ChaoticKraus said:
I have a question that might be a tough one to answer. It's about "superstars" such as Michael Jackson and Madonna in their glory days, Eminem in the early 2000's or Lady Gaga who seems to be halfway there today(IMHO) (bonus question: do you make the same prediction?).
Do you think that they are harmful to the industry by "obscuring" smaller bands and artists or are there enough room for all in the marketplace?
Ahhh, the Lady Gaga question. I knew she'd poke her head in here eventually.
Of course big artists are going to overshadow smaller artists. It's like saying "doesn't the tallest five trees in the forest stand out too much against the others?" - so then you cut them down. Oh but wait, now there are 5
new tallest trees. You could theoretically continue that process until there wasn't a tree left. Of course, what some people really want is just for enough pruning so the stuff that
they don't happen to like is cut down. But then those people would just find new stuff to whine about and the process would begin anew.
Michael Jackson was huge because people loved the songs (well, until the 1990s, anyway). Same with Madonna. Sure, she might have done some strange things on the way to fame (and I'm not going to elaborate because I know a little too much here) but at the end of the day, if "Like A Virgin" was a shitty album with crap songs, no-one would have bought it and she wouldn't still be active in music today. Have you any idea how rare it is for a female in the sexist, ageist world of bubblegum pop music to have a career spanning nearly 30 years? She kept it up that long because she knows how to write songs, and how to work with other people who write songs. Eninem scored big because he's a talented rapper who had some catchy tunes that people liked, and if it wasn't Eninem and 50 Cent it'd be someone else up there being "that person you think of when you think of rap music these days".
Lady Gaga is of course ludicrously talented, as good a singer and performer as just about anyone who has worked in pop since the style began. She does pop because she wants to, but she could do just about any style she felt like. She also knows how to work the media to her benefit. Notwithstanding some amazingly unfortuitous fuckup, she'll probably be around for a while.
Bottom line is that for every person you see whining there's another five or ten or thousand who are buying the records. Nobody is forced to buy the new Ke$ha single... but they do, because they like the music. It was a good song, people liked it, so they bought it, that's really all there is to it. Yes, there's marketing, promotion etc, but for every Ke$ha there's 1,000 wannabe Ke$has who released a song just like hers and got nowhere, and who got an equal marketing and promotional push. Why did Ke$ha get somewhere when those girls didn't? The song was better, it appealed to more people. Simple as that. Did she overshandow others? Yes, because her songs were better, they stood out.
ChaoticKraus said:
And are the whole "Top 10 Hit" phenomeneon with people like Justin Bieber, Kesha and the Black-Eyed Peas as harmful to music as many people claim or are they just pissed that their favourite bands doesnt get as much attention?
To be honest, if their favourite bands
did get that much attention, they probably wouldn't be their favourite bands anymore. The people who whine about popular artists being popular would just cry "sellout" at their favourite bands and then move onto something else more obscure so they could still be part of their little Internet Cool Club.
People drone on and on about the evils of the "top 10 hit phenomenon" as if it is a new thing or something and how music from bygone eras was somehow inherently superior before all this pop stuff started showing up very recently. What a load of horseshit. Check out this video:
The Monkees were huge and I mean
huge in the 60s, as The Beatles gradually went more left-field, The Monkees took over as the primary group of concern for young teenage girls and had hits all over the place, such as the one in the video above. And guess what. The Monkees didn't even play their own instruments on ANY of their own recordings. Those drums and guitar you hear in that video are mimed, the real work was done by uncredited session musicians. They were far from the only example of a band like this, in fact, it was
the norm in the 1960s. Bands would rock up to a studio, run through their songs once or twice, record them roughly, then session musicians would listen to the rough recordings, learn the songs and play them on the final mix. Say what you like about Justin Bieber, at least he's capable of actually playing his own guitar parts, and it's him on his own recordings.
And yes I do believe there's enough room for everyone. After all Justin Bieber's market isn't the same market that buys Bullet For My Valentine or whatever. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that there's not a lot of crossover there. Why fans of the latter would even care enough about the existence of the former to even comment is something that continually astounds me. I think it says more about their personal insecurities than anything about the real world of music.
