Prog Rock Blasphemy from Kanye West

 

With one thing ... you are comparing apples to oranges. You are comparing something done 40 years ago, with the way it is done today ... and sadly ... possibly not giving credit to musicians that do not live for the financial greed and advertising that many of these do. How, then does one credit someone like Peter Hammill ... for his work.

 

There are two kinds of people, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore once said in one of their lesser enjoyed albums ... there are whores, and then there are prostitutes ... and the difference is one gets paid for it and the other gets ripped off. I'll leave you the moral of the story and maybe one day you will read some stories that are massively sad in that area ... for every rich one like Kanye, there are 100 others that are suffering and will never get a penny at all ... and some of them wrote the very song Kanye (or someone else) sang!

 

But to simply state that everyone is a moron that is simply looking at sales and numbers ... I'm not sure you have enough respect for the arts and some of the people that barely make it all their lives ... but their hide, desire and work ... will live a lot further and appreciated a lot longer than the ego that is what many of these "popular" folks are all about.

 

The artists you mention don't have a choice on the numbers ... it's how they got there ... and to stay there they have to play the numbers game ...

 

Maybe one day you will study "art" and "artists" and realize that those people are not artists ... they really are accountants that can sing and go after the glow and the money ... and has very little to do with music, except the deception that allows you to believe in it simply because they are "famous".

I actually agree with you-I have a very hard time speaking to people who don't process music as art but see it only as entertainment. But that said, I don't think the answer is to write off pop/radio friendly music entirely, since there'll always be merits worth exploring in every genre. The best R&B artists tend to take influence from a variety of genres-Chris Brown's latest album Graffiti has absolutely deplorable lyrical content, being mostly about how people should feel bad for him because he's become an outcast since beating up his girlfriend, but the actual music itself is superb, taking inspiration from everything from new wave to Philadelphia Soul right down to the Cure. It's never as clear cut as "all of X genre is bad", because that simply isn't true-music is in a constant state of change from all areas, even areas that you may not particularly enjoy. 

That's why I think "blasphemy" is such an absurd thing to say in this context, since no musical genre is "sacred" and every genre of music SHOULD pull influence from every other genre. That's how you keep things fresh, by borrowing and innovating.  

 

It wasn't intended as such towards you at all ... it was more intended to show a massive difference in the type of artists and musicians out there. Which it appears you just went on to clarify even better.

 

Unlike others, I don't enjoy sitting here and trying to cut down people that don't deserve it, and are trying their best to express themselves. Or worse ... troll the threads with chatter as a way to break up the parts of the thread that DO mean something.

 

My apologies if that came out incorrectly. -- unlike the other folks here who are more interested in insulting others than they are in making a valid comment about the subject matter itself.

 

 

 

I think that sometimes the demographics are made simply to create a concept or idea. If you look around and ask the same question to the first 20 people you see that cross your path, the number is probably less than half of that demographic ... it is bloated.

 

I do think, in a funny, paranoic sort of way, that some record companies, are also owned (or vice versa) by the same conglomerates that the media they represent, so inventing information to prove their point is necessary ... and the main issue here is ... is it true, and I don't think those statistics are anywhere near true.

 

In the end it's like seeing the big numbers of millions each movie brought in ... it's how they tell themselves that something is "good" and guarantee they can take in more money ... that most people are going to say ... well, if everyone is seeing it we have too, kind of mentality.

 

... These people want music fed to them, as opposed to an experience that must be sought out. In the early 70's, record comapnies were still catering to the demographic, but the demographic demanded music that you had to actively listen to and approach as an artform, not a commodity. The shift in demographic is undesirable.

 

The real truth of this, I believe, is that in the 70's a lot of people found out that you did not need the record company, and you could OWN your own material ... this was on account of the media and information finally getting around, to what otherwise was an unsuspecting artist ... though the history of rip-offs, even by that time were many, but that artist would be dead in the media because no record company was going to touch them.

 

It was one of the things that Bill McIntyre had been trying to get (just to give you an idea of when) make their own company and record their own stuff instead of signing with Columbia ... who, more than likely, never gave them a proper accounting of sales, and that was that. This was The Firesign Theatre, and the first example of this I ever heard. And of course,, you probably don't know that Gong/Daevid Allen are still in court with the Mr. Big colorful balls in the sky, something that others might also have done but have not said as much, like Mike Oldfield, or Tangerine Dream.

 

In the 90's the Internet made the change possible ... you could now create your own presence and you were no longer dependent on a record company to do you the favor and take your money ... in essence, anyone having to live by a record contract these days ... is a puppet to the machinery ... and the only ones that aren't are the major ones that can call their price, the Eltons, the Madonnas and such.