Pop Idle
The demise of the British music industry is old news. The insiders — DJs, A&R men — have been predicting it for years, but oddly enough there has not yet been a meltdown. Record sales are even beginning to go up. The reemergence of singer-songwriters like James Blunt and Amy Winehouse, rock ‘n’ roll outsiders such as Arctic Monkeys, and classroom rebels like Dizzee Rascal, has meant a resurgence of interest in British music.
Paul Rees, editor of Q magazine, sees the industry as being “in a better state than people think. People are always harking back to some other era, going how great it was, and if you actually think back or if you look at the charts in those eras, they’re diabolical”. This may well be true, but while our parents’ generation was used to being told to “turn down that crap,” my mum rather likes the Kaiser Chiefs.
More soberingly, today’s indie kids, with their skinny jeans and asymmetrical haircuts, do not even realise that indie once stood for “independent”, a mid-nineties, post-grunge movement with bands like the Dandy Warhols and Kula Shaker at its helm. Kula Shaker disappeared, the Dandies sold their souls to Vodaphone and Simon Cowell gave us Pop Idol.
As Rees points out, “There is no independent music anymore,” citing Domino records, a supposedly alternative record label but home to Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys, as an example. But every generation gets the music it deserves and in an era where the rebels of choice are Avril Lavigne and whatever cover band NME is wanking over this week, maybe Pop Idol for the pop idle is somehow appropriate.
No longer must the music-lover queue outside his local record shop for the latest CD, he can now download it in under three minutes from the comfort of his bedroom. Rees points out that “[the record labels] were really slow on this whole downloading thing, thinking it was going to stop people from buying records, but it’s done the opposite. It’s engaged people with music again. It’s empowered people to go and listen to music.
Moreover, Rees claims that the industry itself is beginning to change. “They’ve started to sign artists and bands again based on the fact that they might have a career, rather than a lot of disposable pop music, like Shayne what’shis- face,” referring to Shayne Ward, winner of the last series of X Factor.
This might be an overly optimistic view, however, as Courtney Taylor, lead singer of the Dandy Warhols, speaking long before Bohemian Like You was appearing on television adverts, noted that “record companies tell you they’re interested in careers not hits, but if you’re not producing hits they don’t give a fuck about your career”. Maybe like the finale of X Factor, the result, in the end, is down to the public.
If we continue to lead the way, record companies will stop investing precious amounts of money on artists whose surnames music editors cannot even remember, and give us some real music.
18th May 2006