| NUMBER ONE WITHOUT
A BULLET
Most of us these days can be ( thankfully ) oblivious
to music sales charts, but a couple of interesting things have occurred
recently that are worthy of note.
Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “ Dark Side
Of The Moon “ has just notched up an incredible 1500 weeks
in the American charts, far surpassing the previous 6 year record
held by Carole King’s “Tapestry” album. About
8000 people a week in America alone go into record shops & buy
a copy, every week. Technologically perched at the nexus of analogue
& digital, it was the first CD released by EMI in 1984 &
it has continued to etch itself into the communal mind ever since
it’s release, none of it ever licenced for other commercial
purposes. For many people the night that they first heard Dark Side
Of The Moon in it’s entirety was like a rite of passage, a
musical epiphany not just for it’s original generation but
obviously for successive generations since, even if for longtermers,
it remains one of those great record albums that you never really
want to ever hear again. And it’s not even the band’s
biggest seller, The Wall is tied with Led Zeppelin IV as the top
selling album by a band ( I don’t count compilations ) of
all time! So it’s no surprise that Roger Waters on his forthcoming
tour will be performing the entire Dark Side Of The Moon, reclaiming
it as his own. And who could blame him?
Pink Floyd spans a period too, when people bought
many more records than they do now, when records that reached Number
One were almost ubiquitous, you heard it everywhere, radio, television,
shops, taxis, you couldn’t avoid it, like it or not. Remember
Abba? It provided a momentary musical snapshot of the communal conciousness,
a cultural zeitgeist to be inevitably replaced by yet another Number
One.
But over the last decade or so the music market
has become so fragmented & genrefied that there has ceased to
be a dominant song or even style, it’s all devolved to the
periphery, the core is gone. The niche market rules. For instance,
The Grammy Awards now has over 30 award categories, magazines like
Billboard has that many charts ( so if they have “Urban”
charts why isn’t there a “Suburban” category ?).
Music has become horizontal spread rather than an upward spiral.
Perhaps that ‘s why in Australia recently, James Blunt only
had to sell 7,000 copies in a week to get the Number One album slot,
while The Youth Group grasped the coveted Number One single slot
with only a mere 4,500 copies sold in a country of 20 million people.
All of which is compounded by the format wars. Recently they changed
the pop charts in Britain to include i Tunes downloads & thus
we had the first Number One single “Crazy “ by hitherto
unknown Gnarls Barkley with no retail sales, while the album went
gold from downloads before it was released as a CD to retail. Phew!
things are moving fast.
And speaking of speed, have you noticed how the
punctuation of music has slowed? Aside from a couple of exceptions
they just don’t release records nearly as often as they used
to. The Beatles for instance released 23 singles, most not on album,
13 Eps & 12 Albums in less than 8 years. The Rolling Stones?
17 singles & 12 albums during the same period. The Doors? 6
albums in 4 years.
Get the picture? The rhythm of releases has slowed
over the last 2 decades or so, now an album every year or 2 or even
longer is all that’s expected in spite of demand, singles
are merely advanced advertising for the forthcoming album length
release rather than fleeting glimpses of the creative process &
progress. A quick musical postcard. This slowed rhythm of releases
also distorts the music, because of the long wait between records
now, expectation can be raised to unrealistic proportions both in
the artists & the audience. How can anyone ever live up to that?
Each gesture becomes a bold disproportionate portentous statement
before another lengthy silence, rather than an audiophonic progress
report followed quickly by another progress report. The modern cycle
of releases rather than reflecting creative evolution & progress
becomes a series of statements of points reached not explored. There’s
no sense of urgency, of revealing the process as much as the product.
Bob Dylan’s accelerated creative evolution in the 60s &
70s can be charted on the albums of the time, “Bringing It
All Back Home “, “Highway 61 Revisited” &
the double “Blonde On Blonde”, all recorded & released
in a 2 year period of here’s where he is at the moment, he’ll
be somewhere else next time series of bulletins that are still invigorating
in their urgency.
But it’s the demise of the pop charts as
contemporary cultural meeting point that is most lacking in the
current charts. The biggest Australian pop band of the 70s, Sherbet,
notched up 20 consecutive hit singles, 17 albums including 10 platinum
& 40 gold in their decade long career. Quite a work ethic. But
they also had the advantage of a weekly TV show that provided the
venue for this rapid fire release regimen, Countdown. Often damned,
seldom praised, it provided an unrelenting forum for pop in Australia
that has never been recreated. So it’s little wonder then
that Sherbert have reformed to headline the forthcoming Countdown
revival tour.
Can you imagine an Australian Idol reunion tour
30 years from now? I thought not. Or at least you don’t really
want to.
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