altered who got signed to record contracts. A singer like
Madonna, with a serviceable voice but a great sense of theatricality and a
willingness to reinvent herself constantly, became a huge star in the 1980’s
largely on the strength of her videos as well as the songs they portrayed. (She
did a video to “Material Girl” that was a flat-out copy of the scene of Marilyn
Monroe singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes — and the Los
Angeles Times’ editorial cartoonist, after
one of President Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union addresses, pictured Reagan
as Madonna as Monroe singing, “We’re living in the material world/And I am a
material boy.”) The show really didn’t go into much detail as to why MTV so totally abandoned videos in its programming —
today it’s almost all tacky so-called “reality” shows plus an occasional Video
Music Awards or some such show that hearkens back to its glory days — though it
noted that music videos have migrated, like so much else, to the Internet,
where people seek them out on YouTube. (Barf.)
Episode eight, “I Am My Music,”
briefly toured through not only 78 rpm records but also the original
gramophones, graphophones and Victrolas that played them (though actually much
equipment in the 78 rpm era, particularly towards the end of it, was
considerably more sophisticated than shown here) and briefly touched on the
so-called “Battle of the Speeds” between CBS/Columbia, which developed a
long-playing 33 1/3 rpm record that could last up to 25 minutes per side; and
RCA Victor, which developed a short-playing 7-inch 45 rpm record with a large
spindle hole (to accommodate the high-speed changer that would allow several
records to be stacked and played in succession). Both formats survived, since
the small size of the 45 rpm player allowed teens to carry both a supply of
records and the equipment to play them on and set them up virtually everywhere,
while the 33 1/3 rpm LP became the bastion for more serious music, not only
classical but also artistically adventurous pop forms. Two LP’s from the 1950’s
got special mention on the show: Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small
Hours (in which he responded to the breakup
of his marriage to Ava Gardner by making a whole album of heartbreak songs and
carefully sequencing them so the mood built up over the entire span of the LP)
and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue
(five extended performances by an all-star jazz band with Miles, Cannonball
Adderley, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb
— actually Miles had innovated the long-form jazz LP eight years earlier with
his Prestige Records release Dig,
but Kind of Blue was on a major
label, Columbia, and it was also artistically innovative in that it was based
on modal songs, which use scales instead of chords as their basic underlying
organizing principle).
The show also included clips of Willie Mae “Big Mama”
Thornton performing “Hound Dog” and an interview with the song’s co-author,
Mike Stoller (he wrote it with his usual writing partner, Jerry Lieber, and
drummer/bandleader/producer Johnny Otis), followed up by a clip of Elvis
Presley singing his heavily remodeled version (which, according to biographer
Albert Goldman, he got from another Black act, Freddy Bell and the Bellhops,
who rewrote the Thornton original so it could be sung by a man) in which Otis’s
name magically disappeared from the songwriting credits (and Otis, done out of
his rightful share of royalties from a record that sold 10 million copies, was
naturally pissed). It then mentioned the rise of Top 40 radio and its crucial
importance in “breaking” rock records in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and
the tyranny of short running times it imposed — whereas a 10-inch pop 78 could
accommodate 3 minutes 20 seconds, and a 45 could be longer than that, if you
wanted it to get played on the radio you had to keep it between a flat two
minutes and 2:30 — which was broken when Bob Dylan recorded “Like a Rolling
Stone” with a full band. Columbia, Dylan’s label, made two 45 rpm versions
available — one split down the middle like a typical two-part record and one
with the full six minutes on one side of a 45 — and enough stations played the
full-length version it cracked the charts, vastly expanded Dylan’s audience and
also made the horizons of rock that much broader. All of a sudden, as one
interviewee put it, rock was serious
— and instead of just one good single and trashy filler, rock LP’s like Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited, the Beach
Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’
Revolver and Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were works
of art in their own right, presenting songs of uniformly high quality and
depth. The “concept album” invented by Sinatra on In the Wee Small
Hours came to the rock world with Sgt.
Pepper and to the soul world with Marvin
Gaye’s What’s Going On, in which
he not only wrote and presented a series of songs dealing with political themes
— war, the environment, the counterculture — he faded them into each other so
each side of the record was a continuous piece of music without audible breaks
between songs. The show mentions that Motown owner Berry Gordy didn’t want Gaye
to make What’s Going On — he
wanted to keep the image of his company safe, pop-oriented and decidedly
noncontroversial — and it does not
mention how Gaye got to make the album. Just before he started work on it, Gaye
had had the biggest hit of his career, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”
(which had begun as an impromptu studio jam on a song that had already been a
hit the year before for Gladys Knight and the Pips), just as his record
contract with Motown was expiring. With the bargaining power that comes from
having had your all-time biggest hit just when your contract comes up for
renewal, Gaye laid down the law to Gordy and told him that if Gordy wanted him
to stay with Motown, he’d let Gaye make What’s Going On.
After that the show segues into the development of
the cassette and its rise as a music medium, both in pre-recorded form (I
vividly remember buying the cassette instead of the LP of the Police’s final
album, Synchronicity, because the
cassette had an extra song, “Murder by Numbers”) and because it could be used
for home-recording. This led to the rise of the “mix tape,” in which people put
together songs from several albums to create a personal mix of their own, often
shared with friends or actual or potential romantic partners. It also led to
the phenomenon in the punk world (oddly, of all eight Soundbreaking shows this is the only one that so much as mentions punk!), in which bands recorded their own music, put
it out on cassette because it was far easier and cheaper to do so than master a
vinyl disc, and advertised it in punk ’zines. Dave Grohl, drummer for Nirvana
and later leader and guitarist of the Foo Fighters, recalls buying tapes from
’zine ads but doesn’t mention that Nirvana’s first recording was distributed
that way: it was called Fecal Matter
and came out well in advance of their first commercial recording, Bleach, on the Sub Pop label. The show also does a
digression to the Grateful Dead and the fan base they attracted of people who
recorded their shows and traded them with each other, and realizing that they
couldn’t stop it, the Dead not only allowed people to record their shows but
even set up a special section for tapers so their microphones wouldn’t get in
the way of everybody else’s line of sight. After cassettes came CD’s, which
were originally marketed as a high-end audio product — few people (including
me) expected them to displace both LP’s and cassettes, but they did — and one
spectacularly wrong prediction I made about CD’s was that, by eliminating the
side break in between the two halves of a record, they’d encourage more artists
to do album-length works and concept albums. Instead the opposite happened; the
feature CD listeners glommed onto was the ability to pick just one song out of
a CD and play it, ignoring the rest — and music fans found themselves forced to
buy a whole $15 to $20 CD containing 17 songs they didn’t like to buy the one
they did. The solution came in the form of .mp3, a computer format for compressing
music so a song could be transmitted over a telephone line in the early days of
the dial-up Internet connection; .mp3 was invented by German engineer Karlheinz
Brandenburger, who did various tests as to how much he could compress digital
music files without creating distortion (the “3” in .mp3 denotes that the third
attempt was the best in terms of the compromise between quality and file size);
Napster and other free (and illegal) “peer-to-peer” file-sharing services
allowed fans to download music for free and only get the songs they wanted,
though the dangers included low quality, songs that stopped in the middle and
the possible infiltration of malware on your computer. That changed when Apple introduced iTunes and offered
high-quality downloads for just 99 cents a song (though the price for most
current material has gone up to $1.29), and iTunes and its competitors put the
illegal file-sharers out of business by offering consistent quality at a
reasonable price.
Only now the trend is away from downloading and towards
“streaming,” so instead of buying individual songs in either physical or
electronic format, you pay a monthly fee to rent access to music so you can
hear any song from the company’s playlist you want at any time. The show
presents this as a trendy new way for young people to listen to music, but it
has two other factors driving it, both highly problematical. One is the
modern-day media industry’s interest in shifting all content purchases from buying to renting — a trend
that started with the sale of computer software (where the traditional
“first-sale doctrine” of copyright law — that you can’t make copies of a
copyrighted work you purchased legally but you can do anything you like with that one copy, including
resell it, give it away or cut it up into pieces and reassemble them as a new
work — specifically doesn’t apply) and is now being applied to everything. Computer software is now being sold as a “service,”
meaning that instead of owning a copy of the program you rent it month-to-month
(so if you stop paying every
document you created with that software becomes unreadable and useless), and
electronic files of books, songs and movies are sold under a so-called “End
User Licensing Agreement” that severely limits what you can do with them. The
idea is to end the entire idea of collecting media forever — instead of distributing physical
copies whose buyers own them outright, both media and tech companies want us
simply to rent them under increasingly stringent user conditions that govern what
we can and can’t do with them. The other factor that is putting an end to the
whole idea of a record collection
is the increasing redistribution of wealth and income upward, and the rising
level of economic inequality. More and more young people are either forced to
keep living at home with their parents or to accept multiple-roommate
situations or live in very small spaces; one interviewee in this program
mentions being particularly impressed by a friend who had a massive collection
of CD’s, cassettes and over 4,000 LP’s. Few young people today can afford to do
that; not only do they not have the money to buy that many physical products,
they don’t have the money to rent enough living space to accommodate them.
