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- The debt Beyoncé owes visual artists
The video for Run the World (Girls) recalls the work of South African photographer Pieter Hugo. But is it homage or appropriation?
The music business may be shrinking, but there's still an elite group of artists who can afford mega-budget videos. One of them is Beyoncé, who on Wednesday night (18 May) debuted Run the World (Girls), prompting adjectives such as "post-apocalyptic", "futuristic" and "amazing". The Daily Mail compared the choreography to Riverdance; the words Mad Max were bandied around too. Yet the most obvious influence is the work of South African photographer Pieter Hugo. His images of the "hyena men" of Nigeria – itinerant circus entertainers who perform with hyenas on chains – are echoed in a scene where Beyoncé, well ... holds two hyenas on chains. The work of another photographer, Ed Kashi, can also be discerned in shots of buffalo, sand and burning cars.
There's nothing new about borrowing, but it's unusual for disturbing imagery to be plundered for glossy commercial purposes. While there's something undeniably mesmerising about Hugo's portraits of masked men and Kashi's photographs of Nigerian farmers slaughtering animals, it's uncomfortable seeing them referenced in a pop video (this one is directed by Francis Lawrence). There's a big difference between near-destitute men holding hyenas on chains to earn a living, and Beyoncé posing in a couture dress with two big cats blown up thanks to the miracles of CGI. Is it homage, or appropriation?
As the internet gives us access to more obscure material, so this cultural collage becomes not just easier but inevitable. As the old references – A Clockwork Orange, Cabaret, 2001 – are used up, savvy pop artists (or their creative teams) look further afield. In the past few months, Lady Gaga has borrowed from video artist Bill Viola for Judas, Lykke Li has said the promo for Get Some was inspired by psychedelic film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Kanye West has referenced Gaspar Noé's mindbending Enter the Void for All of the Lights.
However, none of these artists (usually) get paid or credited. Indeed, the estate of Guy Bourdin sued when Madonna recreated some of his fashion photographs for the video to Hollywood; in the 90s, the Face magazine wasn't pleased when the video for En Vogue's Whatever borrowed from a Sean Ellis photoshoot. It's also debatable as to whether the appropriated imagery has the power of the original – too often it's commercialised and watered down. Yet it's also a tribute to the strength of the original work. In 2011, "spot the reference" is a game that need never end.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Music Weekly podcast: Bob Dylan special
John Harris stands in for Alexis Petridis and Rosie Swash this week, and looks at the music of Bob Dylan as we approach his 70th birthday.
Emmy the Great and the Guardian's Stephen Moss join John in choosing their favourite tracks. See if you can guess which songs they pick before you hear the podcast.
Plus we hear why it's worth celebrating Dylan's 70th with James McGrath, cultural studies lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University, and there's a reading by Michael Gray from his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, now available as an audiobook.
Tell us about your favourite Dylan track and join the debate here. Or let us know your views on this or anything else on Twitter – @MusicWeeklyPod. We're on Facebook too!
Переслать - Why the Ivor Novello awards are an industry favourite
There's a reason why speeches at the Ivor Novellos – such as Plan B's ode to his 'alcoholic grandfather' – are so touching. It's because artists respect a ceremony that rewards songwriting
At the Ivor Novello awards yesterday, Plan B thanked his "alcoholic godfather" for introducing him to soul music, because hearing Smokey Robinson taught him how to structure songs. Villagers' Conor O'Brien said songwriting was self-rewarding, and saw his prize for best song musically and Lyrically as a bonus. Celebrated composer Michael Nyman gave an acceptance speech detailing all the coincidences that had led him to where he is today – a speech so long that it prompted host Paul Gambaccini to exclaim: "I've forgotten why I'm here now." The audience included superstars such as Jimmy Page and Elton John.
These people rarely attend awards, but the Ivors are special. And not just because it's not televised, making the people appearing on stage much more relaxed. Voted for by fellow musicians, it returns the focus to what great music is about: songwriting.
Most people wouldn't be able to pick songwriters such as Eric Appapoulay, Richard Cassell and Tom Wright-Goss (the co-writers of Plan B's She Said) out of a lineup, yet they've helped create the soundtracks of our lives. At an industry press conference in 2010, focusing on the millions labels invest in artists, oneexecutive pointed out that after all the money put behind an artist they were still at the mercy of finding a great song. Without a hit, investment would be pointless. In the digital age, which has given music fans the option of cherry-picking tracks, labels are even wearier of putting non-singles on to albums.
The majority of people think one of the biggest-selling songs this year, Adele's Someone Like You, was composed by her alone, even though it was co-written with 49-year-old Dan Wilson (former singer of Semisonic). In fact, a large proportion of the songs in the top 40 were co-written by people who are not performers.
But artists are increasingly expected to give away music as a promotional tool, making their living from ancillary income such as sponsorships, touring and merchandising. In a speech at Midem, earlier this year, Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan said the music industry had to come to terms with the fact that songs were no longer the products it had to sell. "Content is no longer king. Its throne has been taken by experience." Where does this leave songwriters?
Mulligan laments the complexities of getting publishers (who represent songwriters) and labels to license new music services. Yet, at the licensing panel at last week's Great Escape conference, Patrick Rackow, CEO of the songwriters' association Basca, pointed out that the reason Pandora hasn't yet launched in the UK was not due to the complexities of licensing – it was that they simply didn't want to pay. So far, less than 10% of PRS for Music's (the UK collection society for songwriters) revenue comes from digital services, as they often receive a tenth (less than what the credit card companies make for processing payments) of what labels make. Many songwriters say that getting a song on an album is now irrelevant – it needs to be a single, so that they can get royalties from airplay.
So if the lack of new music services is, indeed, due to the complexities of having to conclude deals with a myriad of labels and publishers there is a simple solution: collective licensing. Let PPL negotiate and manage the licensing for labels and PRS do the same for songwriters and publishers. It's worked perfectly for decades when it comes to radio and television, and both songwriters and artists are in favour of it. It's transparent – music services know the content cost they need to factor into their budgets, and songwriters and artists know how much they're due (the deals currently made with digital music services are all covered by non-disclosure agreements). Everyone, from Lady Gaga to Villagers, gets the same rate per "usage". Maybe that's the reason the major labels are not in favour of collective licensing. They say it will be "a race to the bottom" for the value of music, and maybe it will mean less revenue, but it will mean a fairer and more workable system.
David Riley, director of Good Lizard Media, suggested that songwriters should be paid marketing fees instead of royalties, since music is used as a marketing tool for an artist's "brand". Maybe I'm a romantic, but I have difficulties viewing it that way. Music is medicine for the soul, and it can take years to create something that touches thousands of people. A marketing fee would require artists and labels to pay songwriters in advance, based on how effective they think this medicine would be. The beauty of the royalty system is that it cuts out guessing work. Songwriters only get paid – in micro-payments – if people really like their music. Yet, Riley has a point. If there is no more revenue from the actual music, songwriters are pretty much screwed without an alternative way of remunerating them.
The songwriters at yesterday's Ivor Novello awards are not marketing professionals – they're more akin to scientists spending their lives trying to invent ways of relaying emotions, moving people, and making their lives seem just a little bit better by making poetry out of everyday experiences. The music industry wouldn't exist without great songs – and songwriters. That's why the Ivor Novello awards are so loved.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Twenty favourite Bob Dylan songs
From acknowledged masterpieces to eccentric picks – as chosen by a fan who first saw Dylan live in 1965
Obviously Bob Dylan isn't going to spend his 70th birthday listening to his own recordings. So I'll do it for him, while rejoicing that he is still around and willing to share the gift that opened up vistas of emotion not just for those of us lucky enough to have bought a ticket to the whole show, but for subsequent generations who find themselves responding to his shrewd insight, his sense of humour, his deep and broad love of music, and his sheer humanity.
So here's my birthday playlist: not a "best of" in any sense, even though it includes a couple of acknowledged masterpieces, but an occasionally eccentric selection of personal favourites that starts in a listening booth in a basement record shop, one summer afternoon between the Great Train Robbery and the assassination of JFK.
Let us know your own favourite Dylan song in the comments below, and we'll pull together a second playlist of 70 tracks that you've picked to celebrate Bob's birthday next Tuesday
1. BOB DYLAN'S DREAM
From The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, 1963
One man's plagiarism is another man's folk process. Dylan lifts themelody of the traditional Lord Franklin, and some of its lyric tropes, to create a poignant and astonishingly mature reflection on the evanescence of youth, sketched with a few deft brush strokes. If you were 16 at the time, he strengthened the resolve to enjoy your precious time, and deepened your appreciation of it after it had gone.
2. SITTIN' ON TOP OF THE WORLD
From Victoria Spivey's Three Kings and a Queen, 1962
One of the last of the great Mississippi blues singer-guitarists, Big Joe Williams was close to his 60th birthday when the 21-year-old Dylan played harmonica and sang harmony on this version of a Mississippi Sheiks song. This Dylan would resurface 30 years later on Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, two acoustic solo albums with which he reset his compass in the early-90s.
3. BARBARA ALLEN
From Live at the Gaslight, 1962
A sober rendering of the celebrated story of star-crossed lovers, delivered to a Greenwich Village audience when Dylan was parted from Suze Rotolo. The girl on the Freewheelin' cover was spending several months studying art in Italy, and it's not fanciful to imagine that you can hear how much he was missing her as he sings of the entwining of the red rose and the briar. A beautifully tender performance, in any case.
4. NORTH COUNTRY BLUES
From The Times They Are A-Changin', 1964
Back in the days of the folk revival it was perfectly normal for performers to sing songs in the voice of the opposite gender. Dylan goes further with this one, creating the persona of a young wife and mother in the Masabi iron range, watching her world contract and shrivel as the mining industry collapses and her husband leaves one morning without a word. This is the country Dylan grew up in, which may have helped him empathise with his subject, but the degree of identification is uncanny. "The sad silent song made the hour twice as long," is one of his most perfectly constructed and enduringly resonant lines.
5. IT'S ALRIGHT, MA (I'M ONLY BLEEDING)
From Bringing It All Back Home, 1965
Who is to say that this is not the finest of all his songs, the one in which he found the precise balance between social observation and poetry, and in which his immersion in traditional music produced his voice at its purest? Myself, I remember the chill of hearing those harmonica stabs for the first time at Sheffield's City Hall in the spring of 1965.
6. SAD EYED LADY OF THE LOWLANDS
From Blonde on Blonde, 1966
Recorded at four in the morning after a session that had started 10 hours earlier, and in which the musicians had done little but play cards while Dylan worked on the lyric, this draws its sepulchral power not just from the glinting ambiguities of his magnificent wordplay but from an arrangement that ebbs and flows like a slow tide. Not having been given a clue as to the length of the song, the musicians surged to a climax at the end of every chorus, only to find the singer pulling them into yet another verse. Eleven minutes and 21 seconds long, the one and only take was given its own special setting, isolated on the fourth side of a double album. It presented itself as a masterpiece, and it was.
7. I SHALL BE RELEASED
From The Bootleg Series Vos 1-3, 1967
The stately Basement Tapes plea for redemption, featuring Robbie Robertson's steely Telecaster, Garth Hudson's eerie organ, Richard Manuel's aching falsetto harmony, and Dylan's centuries-old lead.
8. I STILL MISS SOMEONE
From The Dylan Cash Session (bootleg), 1969
Johnny Cash's most haunting song is performed as a duet, with Dylan providing improvised harmony and going solo on the bridge in what sounds like some only tenuously related key. To be heard in conjunction with Train of Love, Dylan's urgent and heartfelt contribution to Kindred Spirits, a Cash tribute album, a few years ago.
9. WILD MOUNTAIN THYME
Isle of Wight Festival (bootleg), 1969
He took the stage many hours late, with the Band, wearing a white suit, and delivered a underwhelming hour-long set to an audience whose expectations would have been impossible to meet. But with its thoughtful and precise phrasing, this version of a traditional ballad, part of a four-song solo acoustic interlude, provides another confirmation of how beautifully he could/can sing.
10. SPANISH IS THE LOVING TONGUE
B-side of Watching the River Flow, 1970
Dylan reflects his lifelong attraction to the Tex-Mex borderlands in this spare, relaxed version of a fine ballad, accompanied by his own piano and Leon Russell's bass guitar. There's also a cherishable tango-style arrangement for full band and cooing chorus on the universally reviled album called simply Dylan, thrown together by Columbia Records after his temporary defection in 1973.
11. GOING, GOING, GONE
From Planet Waves, 1974
With majestic accompaniment from the Band, he takes an early stab at the comfortless, darkness-falls mood that would be explored in detail almost a quarter of a century later in Time Out of Mind, his self-examination in late middle age.
12. YOU'RE GONNA MAKE ME LONESOME WHEN YOU GO
From Blood on the Tracks, 1975
All the way from Don't Think Twice, It's All Right to Sugar Baby, Dylan has been telling us that love is not a simple thing. For all its relative brevity, its ebullient attack and its jaunty harmonica, this is perhaps the most complex and multi-faceted of all his love songs, its fond and vivid reflections shot through with the deeper hues of realism. If I had to keep just one, this might be it.
13. NEW DANVILLE GIRL
from The Genuine Bootleg Series (bootleg), 1984
Sam Shepard helped him write this epic dislocated narrative ballad, later revised, retitled Brownsville Girl and released on Knocked Out Loaded. This version doesn't have the heart-piercing line – sung in a single breath – "Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content", but nor does it have the overblown production, marked by a steroid backbeat and an instrusive female chorus.
14. QUEEN JANE APPROXIMATELY
From Dylan and the Dead, 1987
I get into trouble with one prominent Dylan scholar whenever I mention this track, taken from a concert in Eugene, Oregon during a tour described by another professional Dylanologist as "one of Dylan's all-time worst career decisions". Dylan himself later wrote, in Chronicles Vol 1, that the tour had shown him a new and more stimulating angle from which to approach his music. Technically speaking, this version of Queen Jane is certainly a mess. But it's also the sound of a bunch of people, bonded by ties of affection and respect, hauling themselves out of the sludge to create something of shape and proportion and darkly luminous beauty. I can listen to it endlessly. The rest of the album is, indeed, lamentable.
15. RANK STRANGERS TO ME
From Down in the Groove, 1988
The most despised Dylan album of all contains this atmospheric arrangement of a song by the gospel composer Albert Brumley, taken from the Stanley Brothers' repertoire (also the source of A Man of Constant Sorrow, from his debut album). Just a lightly strummed guitar, Larry Klein's zooming bass, and a spectral voioce intoning a haunted lyric.
17. BOOTS OF SPANISH LEATHER
Bonus track on Japanese Not Dark Yet EP, 1998
When people say that Dylan doesn't respect his old songs, play them this. No, he doesn't follow the old tune. He's paid you, the listener, the compliment of devising an excellent set of variations, allowing him to re-engage with the lyric rather than merely trot out a classic. And you've got to love his studious attempt to fulfill a lifelong ambition to play lead guitar.
18. 'CROSS THE GREEN MOUNTAIN
From Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol 8, 2008
Written for the soundtrack of Gods and Generals, a Civil War TV series, this finely crafted extended ballad finds Dylan inhabiting the mind of dying soldier. The crepuscular mood is brilliantly evoked by his band, subtly invigorating each verse in a way that evokes the job the Nashville cats did on Sad-Eyed Lady. A major work, it deserved a better fate than to be tucked away on a rare-and-unreleased anthology. But then so did Blind Willie McTell.
19. SUGAR BABY
From Love and Theft, 2001
From a bayou mist of bell-like guitars and murky keyboards emerges a voice of wry wisdom. "Every moment of existence feels like some dirty trick," he sings. "Happiness comes suddenly and leaves just as quick." So this is how it ends. But, somehow, love survives.
20. IT'S ALL GOOD
From Together Through Life, 2009
At the end of an album in which he successfully channeled the Muddy Waters Blues Band of the late-50s, Dylan stands back and produces this gently barbed summary of our times: a sardonic indictment of complacency and greed. He didn't change the world, after all. But then he never really thought he could.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: The Strokes – Call Me Back (Erol Sabadosh remix)
Fear not all those who saw their dreary performance at Radio 1's Big Weekend – this remix makes the Strokes sound revitalised
While Lady Gaga clambered into her coffin and kept everyone waiting for half an hour at Radio 1's Big Weekend, those watching on BBC Three were treated to a few songs from the Strokes who were headlining a separate stage. Perhaps "treated" is the wrong word because it sounded like the band members were each playing different songs. While their latest album, Angles, had its moments, it's refreshing to hear the Strokes sound revitalised on record – even if it is via this remix by London-based DJ and producer, Erol Sabadosh. On Angles, Call Me Back is stripped to just Julian Casablancas's non-plussed shrug of a voice, skeletal guitar and distant keyboards, while Sabadosh adds a juddering, off-kilter beat, weirdly pitched sounds and distorted synth noises. It shouldn't really work, but Sabadosh manages to make boredom sound appealing.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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