Banned In the U.S.A.

My local supermarket sometimes plays classic rock on its P.A. system, and while I was shipping there today, I heard a song I hadn't heard before.  I listened carefully to the lyrics and memorized enough of them to Google them on my laptop.  It turned out to by "Keep Pushin'" by REO Speedwagon, released a few years before the Illinois band released Hi Infidelity, their nationwide commercial breakthrough.   Anyway, I punched up an audio-only video for the song on YouTube to hear it again, and I got a title card saying that the video was banned in my country because of an organization called SESAC.  I tried someone else's upload of "Keep Pushin'" and I got the same message.  What was going on here?  I then Googled SESAC and found out the awful truth.

SESAC is an acronym for the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, a sister licensing organization of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcasters Music Incorporated (BMI), the groups that govern song rights.  YouTube was allowed to offer recordings of songs published under the auspices of SESAC until yesterday at 4 P.M., when a contract between SESAC and YouTube expired and negotiations to renew it had proven fruitless.  The result is that any songs written and/or recorded by music artists whose work is protected by SESAC are no longer available for hearing on YouTube.  Not just audio-only video clips, but also official promotional clips.  Not only is REO affected, so is R.E.M., as well as Nirvana, Green Day, Bob Dylan, Cheap Trick, and Adele.

And as you can see, you can say goodbye to Adele's "Hello."

The good news is that the ban on SESAC content is likely to be temporary. The bad news is that no one knows just how temporary it will be.  A YouTube spokeswoman  responded to requests for the state of affairs regarding SESAC-licensed artists.  

"We have held good faith negotiations with SESAC to renew our existing deal. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we were unable to reach an equitable agreement before its expiration," the spokeswoman said through a press release.  We take copyright very seriously and as a result, content represented by SESAC is no longer available on YouTube in the U.S. We are in active conversations with SESAC and are hoping to reach a new deal as soon as possible."

I don't know how much this is going to affect my Music Video Of the Week segment on this blog, but given that SESAC is smaller than its sister licensing groups, so it will probably be more of an annoyance than a major inconvenience.  Those who want to hear either of the two live Budokan albums from Bob Dylan or Cheap Trick might as well just buy them rather than hear them on YouTube (though you should just get the Cheap Trick album, because their 1978 Tokyo performance was as wonderful as Dylan's was horrid).  As for YouTube's efforts to regain the rights to uploading SESAC-licensed recordings . . . I hope they take REO's advice and keep pushin'.  

2017 Grammy Update

Last week I wrote that I was relieved when Kanye West didn't jump out of nowhere to hijack Adele's acceptance speech for the Record of the Year Grammy with a protest on Beyoncé's behalf.  It turns out he was never at the ceremony.  He had threatened to boycott the Grammys if hip-hop/R&B performer Frank Ocean wasn't nominated for anything.  Ocean then declared that he didn't want to be nominated for any Grammys, neutralizing West's boycott threat, but West stayed home anyway.

Adele, of course, dedicated her wins to her Beyoncé, even saying that Madame Knowles-Carter should have won those same awards.  A friend of mine on Facebook said that this was because Adele didn't deserve to win them, and she knew it.

And I don't know why this person is a friend of mine.

I do know that some observers are suggesting that Beyoncé lost seven out of nine Grammy nominations because of racism - this suggestion being made at a time when hip-hop/R&B records dominate the music awards as much as the pop charts and when traditionalist rock bands can't even get arrested.  Perhaps racism had nothing to do with Beyoncé's losses.  Maybe she's just overrated and overexposed. 

All hateful comments from Beyoncé fans telling me what I can do with myself will be unpublished and deleted.  Kanye, you've been warned. :-p

25 Skidoo

Adele won Album of the Year for 25?  Great, I can now say I own a copy of an Album of the Year Grammy-winning LP that was released in this century! :-D 

And she also won song of the Year and Record of the Year for "Hello." She dedicated her wins to Beyoncé, who won only two of the nine Grammys she was up for; Queen Bey won Best "Urban Contemporary" [read black] Album and Best Music Video), and, fortunately, Kanye West was nowhere to be seen in the hall. 

Adele's wins shouldn't fool anyone in to thinking we're ready for a revival of sensibility and taste in popular music.  As I once pointed out on this blog, her style is a throwback to the days of 1960s British songstresses like Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and Cilla Black, and her success has hardly helped the rest of pop return to a sixties-type standard.  (Best New Artist?  Chance the Rapper.)  But rock is still hanging in there, with Cage the Elephant, one of rock's more interesting current bands, winning Best Rock Album Grammy for Tell Me I'm Pretty.  But you know that rock is still in trouble when you realize that Bowie won four Grammys despite being dead. :-O

And Beyoncé's pornographic-Lady-Madonna-priestess schtick?  See how they run; even people who have long been in Queen Bey's corner are distancing themselves from her Grammy performance.  She might have just pole-vaulted the shark.  No wonder Kanye was nowhere to be seen.  You think he was going to try to defend that?       

Rolling In the Deep

I didn't watch the Grammy Awards last night - I tend to avoid awards shows these days, they're so boring - but I have heard that the impromptu Whitney Houston tribute was very nicely done.

The biggest story, of course, was Adele sweeping the awards she was up for, winning Album Of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album (21), Record Of the Year ("Rolling In the Deep"), Song Of the Year (ditto), Best Short Form Music video (again, the same song),and Best Pop Solo Performance ("Someone Like You"). It's official: In popular music, it's cool to be British again.

And despite the continuing war against rock and roll from rappers, trendies, and demographically driven radio conglomerates, rock pushed back at the Grammy ceremonies. In addition to Whitney Houston, another departed soul's spirit - Kurt Cobain's - was felt when his ex-Nirvana bandmate Dave Grohl's band the Foo Fighters won four awards, for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance for "Walk," Best Hard Rock/ Metal Performance ("White Limo") and Best Rock Album - Wasting Light, which, if not for Adele , might have had a chance of winning Album of the Year. It's times like these you learn to live again, indeed.

The biggest surprise came from the alternative folk rock band Bon Iver, who won the Best Alternative Album Grammy for their self-titled LP. That's not the surprise; despite Madonna's insistence from 1990 that alternative music is music that's not popular, Bon Iver, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, turned out to be popular enough (popular enough with the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, anyway) to take home the Best New Artist award, beating out Nicki Minaj, who records music that is very popular. Take that, Madge!

Of course, an earlier collaboration between Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon and hip-hop star Kanye West (!) obviously helped the band's cause.

However, the Best New Artist Grammy is a curse - only rare acts like the Beatles and Crosby, Stills and Nash have survived it - so I hope Vernon and his bandmates don't end up losing by winning. :-(

Dude, You're Getting Adele!

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. This is the twenty-first century, after all. British pop singers do not enjoy success in the United States anymore. Besides, even if you have the best voice among your peers, you need a gimmick to get your music across.

So how does that explain the success of Adele?

When Adele Laurie Blue Adkins released her first album, 19, in the United States in June 2008, few people took notice at the time. But with a little exposure on American television and interest from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences - she won the Best New Artist Grammy in 2009 - more and more people in this country began to listen. The album eventually rose to number ten in America, and her unique contralto voice - delivering honest, heartfelt songs through a set of strong, stylish blue-eyed soul arrangements - established her as a singer to be reckoned with.

Because so much attention has been paid to the highly overrated Lady Gaga - thanks to her unorthodox wardrobe and her obnoxious attitude - it would be impossible for anyone to draw so much notice simply by singing. Yet that's what Adele has done. Consider the statistics of her second album, 21 - nearly five million copies sold in the United States, the most successful digital album of all time in the U.S., only the sixteenth album by a female artist to spend at least nine weeks on top of the Billboard charts, and the first to do so by a British act in 23 years. 21 has also spent a total of thirteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Top Two Hundred, the longest an album has held the top position since 1998. Oh yeah, her singles "Rolling In the Deep" and "Someone Like You," both from 21, are the first two consecutive singles from the same album recorded by a female British recording artist to top the American charts.

This all makes sense once you hear Adele sing. There's not a shred of artifice in her performances, and her devotion to the traditions of British rhythm-and-blues singing are far more honest than many soul recordings to come out of the mother country in the past twenty years. White R&B has always been hard to pull off, and it's even tougher for British performers to make it work. Few have done so. Adele has joined a very elite club that includes veteran performers like Chris Farlowe and the late Dusty Springfield, as well as more recent singers like Joss Stone.

So what's the reason for Adele's success? I'm inclined to guess that Americans had had it with lightweight pop singers being crammed down their throats for so long, and when they found something more substantial, they leapt to embrace it. Adele didn't get off to the best possible start - she had a self-destructive streak that involved drinking and pining for an ex-boyfriend almost cost her a chance to break through in the U.S. - yet ironically, she's been able to pour her emotions into her cathartic singing and songwriting (yes, she's a composer, too) and strike a chord with American audiences . . . as well as with audiences in her homeland. In the United Kingdom, where her success has drawn comparisons to the that of the Beatles, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown called her a "light at the end of the tunnel." He was referring to the persistent British recession, but he could just as easily have been talking about the state of English-language popular music.

Success speaks for itself. And the proverbial sidewalks she's following (or the pavements she's chasing, as she would put it) are definitely leading somewhere.

Foreign Music Affairs

In a music world dominated by so much American hip-hop and dance pop, I was certainly surprised to find out that The Suburbs, an ambitious album from the Montreal band Arcade Fire, had won the 2011 Album of the Year Grammy. Yes, I have heard Arcade Fire's music. Their work is very sharp an acerbic, with a lot of heart. That's why I can't believe they won the Album of the Year Grammy. Alternative rock bands from Canada aren't supposed to win such prestigious mainstream awards. Even though band founder Win Butler and his brother William are in fact Americans, just the fact that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences would nominate a band from across the border is news to me. I got to thinking that the only non-American pop act anyone cares about these days is Canada's Justin Bieber. It turns out, in fact, the the United States is one of many countries where The Suburbs hit number one on the charts.

The British haven't done so badly at the Grammys in recent years either. Although it was taken for granted that Robert Plant and American Alison Krauss would win the 2009 Album of the Year Grammy for Raising Sand, because the veteran Plant is popular with NARAS voters, I wonder how many people saw this coming at the 2009 ceremony - soul singer Adele winning the Best New Artist and Best Pop Vocal awards on the basis of her single "Chasing Pavements," a song with a title that doesn't make sense in American English. (The word "pavement" is Britspeak for "sidewalk;" Adele was comparing the pursuit of a broken relationship to chasing an empty sidewalk.) It's also worth noting that two British bands that have been lucky to click with American audiences, Coldplay and Radiohead, have also been Grammy winners, with the record sales to back them up.

The past decade has been a mixed one for non-American pop acts, especially the Brits. The veteran rock critic Dave Marsh, noting the domination of American acts on the U.S. charts in the mid-eighties with the Brits were represented by poseurs such as Duran Duran or grizzled veterans such as Phil Collins, declared at the time, "British rock has never been so irrelevant." Wonder what he thought of the first decade of the new century? For awhile, unless he was Chris Martin or Thom Yorke, a British rocker couldn't get arrested in America. British bands like the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand were winning accolades in their homeland even as their names drew blanks here; in America, Arctic Monkeys may just as well have referred to missing links and Franz Ferdinand may very well have been the Austrian archduke whose assassination sparked World War I. (I'm kidding, of course; Americans know next to nothing about evolution or world history.) And were we really paying attention to Amy Winehouse for her music?

The Arctic Monkeys supposedly released one of the greatest albums of all time (so a U.K. music poll insisted) when they issued Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not in 2006. We Yanks responded with a collective "Yeah, right" by getting that album no higher than number 24 on the Billboard charts. And Franz Ferdinand's 2005 album You Could Have It So Much Better didn't have it much better than 378,000 copies sold in the States in its first three years on release. (Their 2004 debut album only got up to number 32 here.) But Coldplay and Radiohead have kept the flame alight (another British word there) for British pop in America, and Adele seems to be poised to succeed on a much bigger scale than Amy Winehouse could ever have dreamed, now that her second album is coming out. ("Chasing Pavements" only got up to number 21 on the Billboard singles charts, but that could only be because too many Americans didn't know what the heck she was talking about.)

I've complained about the sun setting on the British musical empire here before, and I'm under no allusion that U.K. performers are going to reclaim for rock and roll American audiences lost to rap and Lady Gaga. Nor do I even believe that even British dance popsters could succeed in America on a big scale. Or, for that matter, British rappers. Hip-hop by nature is vulgar, narcissistic, and ill-mannered, which is why we Americans are so much better at it. But the recent accomplishments of British performers, coupled with those of their Commonwealth brethren in Canada (I'm not talking about Justin Bieber here), proves that, despite the nationalistic way of thinking Americans have gone back to with regard to popular culture, there's still an audience here open to non-American popular music.

Even if we still insist foreigners have to sing in English to have a hit here.

Wonder how long it will take Adele to stop writing songs with titles like "Chasing Pavements?" :-O