sweet and Geisty blend of retro and nuevo - analogue and digital -  in the audio and the video of  that Bruno Mars megahit "Locked out of Heaven"

if you just listen idly, you mostly hear The Police - the jumpy beat, the loping reggae-ish bassline

if you watch idly, you see a band, playing live, in the old fashioned way, with New Wave-redolent boisterous dancing

but the song is very  produced -- it actually has four producers (the norm, seemingly in pop these days) except that one of the four, The Smeezingtons, is actually three people -- Mars and the two other dudes he wrote the song with -- so that's seven people working on the production, arrangement and mixing on the track -- where did all that work go? (And how come so many chefs didn't spoil the broth?)

well, it has all that vocal science bubbling alongside the main song which could pass for a "document of live performance"
 
like the voices speeding up in the background of the chorus, like giddy euphoria spinning into orbit

in the video you have vintage / old skool technology: the Akai MPC that triggers the vocal stammer-riff, that old camera -- and an overall scrim of Instagram/Hipstamatic period aura -  "very VHS-y" as Mars himself puts it -- but obviously painstakingly postproduced and digitally tweaked for a quasi-analogue/pre-faded effect

pure delight, though -- the song (not so much the video, which is just okay) -- probably the most rhythmically vivacious thing on the radio right now. And --in its Eighties mainstream Police / Dire Straits references -- a suitable book end to a 2012 that started out (and stayed) dominated by the similarly sourced "Somebody That I Used Know"

Gotye on Retromania

The creator of 2012's biggest selling single speaks about Retromania:

Now Gotye is in a new phase of his career, musing about the way he got here, and taking time to reflect on the way he creates music. He said he had recently read Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania, which takes the view that the current music industry isn’t offering anything new or original, but rather constantly rehashing recent pop history, albeit in new forms.

Gotye said that reading Reynolds’ diatribe had made him think about the way he wrote songs, cobbling together bits and pieces of never-heard music that he discovers in vintage record stores. “Somebody That I Used To Know,” in fact, samples a guitar part from Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfá’s song “Seville,” from Bonfa’s 1967 album Luiz Bonfa Plays Great Songs. Gotye was intrigued with the album title and found a little musical bit that he twisted and turned into something brand new. And that, he has come to realize, is maybe his unique musical gift.

“I think maybe the stuff that I do that’s the most successful or the most interesting is the stuff that somehow finds the balance between those competing tensions [sampling the past versus creating something brand new] and something unique does come out of it. And maybe the stuff that I do that’s more of a stylistic homage or pastiche, recently I’ve decided I shouldn’t allow myself the license to do that as much because it’s not as interesting and I should challenge myself to try to distill something more unique out of those directions.”

Well, if the book helps him come up with another song as fresh and original as "Somebody I Used To Know", and with as much staying power (okay, there was a moment back in June or thenabouts when having heard it approximately 1076 times on the radio I started feeling a tad tired of it, but I'm on my second wind of "SIUTK" love now) , I shall consider it a Job  Well Done. 

Did they ever even release a second single off  Making Mirrors? I suppose they are waiting for the first one to fade off the airwaves. Might still have a bit of a wait ahead.

 

"Old Records Outselling New Records"

according to LA Weekly's Chris Kornelis

Hey, I predicted that in Retromania!  Or rather, speculated about it as a possible future scenario, extrapolating from current trends (i.e. where things were at in 2009-2010).

Judging by Kornelis's piece, it's happened much quicker than I imagined:

"The first six months of the year saw sales of 76.6 million catalog records -- industry-speak for albums released more than 18 months ago -- compared to 73.9 million current albums"

According to Nielsen Soundscan-watcher David Bakula, this has happened because of two factors:
"not having the big blockbuster new releases in the first half, and having very, very strong catalog".
The latter category includes Guns N' Roses' Greatest Hits and  four Whitney Houston albums.

Admittedly, the past has an advantage over the present, because catalogue LP and greatest hits collections are generally budget-priced, compared with full-price new releases. In penny-pinching times, that will incline punters to avoid new albums, or just opt for the track rather than take a punt on the whole LP (see the 10-fold disparity between the five million who downloaded "Somebody I Used To Know" versus the half-million who bought the Gotye album).

It could also be that the kind of people who still bother to buy music (either as physical CDs or legal downloads) are older, and thus skew away from buying new releases in favour of old favourites.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

update: Maura Johnston at Village Voice has further thoughts on this topic:

1. Radio and other mass outlets are becoming way more conservative and focusing more on the past.  She notes that places like Target  give prominent display space to greatest-hits collections, big albums from established stars, while new releases get "comparatively puny" exposure. And radio, as
explained by Kornelis in a piece for the Seattle Weekly , is becoming "becoming more cautious with their playlists because of the Personal People Meter, Nielsen's new device for measuring ratings. Its data shows that people are more likely to switch channels when unfamiliar songs come on; the incentive to play new songs is, therefore, diminished from a business-side perspective."


2. The design of digital-music stores encourages people to stick with the familiar. "What with "personalization," spotlighting of the already-popular in order to assist people who might be interested in checking out that Adele lady, and having to cram a lot of information about new releases into a small space... finding truly new music is a tough row for people who aren't completely immersed in music....  Incentives like Amazon's crazy-deep discounting of certain releases only encourage this type of cocooning".

3. News has more of an effect on album sales than almost any music-centric promotional outlet these days. "Two of the five top catalog albums of 2012's first six months had Whitney Houston, who died in February, at their core; her greatest-hits collection sold 818,000 copies, making it the fourth-best-selling album of the year so far (behind Adele, Lionel Richie, and One Direction), and the soundtrack to The Bodyguard sold 202,000 copies....  just look at how record sales for Richie's new album Tuskegee, which is itself a record full of him remaking his old hits with current country stars, were boosted by a special reminding people of its existence airing on broadcast TV"

Maura also points out that Adele's 21, which is 2012's best-selling album even though it came out in 2011, has just flipped over into the "catalogue" category (18 months since release, which in its case was Jan 11 last year). That means that as it continues to sell and sell, the catalogue > current effect will only get worse during the second half of 2012.