Imagine you’re an aspiring musician known for how you delicately balance art and talent. You’re fairly popular on the internet, mostly due to your thousands of profile views on Myspace. Unfortunately for you, being popular on the internet doesn’t necessarily translate to making money and as a result, you’re flat broke. You realize the only way to do this is to gain more exposure via promotion, music videos, radio single, etc but even that costs thousands of dollars. Record labels know your situation all too well and so they offer you a deal. They will finance your rise to stardom but in return they get to make all the financial decisions. And by financial decisions, they mean they need to cater your sound to a demographic that would yield maximum revenue, AKA they make all the artistic decisions. The record label tells you it will actually be easier for you since they will just outsource songwriters to write for you and ensure a team of specialists will make you sound “perfect”. Sure you will finally be making money off your songs but are they really your songs? Too many times I’ve seen an artist settle for the numbers, formulas and figures of the industry and essentially, settling for pop. What gets classified as pop? It’s a little hard to define and I’m not sure what the industry definition of it is but for all intents and purposes for this blog, I will refer to pop music as songs that you lose interest in with time, as opposed to songs that getter better with time. Songs that are made to sell, not last. Unfortunately, I know a lot of artists who have succumb to this fate, this derailing and have undergone the fall to pop.
When I first heard Regina’s music I never thought I her name and the word “pop” could exist in the same sentence. My first thought was “wow, this is a true artist”. A true artist in every sense of the word. One who, I believe, should be selfish with their motives. And by selfish I don’t mean monetary gain by any means. I mean they make music to solely satisfy their own need to release emotion. When you hear her music you’ll see what I mean. She does exactly what she wants and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. I first heard a couple of her songs from a friend and did what I usually do with an artist I think I’ll like: download their discography and see if I can find any diamonds in the ruff (I usually find that the popular songs are my least favorite). This discography turned out to be a little unusual because I found every song to be thoroughly entertaining. Even if I didn’t like a song it would entertain enough to hear it all the way through. Perhaps it was her fantastic display of singing and piano talents, or maybe it was the dynamic array of genres she used throughout, but I think the main reason I found it so interesting was because it was so refreshing to hear someone singing so unconventionally. She is definitely the most unique singer I’ve ever heard, and it’s nice to see someone break the mold of what singing should be. Singing is an art, and an art is not about being perfect, it’s about being expressive, which is something Regina is very, very good at.
Her music ranges from the strange...
to the beautiful...
to the strange and beautiful...
Sometimes I can’t make out if she’s absolutely insane or incredibly brilliant
It’s quite apparent that she has a very eclectic taste in music. Almost her entire first album is comprised of jazzy and bluesy tracks while in her other albums, you can tell she got influenced by a wider variety of music. Only a couple of her songs have infiltrated the mainstream, by far the most popular being Fidelity. A lot of people noticed her with this song and of course, so did some record execs.
For her new album she gave the steering wheel to a superstar cast of producers (Jeff Lynne (ELO, The Traveling Wilburys), Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Eminem), David Kahne (Paul McCartney, The Strokes) and Garret "Jacknife" Lee (Weezer, REM)) and made one of her least inspired albums by far called, actually, Far. Perhaps the title was alluding to the fact that she left her eclectic self behind and traveled to the far away world called Pop. I liked her album the first week, hated it the next, and never listened to it after that, which is exactly what the producers were excepting from this album. Give you a little bit so you’re eager for more. From a business point of view it’s much more profitable to make someone buy a new album every month than to provide a great album that will last years. A brilliant business model but it’s a damn shame that someone as talented as Regina Spektor was wasted on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment