I grew up in the “Four Seasons” era. However, when you’re young you don’t realize there are distinct differences between singers, songs and so on. I mean if I heard a “Four Seasons” song on the radio and the next one was “Please Mr Custer” by Larry Verne, I’d think they were both okay. Now I realize the Four Seasons did put a lot of work into those harmonies.
A while back, a guitar player friend of mine joined an “oldies band”. He remarked that the 4 Seasons’ songs were not the simple chord progression songs typical of that era. I said I noticed the same thing when “Candy Girl” came on the radio, and I grabbed my guitar to play along with it. It was a bit more complicated than I thought. Basically, there’s a lot more going on in their songs than people realize.
People who say things like this don’t listen to near enough music. If you want to judge such things by what radio allows you to hear, that’s fine, but at least know that it comes from your own ignorance regarding the music scene (and blame radio programming on it), and not anything based in reality.
Lest I get another warning from a mod, I should say that there’s nothing wrong with being ignorant. Everyone is ignorant about pretty much everything, including myself. What I object to are blanket statements that don’t take into account all the brilliant singers out there that you don’t know about, just because you choose not to know about them due to listening to what well-paid but ignorant radio programmers play for you.
My Four Seasons favorite is their collaboration with Donna Summer. (I greqw up in the 70’s)
Pat Benetar. Joan Jett.
I’m not really a rock fan, but I’ve always love Pat Benetar’s voice. I’m sure there are many others - I’m just don’t know their names.
I’m not talking radio, and I’m not saying there aren’t any.
But please note that after all the posts after mine, people still haven’t mentioned as many women as I did in one post about men (I’ll add the Indigo Girls and Judy Collins, too.) Generally, really great women rock singers – Janis, Grace Slick, Aretha, Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Deborah Harry, Bette Midler, Chrissy Hynde, Mary Travers – don’t play an instrument. Of course, there are also plenty of men who just sing – Van Morrison, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Roger Daltry, Robert Plant, etc.
In addition, if we remove folksingers from the list of women who play instruments and sing, the number becomes ever smaller.
Chuck, I get the impression from reading your replies in this thread that you A) have had a pretty limited experience of the vast array of female artists out there; B) have a limited idea about the scope of 20th century pop music; C) imagine that the music that commercial radio feeds you is remotely representative of the actual musical universe; and D) might possibly be posting in the wrong thread (instruments? who said anything about instruments?)
None of which I fault you for; we all have limited experience in some way or another. I do, however, take issue with your tone of commanding authority and bald statements when you clearly have a great deal to learn on the subject. You may think you know all there is to know, and therefore have earned the right to such an authoritative tone, but I (along with Equipoise, an actual authority on 20th century female pop, having hosted a radio show on the subject long before Lilith Faire raised its lame little head; a show which I co-produced for a time) am here to tell you that you have room for a little humility on this subject.
The dearth of female artists in that part of the universe that most people are familiar with is due more to a near conspiracy of the male-dominated radio-recording complex than it is a reflection of the talent or yet existence of truly great female artists. Equipoise’s show was more a protest show than anything else. It wasn’t a lame, Lilithy, “let’s dance barefoot in soft focus slow motion and celebrate our ghettoization” type affair, like Lilith Faire; it was a “why the fuck do I have to devote a show to this music? why the fuck isn’t mainstream radio doing their goddamn job and playing this stuff?” kind of show.
For what it’s worth, most of the female artists you’ve mentioned are artists that I, personally, find pretty unlistenable. Nonetheless, there are enough other female artists out there that I, who own roughly 3000 CDs and am pretty dang obsessed with music, listen to a nearly even balance of male to female artists.
Do some digging. Your posts are more a reflection of the marketing tragedy that is modern pop than of actual reality.
Just a few of the great voices of the 20th century, without much comment except that I don’t mention them randomly; the word “great” is intentional:
Mary Margaret O’Hara*
Ella Fitzgerald
Kate Bush
Betty Carter
Shirley Horn
Polly Jean Harvey
Eddi Reader
Doris Day
k.d. lang
Johnette Napolitano
Neko Case
Victoria Williams
Jane Siberry
Diamanda Galas
Anneli Drecker
Happy Rhodes
Anna Domino
Bjork
Amy Denio
Lisa Gerard
Katell Keinig
Stina Nordenstam
Sidsel Endreson
Holly Cole
–Those are just my top favorite; my first round of elmination in choosing my desert island pile. And strictly off the top of my head; I reserve the right to add more later.
*If I had to pick a single voice as my one favorite, it might be Mary Margaret O’Hara. And have you even heard of her, Chuck? You got to dig, dude; you can’t wait for the radio to bring your music to you.
–and I apologize if I appear to be picking on Chuck. His attitude is certainly not unique–far from it. Only I momentarily bristled because it seems to me that it would be more seemly if he’d adopted the tone of student, rather than of teacher, on a subject that is clearly not his area of experience. Personal reaction, not intended to be insulting.
Dang, forgot to mention another point (actually I just wanted to see how long I could keep up this whole replying-to-myself chain . . . :rolleyes: )
As far as faulting Valli for not writing his own songs, or this recent criterion Chuck has added regarding an instrument, that’s way, well, backwards. Did Frank ever write a song? Ella? Well, Ella has a credit for improv’ing the scat-based lyric of parts of “A Tisket, A Tasket,” but she never sat down and wrote a song. The entire history of most of 20th cent pop is, you got your songwriters over here in this building, and you got your singers over in the recording studio or on the road. That only changed in the sixties, with Dylan. It’s ludicrous to fault singers for not being songwriters; it’d be like faulting actors for not being playwright.
What, no Joe Cocker?
That’s pretty much what I was thinking. By the way, what instruments did Frankie Valli play? Frank Sinatra?
lissener is addled. I am in no way an authority on 20th century female pop, but I did have a radio show for 6 years in Kansas City and 4 years in Chicago that featured female vocals, several years before Lilith. I have about 1500 or so CDs and over 1000 LPs and I have no idea how many cassettes of female vocalists. I’m still discovering female vocalists, thousands of them on MySpace just in the past few months.
That’s pretty much what I thought, though in actuality the presentation wasn’t strident and it wasn’t at all political. Mine was a cheerful, Hey, listen to THIS!..Wasn’t that a great song? You HAVE to hear this artist! What a voice huh? OMG, listen to what I just discovered pawing through a record store bin! type show. I prefer female vocalists and there were (still are) precious few of them on the radio. And you hear the same ones over and over again. I wanted more variety. More than voices though, I focused on songs. I had to love, or at least like the song. Some I liked more than others. Some artists had an entire catalog of great songs to choose from, while others had one good song that I could stand to play.
About 95% of what I played…I couldn’t and still don’t see why the songs couldn’t be played on regular radio. The other 5% were weird things like Diamanda Galas or John Zorn (with, say, Luli Shoi singing). (Oh yeah, I played lots of male groups/artists, if they had a female singer dueting or singing lead. Think I didn’t play Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up”? It wasn’t a feminist show, it was a celebration of the female voice).
Most of them aren’t my style either, and I rarely played such people even if I did like them, because they got more than enough exposure. I played all different genres too.
To get a sampling of great or at least really interesting voices, go to http://suspended-in-gaffa.com and check out my podcasts. You don’t even have to listen to the whole shows. Each show has 30 second clips of each artist so you can sample what they sound like. Not all of them are going to appeal, and at least a few will have you scratching your head as to why I think they’re good singers (Victoria Williams is an aquired taste to some), but if you can take the time, listen to each sample of all 4 shows, and you’ll at least have broadened your musical/vocal horizons a tiny bit. Those 4 shows just scratch the surface. They don’t even scratch the surface. They scuff it a bit.
Well, the Beatles deserve a lot of credit/blame for this, too.
None of this happened in a vacuum of course, but the modern concept of the “singer-songwriter” started, largely, popularly, not in a vacuum, with Bob Dylan. The Beatles were a band of four, who also wrote their own songs of course. Not the first there, either. And Buddy Holly came before Dylan as well. Nonetheless, the modern concept of the “singer-songwriter” that ruled the airwaves in the seventies, and has oddly become the standard for many in the present day, came to the fore with Dylan. Among others, not in a vacuum, there’s an exception to every rule, yadda yadda yadda.
(I get so dang tired of having to preempt every conceivable “argument” by appending a drug-ad’s-worth of fine print to every CS post. Can’t we just take some of these givens as, well, given?)
To you (and lissener) I ask this question:
If a musician sings in the woods and no one is around, does she make a sound? 
Slightly more seriously, I don’t think it’s quite fair to insist that folks are wrong about contemporary music because they don’t work to bypass the most prolific and effective distribution channels in the business.
If no one is listening, a person might as well be singing in the shower. Well, that’s not quite true, there’s definitely a lot of grey in between shower and fame, but if you’re going to talk about the ‘music scene’ as an entity, then you’ve got to qualify it somehow. And, since it’s where most of the money is, I don’t see how it’s ignorant or wrong to limit oneself to mainstream music.
For example, there’s a local artist (well, she’s down in Mass) whose voice I love. I might mention her in this discussion, but I wouldn’t fault anyone else for not knowing about her.
No one is faulting anyone for ignorance. Re-read the thread; there’s all kind of disclaimers to that effect.
The faulting, if any, is that you can’t speak from a position of authority if you’re just a passive absorber of marketing-driven music. Like anything else in that arena, it’s a pyramid. Everyone’s heard of the one or two individuals at the top, but the farther down the pyramid you go, the more there is to discover. If you’re only familiar with the tip of the pyramid, fine, whatever, no one is faulting you for being like the vast majority of people. Music consumers form a kind of inverted pyramid, in relation to the artist’s pyramid: the higher up the artist pyramid you go–to the very few most popular–the more consumers will have heard of them. The lower you go, the fewer.
It’s a fact, a pretty inescapable one. And no one is being “faulted” for it.
This is all in response to Chuck’s negative statements, about what is NOT out there. You cannot prove a negative, of course; you’d have to have experience of EVERY SINGLE ARTIST OUT THERE to make a definitive negative statement like Chuck’s. This is impossible, but it’s approachable. That is, the more experience you DO have, of more and more artists, the more authority your opinion on such a matter will have. No one can ever become “expert” enough to dictate a definitive statement of this kind, so I’m not arguing for that. I’m just saying that passively absorbing only marketing driven pop places you at one point of the experience/authority spectrum–or near the top of our inverted pyramid–while the more active effort you make to seek out and discover non-marketing-driven artists, the lower you are on that inverted pyramid. Is all.
And to preempt, I’m not claiming that authority. I’m just trying to place in perspective, if your entire experience of female-vocal pop is “Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Tori Amos,” then there’s a huge universe out there to explore. The more effort you put into it, the more you will discover. The music that comes knocking on your door is only the tiniest fraction of what’s available to the active seeker.
She does to me, even if I don’t hear it at that moment.
But some people are listening, and in the age of the Internet, with the advent of first Napster, and now MySpace, among other places, more people can listen than ever.
Qualify it how? What Clear Channel says? If it’s not heard on Clear Channel stations it’s not…what? Worthwhile? Worth listening to? Worth anything?
I’m sorry, what? All the money is being spent on mainstream music, so one should limit oneself to that? I’m not understanding that sentence.
I’m not totally unsympathetic to what you’re getting at. I grew up with 60’s and early 70’s Top 40 radio. That’s all I listened to, so there were hundreds, thousands, of great songs I never heard, tons of artists I never knew about. The difference is that radio back then was REALLY good. Stations/programmers/DJs did take chances and play unusual things. I credit that radio for me having such eclectic taste in music today. When you could hear Shelly Fabres next to the Jackson Five next to Glen Campbell next to The Beatles next to Dusty Springfield next to Patsy Cline next to The Byrds next to Tom Jones next to …on and on and on…it was eclectic music, great songs, different genres. That was before the genres were ghettoized.
If a song wasn’t a hit back then, was it not worth listening to? Well, now that I know about Serge Gainsborg, Timi Yuro, Judee Sill, Jimmy Smith, Tim Buckley, Jane Birkin and many others I can’t think of at the moment, I’d say that there was a lot of great music even back then that didn’t get airplay (at least in the Kansas City area, where I grew up).
Who is it?
Right. It’s blanket statements like “In conclusion, today’s music is not to produce anything worthwhile” that bothers me. That’s so wrong on so many levels it leaves me speechless.