The Day the Music Died

A personal take on a common gripe amongst music fans of a certain vintage!

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

The Day the Music Died

Note: I owe the impetus for finally getting round to marshalling my scattergun thoughts on this big subject to Daniel D, and specifically his piece here, focusing on The Beatles.

Part 1 - Making Movies

Let's not over-egg it. It's only Rock'n'Roll, as someone once sang in a far away place.

But it seems that amongst music lovers of the boomer generation and maybe well beyond, that sometime in (for argument’s sake) the early '90s, the landscape of popular music culture started to become fractured and diffuse. As if there were too many things happening concurrently, creating a myriad of different and smaller audiences for every subset. As if the music media got itself tied up in ideas of “lifestyle”. Which clothing style you adopted, which nightclubs music personalities were being seen at, even whether you spoke with round or flat vowels. A dilution of the essence, in effect.

This was reflected (in the UK) through a noticeable profile lift of people who sounded working-class like me appearing on mainstream TV channels and national Radio, presenting youth-oriented content. Many will remember Terry Christian and Mark Kershaw , who were distinctly northern and possibly found it to their advantage in that time and place. But since Mr Christian was responsible for giving my band at the time its first (and probably only) airplay on local radio before he hit the big time, perhaps I am being selective! Anyway… the conversations became less about individual bands and artists, than about which “scene” they had allegiance to.

But those are just hazy half-memories from a distance. Perhaps it was always thus, and in truth I believe that the ground for what seems in retrospect a slow devaluation of the art form was probably laid a decade earlier, with the advent of two things which were mutually reinforcing:

1)the full-length promotional video for the single record

2)the delivery mechanism – MTV via cable and satellite television.

A marriage made in Heaven if ever there was.

MONEY FOR NOTHING

I can guarantee that there would be any number of singles from about 1984 onwards that it is pretty much impossible for the average music lover of this vintage to hear – even at this remove – without visualising the accompanying video.

I'll list a few and see if you agree.

Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer

A-ha – Take on Me

RUN DMC/Aerosmith – Walk This Way

Madonna – Like a Prayer

David Bowie – Let's Dance

Godley and Creme – Cry

Duran Duran – Rio

Ultravox - Vienna

These are just a few off the top of my head and I am absolutely sure there will be dozens more that the reader will be able to list that I would be equally able to conjure up on my mental TV screen as well as any of these.

The point is that between the TV guys and the record company folks, they hit on a business proposition that perfectly exploited the possibilities and flexibility of video recording and editing; and that coincided with the arrival of cable TV and especially satellite broadcasting in the UK and Europe. Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV launched in 1984.

Therefore the idea that a whole channel could be dedicated to 24/7 music content arguably made the video explosion inevitable, given the ever-expanding amount of disposable income the average young person had for music and fashion and suchlike.

And the currency poured in, as record company execs could quickly see a strong correlation between high-production-value visual content and vinyl sales (and of course CD later in the decade).

It seemed as if every young people's bar would have MTV on all day and evening, with the most popular videos on heavy rotation, as I believe the phrase went. More bar sales, more cable subscriptions, bumper figures for audio recordings which were accompanied by top-performing visual productions.

Established musicians turned their hand to the video factory. Kevin Godley and Lol Creme - half of '70s progressive-pop supremos 10cc - created outstanding and highly innovative visuals for Peter Gabriel, Duran Duran, The Police and many others. I always remember this Police video as a prime example of the heights of creativity the music video could attain, and it still amazes me. It took me a while to even see what was going on with the slow motion movements of the band playing and singing, but the lip-synching being perfectly matched to the music. I believe that they got the band to play along to a double-speed playback of the song, and then slowed the resulting video to half-speed when it was matched up to the original recording. Genius. Visually gorgeous, almost mesmeric. It also helped that it is a fantastic record, of course.

The odd serious actor even got in on the act. The late Donald Sutherland co-starred with the uniquely talented Kate Bush in the storyline video for Cloudbusting. Geo-engineering agitprop, but quaintly charming..

The excesses of the era were epitomised by the story of the making of Duran Duran's The Wild Boys video. Legend has it that during the scene in which vocalist Simon le Bon is tied to a rotating catherine-wheel and dumped - supposedly momentarily - in a vat of water, something malfunctioned; with the result that he was actually submerged for several seconds while they sorted the gear out and retrieved him. He apparently shrugged the episode off , in fine stiff-upper-lip style. Thus confounding his New Romantic Dandy image and confirming his status of “good bloke to have a beer with”.

I don't know whether the stunt was inspired by or was an inspiration for Spinal Tap, as The Wild Boys and Rob Reiner's film were both released in 1984. Though I am sure that Tufnel and St Hubbins would have several opinions on that one......

Another smart bit of business was the use of movie theme song videos to cross-promote the film itself. Quite fitting, one feels, that the stars of one of the most remarkable music videos ever made (Take on Me) should be given the opportunity to perform a Bond theme and enjoy movie immortality.

And the ever-photogenic Durans were at it again..

Notwithstanding all this, perhaps the defining moment of the music video age was Michael Jackson's massively hyped and trailed production for Thriller.

I recall in the UK it was first broadcast on Channel 4 late on a Friday evening, and was very much an event in itself. Directed by established film man John Landis - appropriately he had made the offbeat cult horror An American Werewolf in London which one presumes was a factor in the choice - it was an epic in every sense and must have paid for itself many times over in terms of increased album sales. And it's another case of a song impossible to hear without those perfectly, meticulously choreographed , jumping ghouls popping into your head unbidden. And another cameo role for an established actor in Vincent Price's wonderfully OTT spoken words on the outro.

And that was the seismic effect of the pop video. It could be argued that this technological watershed was also very much a cultural shift; whereby the music business ceased to exist as a standalone entity, and became subsumed in “the entertainment industry”. Moreover, it meant that the focus of everyone involved in music production was no longer entirely on the goal of making the best recording possible. Inevitably, record company budget would be allocated for video production of the promotional single to shift album units. Of course in most cases, it could be reasoned, the music was also of high quality, and if the video just helped sell more records, then so much the better. Nobody could argue otherwise.

But perhaps what I am saying is that this was the start of the slide, in that the process of a devaluation and incipient commoditization of the music itself was underway.

And that is what I will ramble on about in the next part. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this personal retrospective so far. Please comment as I love a good discussion on this stuff , and share if you think other music lovers might also enjoy it!

(To be Continued in Part 2 – Bits and Pieces )