"Remember When They Were Great? How The Heck Did They Get So Dull?"

All too often individual musical artists and bands with something striking to communicate with their vocals and instruments get seduced by the money in their first flush of real success, which mat come after perhaps long years of desperate struggle or goading semi-success. A producer at this point takes them aside and tells them that they are now going to use recording techniques that are going to make them "really big" (i.e., appeal to an even broader audience) and thus get them all even higher record sales. What this typically amounts to in the subsequent studio release is an album by a band shorn of all its interesting edges, idiosyncrasies and acoustical texture. Now it is true that the band may at this early stage of early artistic corruption still re-assert its distinct identity during performances of its live act on tour, often doing on stage better versions of songs that had been "homogenized and pasteurized" in the studio. But the fact that the band may not yet have entirely lost its musical soul when it goes up to the footlights does not satisfy the demands of posterity, unless a good live recording is captured on a good night for its members (either with the band's blessing or by a sneaky bootlegger). Otherwise, this reassertion of originality against the studio product is offered up only to the dissipating ether and the fading memories of the people lucky enough to be in the audience for that performance. Some bands (who aren't obsessing about whatever the petty critics are taunting them about) become aware that their older fans, while still loyally attending their concerts, are complaining about the increasingly smooth superficiality of the band's more recent releases. The response from artists (or shall we say by this point "semi-artistic pot-boilers") is typically this: musicians need to "change" in order to "survive"; or, the band needs to "grow"" in order to keep the music "fresh". Now as this blog has pointed out in earlier articles, there actually have been bands where change was good and they developed by using new and pleasing musical ideas. However, all I can say when the responses are merely apologies for denatured inspiration is this: a little less greed and a little more fidelity to one's authentic artistic self will do more for career longevity than bowing to fleeting mega-profits and digitally pureed musical trends. Ask any venerable blues or jazz musician, and he or she will tell you the same. A smaller but more steadfast fan-base is the reward for bands that refuse to have their horns hacked off and their gonads replaced by an electronically-operated titanium pair.