The Dust of the Grand Wazoo
I just looked at the clock on the kitchen wall and realised the day has almost gone; I’m not sure where it went, though some of it was walking to the supermarket and back and making bread and a five-spice noodle soup, which seems to have been appreciated it. I also fell into a bit of a wormhole when thinking about music for tonight.
I haven’t done a great deal more than that today, and that’s OK: sitting in the sun catching up on New Scientist and Private Eye works for me. Earlier in the day, though, I was taken by an article by Björn Ulvaeus and especially by the paragraph I’ve excerpted below.
Today’s pop industry cheats songwriters – and deters the risk-taking that made Abba by Björn Ulvaeus in The Guardian
In 1973, Abba were invited to submit a song as Sweden’s entry to the Eurovision song contest. We had a perfect song: it was called Hasta Mañana. It was a ballad, it was catchy, it sounded like the kind of thing that did well in the Eurovision song contest. So we didn’t enter it. We chose Waterloo instead, which sounded like nothing we had ever heard at Eurovision before. That was the point: I thought we might come sixth or seventh, but people who saw the show – people outside Sweden, who had never heard of Abba – would remember us. It was a huge, calculated risk, and it paid off in a way we could never have imagined.
This goes straight to the heart of why the UK keeps doing badly at Eurovision (aside from politics); we keep trying to write Eurovision winners rather than trying to write good songs. There’s a metaphor there for a lot of things. There’s something else lurking in there about the corporatisation of music (and the creative arts generally) and the general unwillingness to take a punt on something.
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Music: all this time and I haven’t put any Frank Zappa here. There are a couple of reasons for that, but one is selecting something that might work here. I watched Alex Winter’s excellent, and ultimately quite moving, documentary about him this evening and almost put Watermelon in Easter Hay here, but instead I’ve put in a clip of his best-loved band, ‘the Roxy Band’ in live performance.
As a treat, for those of you not familiar with the sub-genre of YouTube that is reaction videos, I’ve added a couple of classics of their kind. I have issues with the sub-genre, principally that it involves black dudes reacting to music of old white farts who wouldn’t return the favour. In fact I’ve contemplated setting up a channel reacting to black music that would normally pass me by (disclaimer: I think NWA’s F*** The Police is the best protest song I’ve ever heard.)
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