People Watching won because it is an album of both universal appeal and local colour. It has evergreen melodies holding down songs about guilt, urban decay and the tension of leaving behind working class life for global fame,
Be Joe Walsh singing “Life’s Been Good To Me So Far” next.
My expectations were low. There’s barely been half a dozen half-decent winners in Mercury Prize history and it’s been total junk for more than a decade.
I have a general belief that music isn’t that exciting because we ran out of new technology to use, and there’s a glut of great songs on the old technology. From about 1950 to the mid-90s there was a constant flow of new tech in the way of instruments and recording equipment. So you got new product that wasn’t like old product. You’d go into a record shop and hear something that didn’t sound like anything before. Which meant there was a buoyant market. A bit like when phones changed a lot, so you wanted the next good phone.
You can see the end of it with Britpop which wasn’t a new sound like Glam Rock, Punk or 80s Synth bands. The sounds, the fashions were about the past. And this was followed up by endless Beatles re-issues making the top of the charts.
I think the two PJ Harvey albums are really great, the first Suede album, Dummy and Different Class. Roni Size isn’t my thing, but I thought it was interesting (although I’d have given it to Fat of the Land that year). And I quite like the Arctic Monkeys, but it just reminds me of The Buzzcocks.
About the only band after 2000 that I think are doing interesting stuff are Radiohead.
But I think movies are hitting the same problem. People would flock to cinemas because of the new spectacle of Star Wars, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park but we’ve hit the wall on it since 2018. No-one knows how to top Mission Impossible: Fallout or Avengers: Infinity War for that wow factor that gets you telling your friends to go see it. The last apes movie was good, but it didn’t have the same thrill of the first two where it was the first time seeing CG apes that just looked like real apes. Third time, it’s like “great, but I’ve seen apes before”.
Music stopped evolving as it became less possible to make money from it, and you had to make it from merch and tickets instead.
More to the point it stopped evolving with the retreat from warts-and-all played performance to endless digital editing and tweaking. I was there, did it, saw it happen, realised what was happening. Music comes out of computers now, not people, and it tends to do so in looped form.
There’s other stuff. I listen to Billy May’s arrangements for Sinatra, Mancini’s orchestrations, classic period Stevie Wonder harmony and groove. No-one nowadays plays drums like Stevie. Even he fucked it when he discovered automated playback. “I just called to say I love you” is based on a Yamaha Electone accompaniment. I know the bloke who programmed it.
It’s all gone. And you can blame me, the Linndrum, sequencers, looping and sampling. No-one writes like Bacharach, following the melody and adding extra beats to accommodate it. Everything is 4/4 looped groove.
Oh and you can blame the Boomers for having invented and done everything, leaving almost nothing for subsequent generations to invent. Everything now is postmodern recycling.
Why even bother? It’ a meaningless shindig. Me, I’m studying Henry Mancini’s orchestrations. His “Sounds And Scores” is a great book.
At a recent quiz a music question was “Who composed the Pink Panther theme”.
I got outvoted by muppets who said Burt Bacharach.
We’re still friends though.
Or, as Michael Caine put it: ” I’ve been poor, I’ve been rich; rich is better.”
I must be older than I thought, I haven’t heard of any of these people. (The Beatles, m’lud, are a popular singing group.)
I think the quote is “a popular beat combo.”
Award shows are a waste of time. Used to be a good way for people to get an idea of what was good or not, but we have social media, various websites that collect scores from users, meta review sites. Which are not perfect, but better.
The best indicator of a game being good is Steam ratings. If you’ve played the game you can give it a thumbs up or down. Add them up and you get a percentage. Video game magazines were always corrupt. Spend a load on ads, get a higher rating. Awards are full of fart-sniffers drawing attention to themselves by voting for games with trannies etc (Parks and Rec observed this phenomenon when Ron Swanson was given Pawnee Woman of the Year, because by doing something like that, the awards get some publicity).
I listened to the title track. It just sounded like a less good version of The Boys of Summer by Don Henley. In which case, why not just listen to Don Henley (not my thing, I hate the fuckin’ Eagles man).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cXCUp6j5M8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RUIeX6UCT8
Lyrically quite good but musically predictable…
I think that there is plenty of good music out there, you need to go away from the Mainstream to find it. You Tube and streaming services are good places to go looking for it. If you don’t like any of the new stuff, you now have access to masses of old stuff that you’ve never heard before.
I really love Eso Diva by Melody, which was Spain’s entry to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. Easily the best song, didn’t win of course. The videos are worth a look as she is really hot and only partly dressed.
Right Manolo. Let the girl sing the intro & you come in hammering on your dustbin same as all the other tracks we’ve recorded.
Problem is, of course, the average age of the market for this stuff is about 13*. So that’s about the level of sophistication they can tolerate.
*Mental, anyway.