Posts by Ken Double
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looking at you right now, advertising creatives
Er, that would be me. It's actually one of the pleasures of the job believe it or not. Time was no respectable musician would have been seen dead associating with advertising but it's a different world now.
It's about more than just licensing of existing material though. I don't know why it doesn't occur to more creatives to commission the bands they love to write for the occasion. Artists like it because they get to do their actual thing for proper money without shopping their personal stuff. They also get a pleasing kind of anonymity that allows them to drop their guard musically.
I've worked with Sean, Barry Saunders, Rhian Sheehan, Don McGlashan, Phoenix Foundation and heaps of others and never had a moment's attitude or a bad tune from any of them. The only thing you have to remember is that you're not hiring some "versatile" professional. You're tapping into someone's sensibility and you have to want what it is they do. You're effectively casting them like an actor.
By the way, there's a lot of ire directed at streaming but I think two things should be remembered. 1) It works for listeners. 2) If we're pointing the finger about lack of income, don't assume it's Spotify. The record companies are right in there with their snouts in the trough and they're not revealing anything about their agreements or payment structures. David Byrne is onto this and I hope he gets some results.
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I just looked up (evil) "Dust in the Wind" on YouTube - 44 MILLION views! Hardly any comments in English though. Something's happening here etc.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Up the Charts, in reply to Mark Cubey,
Like a lot of shitty analog gear, cassettes have a weird mastering effect on a digital source. The sound is objectively worse yet there's something about the warmth of the crude tape compression that does a brittle mp3 a world of good emotionally.
As for "Bad Blood" and 1989, I concur.
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Ah yes. In the long history of "disposable" pop music only The Beatles ever got any respect. These days I find myself in the curious position of enjoying pop music that my children think is beneath THEM. (The shit I get from my youngest over Gaga...)
My punky, new wavy generation was taught to resent pop as false and contrived but I just can't. I love melody, I love the human voice, especially when it's stating something coherent, and I have a shit attention span that only Miles Davis can defeat. Most of the charts are rubbish - as ever - but I still maintain you're more likely to find a great song there than on anything Pitchfork graded in the last week. (To be fair, they're much more catholic these days.)
If you want funny, smart, argumentative writing on contemporary pop I can highly recommend The Singles Jukebox.
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Hard News: Friday Music: So Rad, in reply to Russell Brown,
Sorry I'm a little late to this party but I'm heartened the over 35s are starting to appreciate Miley's chops, not to mention her mastery of her own destiny. I'm a fan.
This should be of particular interest to New Zealanders. (I've forgotten I actually used to like this song....)
Plainly if Disney does nothing else it teaches you to sing properly.
Aaaaand............................ Replacements!
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Hard News: Friday Music: Record Store…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I still have my Krypton Hits. I shall pass it on to my children who will listen distractedly to the attendant backstory before sticking it next to Godley and Creme's "Consequences" box set in the garage sale that follows my premature death in a home brewing accident. It is foretold.
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Unlike the stupid floating Facebook,etc links bar The Press has recently added which renders the space bar command of ‘screen down’ useless, as it obliterates the top 3 lines of type – why woud ya do that?
I'm afraid social media has completely addled the minds of marketers. I apologise on behalf of a benighted industry that has collectively lost its scone.
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I'm depressed to see Campbell described as "lefty" in so many places. That may be news to Helen Clark. He's certainly not on Team Key but NEITHER SHOULD HE BE. (Sorry that damn caps lock keeps sticking.) Campbell's cultural background is inner-city liberal, but he's impeccably apolitical, happy to go after either the left or the right. In other words, he's a good journalist. There's a false equivalence in operation that sees Campbell as the mirror of the Henry Hosking Hydra, but an objective look at his record reveals nothing more than a journo doing his job.
I'm inclined to sympathise with Russell's notion that maybe Campbell's audience doesn't watch telly at 7pm anymore (mea culpa) but if your own channel isn't supporting you then it's not hard to organise a fait accompli. It's the politics of this that gets you down; the creeping takeover of media by politically motivated interests. We've avoided the worst of it in New Zealand for a long time but no more.
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Tinashe was there? She's pretty hot poop right now. A bit urban for Splore I'd have thought but that's no bad thing. All we get down here is Ciara.
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Looks like Ms Barnett has worked out that irony doesn't have to mean detachment. She sounds almost pissed off. And her band sounds pissed off too. Cool!