That's the UK's entry. I like all the references to various medical issues one may incur before you'll lose your lovers affections, also that famous UK musical cornerstone known as scat singing.
Another thing I like about our entry is how it manages to seem 5 years out of date already. How is that even possible? 5 years isn't even long enough for something to become out of date.
Everything about our entry is outmoded amateurish.
The obvious reason it sounds at least five years out of date is that electro swing was a brief fad that passed out of vogue at least five years ago, but there's far more to it than that. The instrumentation is hopelessly mechanical and old fashioned - the square wave sub-bass, the badly sampled slap bass just before the bridge, the utterly flat hi-hats, the dreadfully synthetic sampled strings and brass. The four to the floor rhythm would have sounded pretty cheesy five years ago, but now it just sounds like a middle-aged producer half-remembering something he once heard coming out of a Vauxhall Nova. The arrangement is far too busy, which is only exacerbated by a mushy and indistinct mix; It's just a big brick wall of noise from start to finish, with no real dynamic structure. To top it all, neither of the vocalists can sing particularly well, with the bloke being especially poor. The production as a whole sounds like a TV theme tune that has been knocked together on the cheap.
What puzzles me most about our shambolic record of Eurovision entries is that Britain is at the absolute cutting edge of popular music. Where we go, the rest of the world follows, as they have done for ten or fifteen years. Every week, I must get twenty or thirty demos from unsigned artists that would stand a better chance than this tat.
To hear how it should be done, critically listen to just about any naff pop record you've heard on a mobile phone advert.
Listen to how much space and air there is in the Clean Bandit mix, how crisp and distinct the individual elements are. The arrangement is tremendously dynamic; When the piano kicks in for the chorus, you get a real uplift because you haven't been battered by noise during the verses. After the second chorus, everything but the vocal drops out entirely, allowing the energy to build back up for the third chorus. Listen to the hi-hats, really lean in and listen, and compare them to those in the Electro Velvet track. Can you hear how much groove and dynamism there is in just that one element? Jess Glynne's vocal performance is a masterclass in precision and control - every note is bang on, every bit of portamento hits the mark dead, every melismatic ornament is perfectly judged.
Pop is brilliant, Eurovision is shit, Tom Robinson for PM.
In case you hadn't worked it out, I really need to go to bed. Just waiting for the valium to overtake the whizz. I can feel my pulse in my eyes. That can't be healthy, can it?
I would love to do a late-night TV programme called Raving On, with a bunch of middle-aged cratedigging nerds waxing lyrical about the drum programming on an obscure Frankie Knuckles b-side. It could be like the Open University for people who did too many pingers in the 90s.
However, I would like to suggest that you are making a lot more fuss about production that is really representative, probably because you are a producer. You sound like one anyway.
Good production largely comes along as a happy, coincidental result of a well composed and imaginatively arranged track, in electronic terms anyway. A producer can only work with what he's got, and some tracks are just destined to sound flat or messy regardless.
The reason our entry sounds like a naff song off the Steps reunion album that never happened, is because that's exactly what it is. Half of the melody is ripped off from The Jungle Book. I'm sure some Simon Cowell wannabe threw the arrangement together and then his underpaid intern just threw it through MultiMaximiser a couple of times- To put any more effort in would have been a waste anyway.
It is perplexing why Britain never has good Eurovision entries, though. You make a good point. Maybe we're not allowed to have our real talented acts on, like how the at the Olympics it's cheating if you send your proper professional athletes?
I have a little theory on the general crapness of eurovision.
In general, modern pop is designed to be drip fed to the consumer (after all that is all we are) through constant repetition. After all familiarity is a big part of enjoying music for most people. Most mainstream massive pop hits ( Sam Smith, Taylor Swift, 1D, Sheeran etc) I doubt most people remember the first time they heard them. It just sneaks into your mind until you know it. The clean bandit track here is a great example, I can sing almost all of it but don't care enough to know who it was by or what it was called.
Now Eurovision is different. You need a track that will hit in 1 go, not a slow building repeat listen in the bars kinda track. You'll note that the most successful x-factor type winners win on a big loved KNOWN track but this isn't allowed on eurovision.
It seems in the UK we try to make a catch all but generic track to try and trigger a false familiarity. All this really does is make an uninspired song of little or no merit.
Some countries, successfully, use a quirky track. Downs punks, death metal and sausage pussy he/shes are prime examples. This grabs the attention, makes the act memorable and gets the votes. Even if the repeat play value of the track is very poor.
This is the complete opposite of our modern music industries desire to not just get you to buy the track for 99p, but to also be more likely to buy products the track is selling on adverts or to view the track on youtube/listen on spotify etc.
It remains to be seen what would happen if you shoved one of the years biggest British pop hits on eurovision when no one knew it or the artist, but I suspect it would just get ignored as uninteresting.
>>23248 >It is perplexing why Britain never has good Eurovision entries, though.
We staged the 1982 event in the Harrogate Centre, with a capacity of 2000. The 1998 contest was in the NIA, which has a notional capacity of 14,000, but the in-house audience was nowhere near that large. Tonight's contest has massive staging and still has room left over for more than 10,000 people. It has become phenomenally expensive to stage it, what with the requirement for semi-finals. More than one country pulled out during the recession for fear of the costs of hosting it. The BBC are responsible for nominating our entries, and when we win they are responsible for organising the following year's event. I suspect that they really, really don't want to do that, and may be nobbling the entries to ensure they're not saddled with it.
You touch on some interesting points. I'm going to propose a quick case study.
Well respected and well known black metal band Keep of Kalessin went on Eurovision for Norway or whatever Scandinavian country they're from a few years back. Here is the sort of music their fans would be accustomed to hearing:
Now, it's important to note that the band had arguably been moving in a more mainstream direction already- Their previous album, released a few years before the contest entry, had a considerably more refined, melodic overall sound. It contained catchy (as far as black metal goes) tracks such as this one. Gone are the harsh, unintelligible shrieks staple to the genre, replaced with a much more accessible vocal style, and even an uplifting major key progression during the chorus.
I mean... If you think it's reasonably catchy, just wait until it gets to the solo and you will understand just how truly they phoned this one in.
But it is puzzling nevertheless- This was indeed a talented, established act, even if it's from a somewhat "alternative" genre. If the intent was a novelty "Oh look them scary metalheads with the black hair and stuff" act, why did they dumb their music down to such an extreme? If the intent was to sell out and write a friendly pop-rock song, why didn't they just get another Bon Jovi sound-alike in the vein of Lordi? (And Lordi were genuinely pretty good, in my opinion.)
Perhaps we shall never know. Perhaps they just wanted to piss off people like me who will never be able to wear a t-shirt with that band's name on it ever again.
>Good production largely comes along as a happy, coincidental result of a well composed and imaginatively arranged track, in electronic terms anyway. A producer can only work with what he's got, and some tracks are just destined to sound flat or messy regardless.
The writing and arrangement absolutely do need to be sorted, but arrangement is firmly within the remit of a modern pop producer. I do think you underestimate the importance of production in pop - a great producer can completely transform a record. The textbook example is that of Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood:
Trevor Horn's midas touch turned a fairly mediocre song by a bunch of scouse perverts into pop gold. Horn called the original version "more a jingle than a song", but he saw the skeleton of a hit record and willed it into being. Most of the excitement and energy of the song comes from instrumentation and sound design.
ZTT took that to the logical conclusion with Art of Noise, who had enormous commercial success with songs that were barely even songs. Moments In Love is one of the most gorgeously evocative pop records, but there's almost nothing there in terms of songwriting, it's more of a soundscape peppered with the merest fragments of melody.
You can just be good. Lena Meyer-Landrut absolutely smashed it with Satellite, which offered very little in the way of novelty but was just an excellent pop record. There were no gimmicks, no elaborate stage show, just a song that deserved to be a hit. Unfortunately, I think >>23253 is close to the mark - like many other countries, Britain just doesn't want to risk the possibility of winning.
Also, just for the sake of posterity, here's the greatest non-Abba Eurovision entry ever, that somehow managed to leave the live audience dumbfounded and finish dead last:
Well yes, of course. I tried to touch on that in my post but it kind of didn't come out. A pop producer these days is essentially doing what a ghost writer does for those celebrity autobiographies, the name on the front of the record is usually just the singer.
But the way I look at it and what I was really talking about is production being the mix, the recording techniques used, the engineering and so on basically. If a producer wants to take over responsibility for arranging the song, choosing the instrumentation, and so on, that's fine, but to discuss that under the umbrella term of "production" seems a bit daft to me. Granted it's industry terminology but it's a bit backwards to me- Once a producer is getting to that level of involvement, they're the main artist.
For example, in the dance world, the word producer is taken to mean "musician", really- They do all the magic things that make the song into a song. On a pop record like we were discussing, it's likely to be design by committee, and a paid-by-the-hour producer who doesn't really care for the source material isn't going to do it much good. We're not talking the kind of pop that at least comes from a genuine artist to begin with and then gets spruced up by some tosser in shoulder pads with a good business sense, but who knows how to work Logic; we're talking full-on, production line, made-to-order modular music.
I think you're being slightly unfair to the modern pop industry. You could call it a production line, but I prefer to think of it as the division of labour. Several contributors with specialised skills can make something quite wonderful as a collaborative effort.
In modern usage, the term "pop producer" is loosely equivalent to "movie director" - their role is to have broad creative oversight, rather than specific responsibility for any particular task. A large proportion of pop producers don't do their own mixes, handing that responsibility to a specialist mix engineer; Likewise, they will often draft in arrangers, engineers and programmers as they see fit.
If you look at the credits of a contemporary pop record, you'll often find four or five people listed as writers, and as many again listed as producers. The division of labour between lyric and melody is as old as pop itself, but roles are increasingly specialised. Topliners, for example, are responsible solely for writing vocal hooks. Many of the best topliners in the business have very limited songwriting ability and rely on other writers for structure and harmony, but they have remarkable ears for a hook. Ester Dean is one of the hottest properties in pop, just for writing little phrases like the "na na na na come on" in Rihanna's S&M or "boom, badoom boom bass" in Nicki Minaj's Super Bass. A lot of people get producer credits after being brought in purely to program the drum parts, or add distinctive synth effects to the chorus.
I don't think it makes too much sense to get caught up on the idea of auterism, the belief that authentic work should come from a sole artistic voice. In the classical tradition, writing and performance are almost always completely separate activities. In jazz, a song may be transformed beyond recognition by the interpretation of improvising musicians, bouncing off each other's sense of how a piece should sound. Pop is a collaborative art form, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
>>23253 >More than one country pulled out during the recession for fear of the costs of hosting it. The BBC are responsible for nominating our entries, and when we win they are responsible for organising the following year's event. I suspect that they really, really don't want to do that, and may be nobbling the entries to ensure they're not saddled with it.
This was often offered up as the reason why Eurovision was filled with such garbage way back when I were a nipper, which is twenty or so years ago. Made sense to me then and still does now, but I'd still consider it a "pub fact" if you know what I mean.
>Ester Dean is one of the hottest properties in pop, just for writing little phrases like the "na na na na come on" in Rihanna's S&M or "boom, badoom boom bass" in Nicki Minaj's Super Bass
Sorry to pull the wool from your eyes, lad, but have you ever met Ester Dean? Probably not. That's because, Ester Dean doesn't exist. Her previously fabricated career is one of smoke, mirrors and state of the art projection technology.
Her real identity that of an experimental VST created by Steinberg Labs in 2003, designed to filter all known world languages and compare the rhythm, timbre and accent of different words, in order to generate sonically unique sentences. Often, it only gave out nonsense, but the developers soon found that it was nonsense of such a precise structure that it was indistinguishable from that of a human songwriter.
Soon, by the later years of the first decade of the 21st century, the lobotomised masses were conditioned to hearing simple, repetetive phrases like "Let's do it, and d it, and do it, and do it" in substitute for actual lyrics. EMI group, together with Warner and Universal, each bought an equal share in the Steinberg product. With a few tweaks, "Ester Dean", as she was now known, was introduced to studios everywhere. The rest is history.
I really like the way you write about music, but I'm sorry. No matter how well pop music worms it's way into our psyche or how good the people involved are at making that happen, doesn't make it good. In fact it's quite the opposite. I'm not arguing that old music was better or that music produced by a single "real" musician is better or anything like that, simply that pop music is mindless shite, nothing but an arm of the subliminal commercialism that surrounds us. The adverts we see, the shite fashion we wear, the way our self image is guided and attacked by what we see on the TV, and the music we are bombarded with on every radio station and nightclub PA are all one and the same.
>>23274 Our entries through those years weren't that bad, whereas for the last decade they've been dire. Moreover, we have actual evidence of a reluctance to win in recent years.
>>23275 >pop music is mindless shite
There's nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. Pacific Rim is mindless shite, and I enjoyed it. Last christmas I bought a book of pictures of baby animals as "a present for all the family", but really, I bought it because I wanted to indulge in it myself - mindless shite churned out for a quick profit, but a briefly entertaining distraction. And so on. Nevertheless, poplad's occasional paeans to the genius of ultra-mainstream commercial music production have always struck me as being like... fawning over an advert, somehow. I get it, I really do, and I hope the posts keep coming as they're generally insightful, well-written and evince a deep understanding of the field, which is always welcome. I can't muster up anything remotely like the same level of enthusiasm, though.
>>23239 >Every week, I must get twenty or thirty demos from unsigned artists
I presume you work in the industry. Did an appreciation for pop music inspire you to move into this line of work, or did it come later as a consequence?
>>23277 Pacific Rim was a massive project involving hundreds and hundreds of people. Pop music is made by a few talentless cunts in a studio with money grubbing, corrupt scumbags making the money from the production rights. Pacific Rim is fucking Blade Runner compared to the UK top 40.
Just because something involves hundreds of people doesn't make it good.
I assume you're trying to say that the fact skilled professionals worked on the film, that makes it more worthy? I might be inclined to agree, but your perspective is skewed - it takes a lot of talent to write, produce and record a pop song - it's usually not the 'artist' that has that talent, but it is still applied to the song by the writer, producer and engineers.
Many people say pop songs are trash, and that anyone could write them. If this was true, why don't more people do it?
>>23279 >Many people say pop songs are trash, and that anyone could write them. If this was true, why don't more people do it?
Many people do, as demotapelad has shown. However the record labels and industry generally looks after its own interest and doesn't want the market to be saturated.
Pacific Rim was a massive undertaking, led by a director who worked for weeks and weeks straight with around 6 hours sleep a day. Look up its production story, the amount of work it involved compared to blurred lines or whatever garbage is vomited onto the top 40 this month is gargantuan.
>Pop music is made by a few talentless cunts in a studio
Cunts they may be, but they certainly aren't talentless. Those talents could be better applied elsewhere, no argument there, but if you think it's easy to produce music that's as technically proficient as the dross that tops the charts then you simply don't know what you're talking about.
>Pacific Rim is fucking Blade Runner compared to the UK top 40.
This is a moronic, nonsensical comparison.
>Cunts they may be, but they certainly aren't talentless. Those talents could be better applied elsewhere, no argument there, but if you think it's easy to produce music that's as technically proficient as the dross that tops the charts then you simply don't know what you're talking about.
The thing is, though, and let's be honest here and just get right down to the truth of the matter. The thing is.
The thing is, is that this point of view is really the same as saying "AIDS may well be the killer of about 1.4 million people annually, but it's an fascinatingly well adapted organism", or "Hitler may have killed 6 million Jews, but look at the way he revolutionised German industry."
Pop music is a bad thing, just in general. End of.
>I presume you work in the industry. Did an appreciation for pop music inspire you to move into this line of work, or did it come later as a consequence?
Both my parents worked as session musicians, before becoming music lecturers. I had a brief stint in a band that got a major label deal (worked my arse off, did an album that sold fairly well, made less money than if I had stayed on the dole) before spending some time as a session player and eventually leaving the industry for the sake of my sanity.
I used to be very snobbish about music, and had no interest in anything that wasn't serious and challenging. Partly, my opinion changed because I saw that many other genres of music were just as manufactured as pop - the ghostwriting and studio trickery just gets concealed to protect the credibility of the artist. Mainly though, working with pop producers made me realise just how hard pop music is to get right, and how immensely skilled hit-makers are.
Like a lot of 'proper' musicians, I thought that pop was just formulaic crap that only sold because it had the promotional might of a major label behind it. I thought that my sort of music was innately better, because it was complicated and pseudo-intellectual. It turns out that being clever is much easier than being good.
If it was so easy to make a hit record, then everyone would be doing it. If the major labels just followed a formula, then they would have an intern knock something together rather than giving Guy Chambers six figures plus points on the album. Making something simple, memorable and emotionally resonant is part science, part art, part alchemy. Pop songwriters and producers are highly skilled, work very hard and truly care about their work.
I think that to enjoy pop music, you just need to invest yourself in it a little bit. Let down your defences, look past your cynicism and take things on their own merits. Something can be pink and bubbly and slickly produced and still be brilliant. Good pop often explores an emotional range that men are discouraged from engaging with - yearning, the desire to be desired, vulnerability, emotional need, self-reassurance. It takes a certain amount of courage to allow yourself to empathise with that, rather than the more "masculine" sentiments found in rock music.
We often accept the idea that our taste in music defines us as a person, but I think that's a cage of marketing and tribalism. It's OK to like Ornette Coleman and Kylie Minogue. It's good to say "I don't like that song, but I'm not going to let that prejudice me against an artist or a genre". Some things are good, some are bad, some are good but just not to your taste, some are bad but you like them anyway. The same applies to all of art - there's good and bad to be found everywhere.
If you're interested in the craft of song, then I highly recommend the Sodajerker podcast. They interview renowned songwriters from right across the musical spectrum, and really get into the substance of their work. The podcast is quite insiderish, so the interviewees are often remarkably candid.
>Look up its production story, the amount of work it involved compared to blurred lines or whatever garbage is vomited onto the top 40 this month is gargantuan
You're comparing a two hour film containing 40+ actors with a three minute song featuring three or four musicians and a singer.
>>23289 Exactly. A project like Pacific Rim requires an absurd amount of leadership and coordination, the management of men and materiel. A few cunts fannying around making wank tunes does not.
Feels weird to have this in /zoo/. I miss /zoo/. I suppose that even if the floodgates were re-opened it's too late, we've already lost the Byelorussian guy. I miss the Byelorussian guy.
>>23296 Yeah ok buddy, if I do a walking tour over the Alps I'm practically Hannibal Barca because the number of people involved in a job is irrelevant.
>>23299 You are not serious. Hannibal's crossing of the alps required intense coordination and planning of the movements of thousands of men and material, as did the production of Pacific Rim ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1663662/fullcredits/ ). The production of a film on this scale is not 'mindless', it is a ludicrously difficult thing to do.
The making of shitty pop music is a fucking walk in the park, so long as you've given the right cunts some head.
