catapult magazine

Mainstream rock radio is going out of buisiness. There is an article in the new rollingstone about the multiple rock radio stations that are changing their name to “The Beat” and programming hip hop. There just isn’t an audience for rock like there is for Hip Hop. Especially among the youth.

So I’m wondering how this happened. First of all I don’t think there are that many “great” rock bands out there right now. Not in the public eys at least. I really like The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, The Hives and Interpol but none of them sound like they’re out to change/conquer the world.

Hip hop, on the other hand, is moving mountains. The sonic ambition is undeniable. And it always sounds great in a car. Rock radio doesn’t move you’re stereo like a great Timbeland Beat.

The hip hop community has it figured out. They’ve found a whole new structure to making and marketing music. Its built so the cream rises to the top much quicker and in much greater quantity. Its all about ease of collaboration. A rapper doesn’t have to spend four years finding the right band members to work on songs. All they have to do is buy their favourite beats from producers and fit songs to them. There are rappers like Kanye West who do it the hard way producing and rapping everything themselves but most prefer to put albums out much quicker. Most of the big name rappers have around 10 different producers doing their beats. Thats like having 10 different of your favourite bands doing the backing track for your lyrics and melody. If that were possible imagine how much more current a rock albums would be. As of now it takes U2 or Radiohead 2 years to come up with a good album.

Thats my theory anyway. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.

Overhang is still looking for a drummer and a bassist. Please email overhang@email.com to pass on possibilities.

I’m not sure being able to put out music quickly is necessarily a good thing. It has its own good qualities (look at Motown), but Motown has a sort of slick sound that is great in its own right, but can tend toward fadishness. There is also a danger of following formulas and I think hip hop can and does fall into this. I think bands like U2 and Radiohead, Wilco (though U2 has not shown this as much the last two albums) have more of a focus on discovering a new process every time they get in the studio, which definitely takes more time, but might yield some freshness. The reason these guys haven’t been as fresh as we would like, though, might be connected to other reasons: like age or taste or their own strategies for contributing to music.

Hip hop is able to put out albums quickly with and the same richness of a 2 year process U2 album because of their collaborative structure. A couple of recent albums I’ve been impressed with are Jay-Z’s ‘Black album’, and The Game’s, "Documentary. Both of these albums have at least 10 producers. That means more than 10 people are contributing their best musical ideas to the project. Jay-Z said in the ‘Fade to Black documentary’ that the hardest thing is to get everyone on the same page. I think he was referring to keeping the album unified under his concept. These albums were made quickly and with a unified aesthetic all the way through.

Kanye West’s album took years to make. He did almost everything himself. It seems like time spent on albums that are great is fairly proportional to the amount of people contributing ideas to the album.

I’ll take this up with you next time we meet…at the O.K. Corral.