Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  More than sixty years after Frank Sinatra had first won Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour with the Hoboken Four, the musical talent show appeared to have no more mileage in the post-Fame, pre-Glee era than a revival of ragtime or skiffle. Yet the New Zealand television producer Jonathan Dowling hit upon a formula, and a title (Popstars), which was franchised around the world. It was originally designed to uncover young women who could be assembled as belated rivals to the Spice Girls: TrueBliss in the original series, and Hear’Say and Girls Aloud in the British version. The audience could not only root for their favourites (and, as the format developed, vote for them by phone, a vast source of earnings for the TV companies); but they were also able to glimpse the audition process, allowing them to gaze like voyeurs at entrants who were tragically deluded about the extent of their own gifts. These hapless souls would once have been content to display themselves at pub pianos, or in karaoke bars, for the amusement of their drunken friends. Now their embarrassment was paraded for the TV-hungry nation.

  The chief beneficiary of this sometimes barbaric entertainment was Simon Cowell, whose music-business experience involved the fashioning of singing careers for television actors (notably Robson & Jerome’s run of chart-topping ballads), children’s favourites (Zig & Zog, the Teletubbies) and soap-opera regulars from Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm. He stepped away from a role in the first British Popstars series to concentrate on promoting the group Girl Thing, whose career foundered after two hits. He then joined forces with former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller to create Pop Idol, before sidelining the show in favour of The X Factor. Meanwhile, Pop Idol too was franchised overseas, and its US spin-off, American Idol, proved to be the networked entertainment phenomenon of the first decade of the new century, producing a succession of enduring stars, such as Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson. Britain countered with One Direction, five solo hopefuls who were encouraged to become a group during the making of the 2010 series of The X Factor. (Ironically, One Direction finished only third in that contest, behind Matt Cardle and Rebecca Ferguson.) Whereas most of the British participants seemed to be doomed to live out their often fleeting fame within the limited parameters of Cowell’s imagination, the American winners were groomed more expertly – and shared none of the ‘manufactured star’ stigma which afflicted their UK counterparts. The talent-show genre has since been extended by programmes such as The Voice and Rising Star, moving beyond music to cover dancing, diving and even gymnastics. But, as Cowell’s biographer Tom Bower noted, ‘The nature of stardom3 had changed. The aura, mystique and mythology which had enthralled fans for years had been ripped apart by mass exposure.’

  Also damaged, perhaps beyond repair, was the notion of originality: the conviction that the most genuine performer was the one who did not sound like anybody else. Instead, all of these television contests expected their hopefuls to mimic the mannerisms and techniques of existing stars, and to reproduce the vocal tics which had come to symbolise emotional commitment.fn1 The most pervasive role models were three of the most commercially successful singers in history: Whitney Houston, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey. Of these, the simplest, least mannered style was purveyed by Dion, a French Canadian discovered by manager René Angélil when she was 12. Dion’s strengths are perfect pitch, and utter clarity of tone, which enable her to shift seamlessly from pop to torch songs to near-operatic ballads. She has become one of the world’s most popular performers of all time, reaching into markets, such as China, which have previously been resistant to Western singers. Yet in the West she has frequently been criticised for the apparent lack of emotion in her voice, which (bar some tasteful vibrato) rarely slips into a forced rendering of ‘soul’.

  The same cannot be said for the singers moulded in the tradition of Houston or Carey. Houston has been credited, in her prime, with owning the most perfect soul voice of all time: endlessly flexible, flawless in its shifts of tone or register, equally at ease with a whisper or a scream. As with her male counterpart, Michael Bolton, however, her flaw was her inability to invest herself in her music. When Aretha Franklin sang, you could track every moment of pain or ecstasy in her life. With Houston, at least until her troubled private life began to take its toll, all the feeling seemed to start, and end, in her voice. Carey was marginally less showy, and more believable, despite the fact that her record label admitted: ‘We look at her as a franchise4.’ But, as with Dion, there was a global market for this facsimile of passion: it’s instructive that Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ and Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ are not only each singer’s most grandiose performance, but also by far their most successful. Aficionados of soul music might relish the vocal equivalent of the barest touch of the fingertip on the skin, sensuality expressed in the briefest of encounters. Countless millions prefer their gestures big and their voices bigger: a bear-hug rather than a fleeting caress.

  Every successful singer has a sound; if a vocalist can’t be imitated, they don’t have a personality. From Crosby to Sinatra, Presley to Dylan, Michael Jackson to Madonna, popular music’s icons have been copied and parodied in equal measure. But never before has a small cabal of singers, with similar range and tone, held such influence as today, when the wall-toppling vocal power and theatricality of Dion, Carey and Houston are imposed on the next generation as a sine qua non.

  The most pervasive and damaging aspect of this almost totalitarian moulding of popular taste is the assumption that you can only express feeling with melisma – the technique of subjecting a single innocent syllable to a switchback ride. The longer the syllable is held, the more a performer carries it up and down and around and back, the more emotional and genuine the rendition is assumed to be. Gone are the Victorian days when the motto was: for each syllable, a note. Now every line of a song must be tortured this way, the melody forgotten in the desperate desire to showcase just how fluent and mobile and expressive one’s voice is. A simple shrug of the shoulders in mid-phrase would convey more feeling; instead, singers are trained to replicate the false catch in the throat which began, deep in soul history, as an almost unconscious exclamation, and now conveys, in gaudy colours, the message: ‘I could not be feeling this song more deeply.’ And when everyone emotes at once, no one can be heard.

  Yet this is also the era when almost every popular song has to be submitted to another, even more blatant adaptation of the human voice: Auto-Tune. What began as a sonic gimmick which gave Cher’s 1998 global hit, ‘Believe’, a near-robotic atmosphere – the singer courageously burying her own unmistakable vocal signature, as if to highlight her romantic desperation – has become an all-pervasive tool, which lends every record an identical timbre. The Auto-Tune processor was envisaged as a method of pitch correction, ‘bending’ an errant note or line back into tune. As early as 1993, the folk singer Janis Ian was bemoaning the intervention of technological aids in the human business of making music: ‘we correct pseudo-singers’ pitch5 via synthesisers so fast that the listener never knows’. Several internationally famous acts were rumoured to owe their careers to the processor, which more recently has also been applied to live performance.fn2

  Many performers have utilised Auto-Tune as a creative musical device, like Cher, not attempting to disguise its use. Madonna (‘Music’) and 3LW (‘No More’) were among the first to imitate her innovation. Exaggerated to the point of surrealism, it become a potent hip-hop tool on T-Pain’s Rappa Ternt Sanga from 2005, followed by several Lil Wayne albums, and Kanye West’s 2008 release, 808s and Heartbreak. It has since been adopted as an automatic preference for any R&B-influenced pop single. This gives listening to any Top 40 station the sense that one has stumbled upon an alien culture, in which androids are attempting to rekindle memories of the long-extinct human race.

  So this is the twenty-first century: vocalists are being trained to emote without emotion; or encouraged to sublimate their identity to a voice processor. Or, of course, they can rap. In addition, the melodic complexity of the popular song, a
t its pinnacle in the 1930s, and still apparent in the verse/chorus/middle structure of the 1950s and 60s, has been replaced by constant repetition of simple phrases – or, in the case of electronic dance music, by total deletion of melody, the old-fashioned tune giving way to rhythmic patterns, samples, and sequenced hooks.fn3 If hip hop has elevated emotive speaking over singing, and pop has eliminated the potential for vocal personality, what is left? Only sonic invention, rhythm and, of course, always nostalgia. What’s remarkable is that, beneath the sugar icing of global pop, mavericks of every hue have been able to manipulate these ingredients into genuinely enriching experiments in stylistic cross-pollination.

  Rock and roll is now6 the music of the land. Broadway, movies, TV commercials, Miami Vice. It’s the music of America. It’s certainly not the music of the alternative society.

  Concert promoter Bill Graham, 1985

  When Bono, at the Grammies7, pledged to continue ‘fucking up the mainstream’, he didn’t seem to appreciate: he is the mainstream, and it’s as fucked up as you can get. So a few surviving grizzled old rockers totter round ever bigger stadiums with bigger lasers and bigger sound systems and the phoney rebellion seems even more fatuous … Rock ’n’ roll is the new golf – it’s something middle-aged square guys do at weekends in ridiculous clothes.

  Theatre critic Mark Steyn, 1997

  In 1996, R.E.M. renewed their recording contract with Warner Brothers Records. Once the champions of independent, alternative, intelligent rock, the group were now operating inside the megalithic media conglomerate owned by Time Inc. Their deal was reported to be the most expensive in the history of the music business, its value quoted as $80 million, although the band disputed this. The aftermath was telling: R.E.M.’s sales went into steep decline.

  Such disastrous business ventures were now the industry norm. Warners had already rewarded Prince, the most artistically adventurous performer of the 1980s, with a vastly improved contract in the early 1990s. He too suffered an immediate drop in record sales, and within three years was appearing in public with the word ‘SLAVE’ written across his face, reflecting his opinion of Warners’ control over his release schedule. Numerous other artists were given equally lavish deals, just at the moment when their fortunes were slipping into reverse. Global corporations were slow to recognise that acts such as Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones might be able to sell out stadium gigs for decades to come, at whatever ticket price they chose; but this did not mean that more than a tiny proportion of those concert-goers would be prepared to invest in their new music. McCartney’s solo career has produced few more convincing albums than Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005), but its sales were barely visible alongside those of even his weakest efforts from earlier decades.

  Here was a conundrum: the industry was regularly castigated in the 1980s and 90s for failing to invest in artists who might have long-term careers. But many of those who already enjoyed that status didn’t sell records. Meanwhile, younger artists were robbed of the opportunity to grow into veterans. As early as 1987, Island Records boss Clive Banks lamented the short-term ethic of the music business: ‘We’ve produced an upturned iceberg8, with the image at the top and the talent out of sight at the bottom. The cost of marketing new talent now means that companies look for immediate returns. That makes it impossible for them to develop talent slowly. Instead they go for the quick kill with insubstantial singles that are heavily marketed.’ The Simon Cowell business model epitomised this trend: it did not matter if the winners of his TV contests disappeared within months of their victory, as there was always another show looming in the schedule, with fresh bait for the willing public to bite.

  While splashing around its multimillion-dollar deals, the record industry was searching for other media to blame for its vanishing profits. What’s arresting, in retrospect, is how early that note was struck. In 1983, British music journalist Paul Rambali told Rolling Stone magazine: ‘There was a time when music9 was much more pertinent to the culture. Records aren’t selling as much, and people are spending more time playing video games, for instance. Generally, music doesn’t play such an important part in people’s lives. It’s just got less to say about our lives.’ With ‘computer’ gradually replacing ‘video’, exactly the same complaint could have been made at any point in the last thirty years. The more multidimensional and multifaceted the entertainment options for young people, the more modern the technology that carries them, the less appealing music becomes, unless it accompanies some other activity – voting for The X Factor, for instance, or stabbing one’s thumbs at a Playstation controller.

  In the 1960s and beyond, music had transported young people into a culture which they, and the musicians, were in the process of creating: an idealistic and even illusory culture, perhaps, but one which represented a refusal to participate in the world of their parents. Then those young people became their parents, and carried their cultural artefacts and heroes (now robbed of their political power) with them. Kim Thayil of the Seattle grunge band Soundgarden lacerated the arrogance of the baby-boomer generation: ‘All the advertising has been directed10 at them since they were little kids … There’s millions and millions of people in their 40s who think they’re so fucking special. They’re this ultimate white-bread, suburban, upper-middle-class group that were spoiled little fuckers as kids, ’cause they were all children of Dr Spock, and then they were stupid, stinky hippies and then they were spoiled little yuppie materialists … And we get their understanding of history. They’re denying other age groups their own memories.’ (In his 50s, Thayil was nevertheless touring with the reunited Soundgarden.)

  Because popular music, and especially the ethos of rock culture, was so central to the baby-boomer generation, they assumed that it would always be so, just as those who grew up to the sound of the big bands imagined that there would always be Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller on the radio. For the children of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, games have been as all-consuming as music was for their parents (or indeed grandparents). Belatedly acknowledging the fact, the record industry has attempted to collaborate with one of the media which has helped to make it redundant, offering exclusive soundtrack recordings, or even guest appearances by animated versions of the stars. The series of Guitar Hero games launched in 2005 focused on classic rock recordings, but – like TV talent shows – rewarded the ability to mimic other people, rather than display originality. (Unlike the plethora of karaoke games, Guitar Hero and its successors also rewarded its users for prowess at game-playing, not musical ability.)

  Hip-hop artists were first and most enthusiastic in their cooperation with game manufacturers, Jermaine Dupri providing music for a best-selling American football game in 1999. ‘We gotta always cross-promote11, y’know?’, he said. ‘This could be like a stepping stone.’ Cypress Hill offered beats and voice-overs to a Mafia-themed game in the same year. But their producer DJ Muggs sounded a warning. ‘I started waking up12 every morning and playing games’, he admitted. ‘I had to stop fucking around. Them shits is like crack.’ In the new century, music was rarely that addictive.

  Whoever put my shit on the Internet13, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him … I think that anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch … If I’m putting my fucking heart and time into music, I expect to get rewarded for that. I work hard, and anybody can just throw a computer up and download my shit for free.

  Eminem, 2002

  Music should be free, anyway14.

  Prince, 1993

  By 1997, Prince no longer existed, except in our collective memory. Four years earlier, he had officially changed his name to an unpronounceable squiggle, which merged the male and female gender symbols. As part of what appeared to be a systematic campaign to sabotage the commercial foundations of his career, he announced that in future his music would only be sold via the Internet. Fans protested that his official website was both impenetrable and unreliable, and
that they had made credit card payments for material which either didn’t arrive, or was soon available at much cheaper prices in conventional record stores.

  The following year, his lawyers sent out cease-and-desist orders to numerous fans who had included his music on their websites. In 1999, he widened his attack by trying to have both physical and web fanzines shut down. In 2000, he resumed his Prince identity, continuing to restrict much of his copious musical output to the Internet. In 2006, his online music store was abruptly closed. In 2007, he allowed his new Planet Earth album to be given away free, in CD form, to everyone who bought the Mail on Sunday newspaper. In 2010, he shut down another official website, telling the Daily Mirror: ‘The Internet’s completely over15. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else … Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers, and that can’t be good for you.’ Then in 2014, as if to prove the cyclical nature of history, Prince’s lawyers launched $1 million lawsuits against twenty-two people who had shared live recordings of his work via their blogs and Facebook sites. ‘Doing things like this is making him lose more and more fans’, one previously loyal supporter wrote on a forum which the artist probably wanted to close down.