Casio CZ/ VZ/ FZ - Pro Series

--- In CZsynth@yahoogroups.com, "synergeezer" <synergeezer@...> wrote:

>  They hired musicians to help them make more money off the
> music-loving kids.  The musicians they hired helped their musician
> friends to make records.  This was the Golden Age of Cut-Outs (vinyl
> LPs that were essentially discarded by the record companies -
> containing some extremely interesting stuff amid Sturgeon's crap)! 
> Between my degree in philosophy and my (fall-back) career in
> computers, I managed a record store in the mid-70s.  There were a
> great many artists who were given major label contracts because 
their
> musician friends inside the music industry liked their music.  Many
> stiffed after one LP, but there were a lot of artists who became
> recognized as great, who would not have made it through the world of
> marketing in the music bidness.  The "cut-outs" were cheap, and
> sometimes interesting.

Dude you are confused, but since you like Ayn Rand, maybe that's not 
surprising.  Your history lesson is bang on, but your opinion of what 
it all means is totally skewed.  Yes, it's true that various 
parasites thrived off cut-outs once upon a time.  A guy called 
Richard Branson built an empire off of it, that is, after he begged 
his mother to mortgage her home in order to pay off all the fines he 
was racking up for being such a scumbag.  You are right that the 
industry did not know how to market the new music of the 1960s, so 
they started hiring longhairs as A&R reps.  These longhairs managed 
to sign enough good stuff to keep the labels profitable, but no label 
in the world wants loads of its albums to end up in the cut-out bin.  
Cut-outs are failures.  Now it just so happened that the period 
between 1965-1975 was a time in which an unprecedented amount of 
really good music was made.  So much, that some of it got lost in the 
shuffle, did not become hits, and ended up in the cut-out bin even 
though it was very good.  Maybe it was the LSD or the marijuana, but 
it seemed like anyone who wan't a total square was capable of 
creating a mind-blowing album in those days.  This all died around 
the time disco became a producers game, and bands became much less 
important.

But it all started to repeat itself after Nirvana's Smells Like Teen 
Spirit rocketed to #1.  Once again the industry was at a loss as to 
how to market the stuff, and more importantly, how to find the stuff 
worth marketing.  So they fired their hair-band metal A&R reps and 
hired a bunch of grungey-looking A&R reps.  And these grungey-looking 
A&R reps didn't have the benefit of a creative scene.  The best they 
could do was sign Led Zepplin wannabes, the better of which went big 
(Pearl Jam), the rest of which wound up in the cut-out bin.  And 
there were tons of cut-outs.  I hung out at my friend's college radio 
show at the time and would come home with boxes of them, almost all 
from obscure, crappy bands that I never heard from again.  The only 
ones I heard from again were Stabbing Westward and Live both of which 
kind of suck, especially the latter.  And my local thrift store still 
gets shipments of brand-new cut-outs from the 1990s, and it's true, 
there are some gems among them (Low And Sweet Orchestra, Zoom, That 
Dog, Vermont, Bill Ding), but the ratio of crap to gem is 20 to 1 at 
least (crap ones include: Ape Hangers, Bandit Queen, The Indians, and 
those are only the ones AMG reviews tricked me into buying thinking 
they might be good!)  Labels invested a lot of money into those 
records, and lost of a lot of money on them.  If you want to know why 
it's hard to get signed, this is why.  And this is why I have little 
sympathy for everyone who complains about not being able to make a 
living in the music industry.  Because most people trying to make a 
living in the music industry, don't deserve to be, and their crappy 
music only clogs up the channels that could be used to get my, much 
better stuff released.  


> Most real artists (in my opinion) have more to say than what they 
say
> in a single song!  

In my opinion, the catchy pop single rules supreme.  The only thing 
more impressive is an album packed full of them, but how often does 
that happen?  Not very.  There's nothing worse than an artist who 
thinks he has 'something to say with his music'.  That's how we end 
up with pretentious U2 and Sting albums (not that I knock these for 
being popular - lets face it, I'm never going to convince vapid 
boomers to ditch Sting and embrace my glitch-hop sound...)  But as 
far as I'm concerned, John Lennon's Imagine has nothing over The 
Archie's Yummy Yummy (and I think Lennon would agree, Imagine is a 
catchy song just like Yummy Yummy)...