There was all sorts of buzz earlier this week about TV on the Radio's apparently abysmal performance on Saturday Night Live. If you like the band, as I happen to, you have to wonder what happened: their recordings are immaculate, and they have a solid live reputation.
Did he say "foam-injected Axl Rose"?
(Credit: 'The Colbert Report')Today, music blog Idolator performs an interesting experiment, embedding the band's performance of "Dancing Choose" on SNL directly above the same song performed on last night's edition of The Colbert Report. The difference is immediately noticeable.
So what the heck happened on SNL? Idolator jokes that they're making the sound bad on purpose for publicity, but in fact it sounds like the SNL sound guy used a default pop mix, making the vocals and next-lead instrument--in this case, they chose the sax in the horn section--loud and dry (with no effects), and putting most other instruments in the background. This type of mix usually accentuates the snare drum to maintain the high-energy rock feel (hear how loud it is?), and the bass (here, the low-end synth) to help pin everything down. Guitars? Backing vocals? Horn section? Sorry, we ran out of time.
This kind of mix is the default because it works with a strong singer--especially if they're using a backing track or lip-syncing portions of their performance--and it ensures that listeners don't have the most common complaint with live sound: "I couldn't hear the words."
But this mix doesn't work as well with art or indie rock bands, where the singers generally don't have highly trained dynamic voices and where the textures provided by the instruments are as important as the vocals. (I think of this as the old REM mix, used on their first few records, where you could barely hear Michael Stipe above the guitar.) Whoever did sound for Colbert seems to have been better prepared for this type of band, adding a little reverb to the vocals and giving the guitars much higher prominence. They also did a great job with the horn section and keeping everything balanced as more instruments got added to the end.
Of course, there are a lot of factors other than the skill and ears of the people doing sound--set-up time, number of microphones and channels, and communication from the band are all important. And, as a wise old producer once told me, you can't polish a bad performance. (He actually used a scatological term, but you get the idea.) But if you ever wonder why the sound sucked at a live show, this is an interesting case study.
It's year-end time, and the critics are weighing in with their year-end lists, from the maddening mix of obscure and popular at Pitchfork to the back-and-forth over at Slate.
I'm not a music critic, so I don't get to listen to hundreds of new CDs for free. That means I've missed plenty of the music on these critics' list, though I know I hate No Age and am indifferent to Girl Talk.
Even so, without checking the data, this year seemed pretty good: TV on the Radio, Beach House, and Portishead all made strong impressions, and I like Fleet Foxes quite a bit, though not as much as Pitchfork. But looking back at my master list, I've only got 9 recordings that were released in 2008.
That's my lowest total-by-year since 1995, which is probably my least favorite music year ever. I know the year's not out yet--I have hope for some LPs under the tree--but I'm curious what everybody else thinks. Was 2008 a dud year? Or am I missing some great entries?
Yesterday I was listening to the new TV On The Radio album, Dear Science, with a couple friends. One of them used to be a big music fan, but basically stopped following music in the early 1990s, circa Beck and Pearl Jam. Every time I play him a song by a band I like (Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse), he comes up with a terse response like "fun." If I press him, he can always come up with a reason why the artists of yesteryear are better. He hasn't bought a CD in ages, has never downloaded a song, and doesn't go to concerts unless it's an act he's known and loved for years. He assumes there's no good new music. I know dozens of people like him.
Then the song "Shout Me Out" came on. As the track kept increasing in intensity, closing with a bonafide kick-ass guitar solo, he couldn't believe it--new music that didn't suck! As he put it "this is the freshest song I've heard in years." Then, the million-dollar question: "Why don't they play this on the radio?"
I had no good answer. Commercial radio seems geared toward two audiences: kids with disposable income who might be willing to buy an album if the single's pounded into their head, and aging rockers who haven't been interested in music since they were in their 20s. In other words, the stations that play new music either play insipid teen music (metal or pop or R&B, all with dumb lyrics), or have a narrow demographically tested playlist that allows new songs only if they sound like they come from the early 1990s (adult contemporary). Or they don't play new music at all (classic rock, Jack FM). Once in a while a truly universal new song breaks through--"Hey Ya" by Outkast, "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. But apart from college radio, nobody's playing cutting-edge rock and roll with potentially broad appeal.
The death of relevant radio bears as much responsibility for the decline of the music industry as file-sharing and free downloads.
A related thought: if a band never gets radio play, who decides what its "hits" are? Last week I saw My Morning Jacket, and last night I saw Sigur Ros. Both are big in the indie rock world--their shows were sold out with more than 1,000 fans--but almost no mainstream penetration. (Although Coldplay's Chris Martin recently admitted that Sigur Ros is better than his band.)
At both shows, when certain songs began, the audience gave a loud cheer--the kind that used to be reserved for when an artist launched into a radio hit. So how did these songs become fan hits? Does MMJ always close with "One Big Holiday" to the same huge applause? Do fans cheer every time Sigur Ros launches into "Staraflur"? Is it possible that some songs are just objectively better than others, or does the response vary widely from city to city, country to country?
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