Tag: 11.02.03

Cheap Music That’s Legal (Whoopee!)

“Music-for-peanuts is suddenly flooding the Internet, much of the tide being released by at least eight Web sites, each one telling the world that it has a quarter of a million songs or more in stock. This wave of legitimate, low-cost music may eventually sweep away music stores as we knew and loved them, because it is such an easy wave to ride. If you can surf the Internet – and especially if you have a high-speed cable modem or DSL connection to the Net – you can do this.”

Turner – Once You Get Beyond The Damn Hype…

What’s with all the “controversy about the Chapmans’ Turner entry this year? “Nobody I know who has actually seen the Chapman brothers’ Death, as the sculpture is called, thought it anything other than oafish. To my mind, it is by far the duffest work they have ever produced. The sense is of a stand-up comic who has lost his sense of timing and is reduced to begging for a laugh.” Meanwhile, the rest of the show is pretty good…

Loving To Hate You – 20 Years Of The Turner Prize

The Turner Prize is the art prize people love to hate. “In its early days the award was criticised for its emphasis on established names, but in 1991 it was relaunched with a hip new sponsor, twice the prize money and an upper age limit. It was thus perfectly positioned to pick up on the whole Britart phenomenon.” Now it fuels controversy after manufactured controversy. Here’s the Guardian’s look back at 20 years of the Turner…

Tarting Up The Classics

“Just when you thought it was safe to get in an elevator again, there comes a new twist on an old bastardization: the rearrangement of classical standards by performers whose chief selling points are not their musical chops but their sexy attire and cool attitudes. The Planets, a British acoustic-electronic ensemble, sell bizarre arrangements of Bach, Bizet and, of course, Clair de Lune on their Classical Graffiti disc. The OperaBabes, also British, indiscriminately mix arias and famous classical instrumental works – all arranged for vocal duet and backed up by various combinations of chorus, string orchestra and the inevitable electronic keyboards.”

Getting Hot Over “Smooth” Jazz

Hard-core jazz fans can’t abide it, but the so-called “smooth jazz” has a large and growing following. “It’s supposed to be banal tripe for people too meek for real jazz. It’s the boring music played on ‘quiet storm’ radio stations or heard in the waiting rooms, lounges and elevators. It’s even the porno industry’s soundtrack. Nonetheless, smooth jazz has its champions. And its audiences are perhaps the most diverse and harmonious in all of music.”

Recording Companies Increasingly Focusing On Older Consumers

While overall sales of recordings are down, music sales to older music lovers are strong. “The growing success of albums by older artists — and of singers like Norah Jones, who appeal to less cutting-edge tastes — offers some solace to an industry mired in a three-year sales slump. The older audience, typically more affluent consumers who grew up buying their music on vinyl LP’s, seldom uses the free file-sharing sites. And because they account for a growing segment of the record-buying public, labels are increasingly tailoring their releases and their marketing, particularly on television, to reach them.”

Stories Of Gabriel García Márquez

Published in 1967, Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ became “one of those extremely rare books that affected people’s ideas about the contemporary novel and also their sense of reality. This became true not only for his readers but also for the many more who eventually received such information, diluted and dispersed into popular culture, without being aware of its source. (A recent newspaper poll in Spain found ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ ranked just after the Bible and ‘Don Quixote’ in universal historical importance – surely the voters can’t all have read it?) Indeed, it is hard to conceive what our sense of the novel, or even of Latin America itself, would be like now had the writings of Gabriel García Márquez never existed.”