- Some stresses are unavoidable - it's just part of life. One of the things I do to avoid stress is not work with people that I don't really like or drive me crazy. I don't care if they're the biggest artists in the world. If I get ask to fly to L.A. to write with someone I don't like and I know is a real pain in the ass, I won't do it.
- Hit songs are mysterious and slippery beasts; few artists have a lock on them This means that many people, like me, have become fans of songs rather than fans of artists.. And because of the swing-for-the-rafters attempt at nailing that elusive hit, all of us - passive listeners, active consumers or earnest teenagers spinning beats or strumming guitars in their parents' basements - are the biggest winners.
- If we presently lack bands with the substance and consistency of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, what we do have is an exponentially greater range of styles, a far richer mosaic of voices, cultures and colours.
- Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye's best lyrics match Dylan's prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali. His comment that 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' is the modern day equivalent of Ali's 'I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger'.
- Let's face it: pop music in its myriad permutations will always be sexually presumptuous, racially controversial and, frequently, politically charged. Still a few things have changed. The music business has become a reflection of the economy at large, only more extreme. Essentially,the top 0.01 percent of artists, groups and songwriters make 99.99 percent of the money. That was not the case in the mid-'70s: there was a lot more room for modestly successful artists to make a decent living.
- Since the dawn of recorded music, every generation has felt shocked by the musical tastes of the next. Sinatra hated Elvis. Elvis hated the Beatles. During the 'Harlem renaissance' of the 1930s, even the emerging black middle class turned up its nose at jazz artists like Duke Ellington, opting instead for 'high brow' classical music. Admittedly, I've suffered from the same knee-jerk reactionism; I took my son to task not that long ago for plastering posters of Marilyn Manson on his bedroom wall. And yet, my father's musical tastes as a child in the 1930s were far juicier than my son's. Indeed, Dad sparked a family uproar during one Sunday dinner by plopping a Robert Johnson recording titled 'Traveling Riverside Blues' onto his parents' Victrola, causing his Methodist minister father to yank the 78 off the turntable and smash the 'obscenity' to pieces.
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