Field Music are one of those bands I don't have much of a fix on - I'd sort of mentally filed them as the kind of group Pitchfork habitually gives a good review to, alongside I dunno The Microphones / Mount Eerie
(Actually looking into it they've had some pretty mixed reviews from P-Fork and they seem more like a British Dirty Projectors if anything).
At any rate, not sure I've ever knowingly heard Field Music but this morning I read a poignant account about how in order to make ends meet as a band they've opened up a sideline as a Doors tribute band.
After getting a disapproving response from a fan, one of the brothers involved wrote this rebuttal / rationale:
Streaming is one of the main culprits when it comes to the non-viability of being a professional musician. Here's an interesting piece from Ryan Dombal at Hearing Things (the new magazine venture by a bunch of former Pitchfork people) on why they have decided to have no more truck with Spotify (mostly the truck seems to have been doing article-related playlists through them). Instead they are having truck with Apple and Tidal.
I subscribe to Tidal, having grown addicted to their superior audio as an erstwhile contributor given a complimentary sub (nice while it lasted). I do have a vestigial Spotify account, which I never use as a daily listener. But because a bunch of playlists based around books of mine are up there I don't really want to close it down - the links are still out there in the printed books.
Still, perhaps going forward I should only do playlists through Tidal and Apple (I believe you don't have to subscribe to Tidal to listen it, just put up with the ads - same as with Spotify. Don't know about Apple). Or even do a playlist through YouTube, which has the added enhancement of visuals a lot of the time.
None of these places are recompensing musicians the way they used to be and should be. But they don't seem to be actively Satanic to quite the same extent.
2 comments:
On the tribute band front: in my neck of the woods (Boston, Mass.) the erstwhile singer of the band Boston, Brad Delp, formed a Beatles tribute band, Beatlejuice, post-his original band and pre-taking his own life. They were quite good, a pretty decent group of musicians and of course Brad could nail those tracks. I would see them once a year as they were the go-to band for the afterparty of a road race I liked to run. Seeing him onstage in front of a couple hundred sweaty folks in shorts and singlets, announcing between songs that everybody should hang on to their plastic cups as the supply was dwindling - I wondered how he squared that with the arenas and band logo-embossed private plane travel of his heyday. Not sure he needed Beatlejuice to earn a living but "Let Me Take You Home Tonight" royalties probably only went so far.
I started to think there must be a movie in the life of a tribute band singer - and then suddenly I became convinced I'd already seen one.
It was a perfectly respectable and normal way of operating as a vocalist, or a musician, to play almost entirely covers. Before deejays become widespread, that's what most bands did - covers of the Top 40 plus the odd 'classic of our time'. Weddings, etc. Musicians weren't necessarily expected to write original material or have some kind of quirky sound-of-our-own. They were actually like deejays, executing the sounds and material that others had made successful.
I wonder who the first tribute band was - ie covers band that only did one artist's work exclusively - was.
Delp is an example of this thing I call Wiki-Fear which is when you look up a band or an artist or writer or anything and the entry reveals something upsetting or depressing about their life that forever faintly attaches itself to the much loved song or artist. in this case 'More Than A Feeling' has a little bit of a shadow over it.
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