The Day the Concert Stood Still

The nature of a concert varies by musical genre and the individual performers. Nevertheless, we all admire a thumping sound system at a concert; that bass drum the kicks you in the gut, that guitar solo cutting through the air like a sonic razor. A concert, in many ways, is a spiritual connection between the artist and audience, through music or more specifically, emotion. With some dough, one has the opportunity to be in the presence of an admired musician or musicians and to feel them for who they are. So, why then would artists destroy this special interaction with lip-syncing, overpowered visuals, and album replicas? Corporate media has taken control over artists, and because of that, artists gain evil power or lack thereof on as well as off-stage. There was a time when bands like The Beetles, or artists like Nick Drake relied solely on their own raw talent. Today, for the most part, is a different story.

Lip-synching is a commonly-used shortcut in live music, but also considered to be controversial. As more elaborate shows came into place in the 1990s, lip-synching was introduced as a tool to dance, sing, etc. simultaneously and accurately. For example, Michael Jackson has performed complex dance routines while lip-syncing and live singing on stage. Unfortunately, artists like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and the like of them have taken extreme advantage of this tool to fool-proof their entire shows. According to The New York Times, the increased use of lip-syncing has made legislators in New York and New Jersey irritated, and suggests informing concert-goers that they are essentially paying for a non-live live concert.

Name any band or artist in mainstream pop culture—they are guaranteed to be satans of the lip-syncing machine. Music making is becoming too easy in this generation to the point where power, creativity and raw energy have trivially fluttered out the window in exchange of the power of purgatory perfection. In today’s brainwashed culture, concert-goers expect nothing less than perfection and any off-note or mess-up is deemed unacceptable. The difference between Cat Power and Kesha is paranormal advertising empowerment. Kesha is an image that has been stripped from her humanity to become a product—the pressure for perfectionism is greater here. However, better isn’t always good; more isn’t always beneficial.

Whether it’s Britney Spears in a 2009 Australian show, Luciano Pavarotti at the 2006 Winter Olympics or Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live in 2004, lip-syncing has undeniably created a bad and non-credible image in which people nevertheless blindly eat up. Therefore, the process repeats itself until the very definition of a live show becomes the very definition of a digital download of the album.

So that begs the question: What are we actually paying for if the concert we’re viewing is a hoax? The answer is the artist brand. Every artist/band has a brand and hype surrounding that brand. This is why Madonna’s concerts are $300+ and Devendra Banhart’s are $40, if that. Tactlessly, the fact that one is a real musician/singer and the other is a performer who uses fake means to get by is completely irrelevant when it comes to branding and revenue. It’s a sad, yet unnecessary truth in the music industry. Plainly, authentic artists are not popular, which garners more fake imitators to merge into the music industry.

The ‘80s, 70s, and even earlier years were fundamental times in concert history: the popularity of experimentation and improvisation. The goal and purpose for a concert back then was not to mimic songs in the exact deliverance of a record or cassette tape, but rather create an atmosphere of emotion and humanistic connection. Music is a living, breathing entity, and when played live, songs change in shifting rhythm and details of instrumental performance—whatever the mood may strike at a certain time. A great part of Hendrix’s popularity came from his pure vigor and improvisation on stage. It was this that made fans yearning for a personal assembly for something fresh, real and animalistic. Jazz has been implementing these stage characteristics since the 1950s. Free Jazz, in particular, was a response to the dissatisfaction on the limitations on already established 1940s jazz. Come 1980s, freestyle made its way to modern settings, introducing rap battles and beat boxing. The craft of freestyle rap is improvising rhymes on the spot, and the art still exists today.

There has been a great speed of careless emergence of technology from the ’90s up until now. For better or worse, technology makes situations easier and more convenient. Consequently, media culture grabbed technology by the throat and altered the outlook on the process of human life, and specifically how concerts were to be executed. Enter the music industry. Alongside lip-syncing, Auto-Tune and scarce instrumentation in songs cultivates faster than The Spice Girls receiving their first record deal. In response to the decline of revenue from experimentalism and popularity of widely accessible generic pop, rock, etc., managers and major record labels placed artists into predetermined boxes, employing an apparent middle finger between creativity and music. Concerts became structured and although experimentalism still existed, the feeling was quickly forgotten by the large majority due to the role of the sheep in an overly produced world.

Furthermore, I should point out there is a vital difference between experimentalism and simply creating clutter. Discerning how much processing occurs on an album in comparison to the live show is incredibly easy to pinpoint. The Black Eyed Peas is a superior example of a band who are 100 times worse on stage than their actual recordings present (and this is during the technological age). They are filled with so much ego that they focus on sales rather than talent and skill.

Speaking of skills, many people today who have played an instrument for about a decade might easily become divorced from it. The main reason behind this is due to never instilling the instrument as part of his or her emotional being, but rather primarily learned as a mechanical device to be operated, not a living process in which to invest thoughts and feelings. Because of this notion, we see musicians taking more shortcuts than ever before into stardom, and concerts do not differ. It’s a story of the cookie cutter.

Today, artists are essentially slaves driven by egoism. There is no soul, no presence, no anything. An event that once drew the public to a whole new universe, is a puppet-show run by corporate media. That’s not to say all bands and artists are awful live. However, to find them we must delve underground. Animal Collective is just one band that stands apart from the rest by entrancing a group of fans into an all-night psychedelic euphoria. They are not corrupted by media and stay true to their genuine selves. Their live shows are heavily experimented and use visuals as a supplement to their outlandish songs. The point being, there is still hope in the world for honest shows. Underground bands are the role models for change, and are increasingly being discovered and uncovered by its shrouds. However, in a way, I'd prefer the underground bands to remain as such so as to prevent another musical homicide.

© Ajay Patel

The Hip-Hop Evolution: For Better or for Worse

Hip-hop is the expression of cultural and societal issues through positive and meaningful messages of inclusion, activism, equity, justice, political consciousness, education and success—or at least it was in its early years. Thus, hip-hop was not just a genre of music, but rather a 1970s lifestyle stance starting in the Bronx. For over three decades, this lifestyle rapidly expanded from the streets of south-central Los Angeles and New York (east side and west side) and into the consciousness of listeners and performers alike. Today, hip-hop has evolved into consumer hip-hop—a colossal music industry with, for the most part, no to very little connection to its roots.

Just like rock and pop, hip-hop music reflects the changing lives and audiences it speaks through in the past decade. While hip-hop still talks of the griminess of the streets, those lyrics are countered by a manifesto of ‘the good life.’ Come 1990s, however, the culture of hip-hop began to remodel itself. Artists such as Buju Banton and Elephant Man have been criticized for their homophobic lyrics, promoting hate crime. Similar claims have been aimed toward Eminem and 50 Cent during their early stages of artist development. To this day, Canada has refrained from allowing Elephant Man to perform a show.

Overall, most rappers today have as much lyrical skill as emos have on epidermal pigment. Pimps, hoes, money and swearing for the sake of swearing seem to be common culprits in hip-hop music. Arbitrary rhyming without any fundamental meaning does not in any respect mean one is hip-hop. Refer to Kanye West’s Getting It In: Don't try to treat me like / I ain't famous / My apologies, are you into astrology / Cause I'm, I'm tryin to make it to Uranus; or perhaps Lil Wayne’s nonsense in Jump In the Air: Mijo, zero degreeyo, frio / Get into your soul like Neyo, weeyo / Oh I meant ohwee or is it oohwee. It’s humorous how anyone can take these and similar lyrics seriously. Compare these to legendary Nas in I Can: We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys / It was empires in Africa called Kush Timbuktu, where every race came to get books / To learn from black teachers who taught Greeks and Romans / Asian Arabs and gave them gold. There is, evidently then, a shift in content and context within hip-hop music. It seems what was once an art can be destroyed and rebuilt by just about anyone. Record labels create revenue by enforcing safe, generalized, omnirelatable music. Consequently, activism, equity, justice and political consciousness are deficient in mainstream hip-hop. It’s mainly a gimmick which blinds everyone, including myself at times, with sensational beats.

Sparked by rappers experimenting with a new art form, hip-hop fashion became an expression of the hip-hop culture demonstrating a particular stance. The fashion of hip-hop was chiefly influenced from Mafioso and breakdance references. Break-dancers (or B-boys) wore, and still wear, clothes that were functional for dancing, such as baggy jeans. Conversely, Mafioso established the classic gangster look. Beginning in the 1990s, the style was immensely exasperated with iced out jewelry, fully-loaded and pimped out vehicles and an overall commercialized, egotistical lifestyle. Just like any other pop artist transformation, hip-hoppers ultimately become the product of relations, instead of a product of the self.

Adolescents are, and have always been, the most impressionable people on this planet. Unfortunately, this rose as hip-hop was symbolizing guns, rape, violence, drugs, and female sexualization. At this time, rappers start to endorse a heartless cohort of ego driven thug soldiers. This is where the fine line is drawn between hip-hoppers and everyone else. I am not African-American, so I'm perhaps not ideal to critic such a dividing issue, however, being brown-skinned, I can look at racial stereotypes from an outside perspective – from a viewpoint that is neither black, nor white. So then, the debatable and omnipresent million-dollar question is: Does hip-hop—specifically its clothes—promote these negative stereotypes? Yes and no; it all depends on the outcast and the observer. However, one may believe it may be easier to avoid a hip-hopper to circumvent any trouble (I use trouble loosely here). Although, despite the negative stereotypes upon hip-hop clothing, the average hip-hopper wears baggy clothes, not to breakdance more efficiently, although that is of course plausible, but to challenge the negative societal perception against them.

Whether for good or evil, Auto-Tune processing has taken over modern hip-hop music. Audiences have been transfixed by the robotic vocal alterations Auto-Tune creates. Auto-Tune is impractical in two accounts: it was originally used to correct vocal pitches that were amiss, even by a hair, to ensure superhuman perfection at all times; it is now used as an esthetic property, which enforces the profound laziness of lyricists and producers alike. Therefore, music has become so "perfect" today that it has literally lost reality.

Either audible or not, this phase vocoder will consequently give off the illusion that the performer can actually sing, therefore not worrying too much about anything else in the production process. In fact, according to the Boston Herald, artists confessed to using Auto-Tune, suggesting it ensures a good performance. That made me sick to my stomach. Had it been used sparsely and more artistically, rather than a bombardment of cover-ups, Auto-Tune could have brought a new challenge to the music industry. Unfortunately, it’s currently doing the opposite. Think of Auto-Tune like steroids was to baseball—we seem to want to mimic everyone because it "seems" to work.

Browsing through this weeks Billboard Top 100, one can easily discover its rise in pop culture. There are at least 10-15 artists on the charts who are heavily over-using this musical “technique”, including Lady Gaga and Flo Rida. The effect reached to such popularity and irritating peak levels that Jay-Z expressed his own opinion on his amazing track, Death of Autotune.

Hip-hop will undoubtedly continue to grow, which is a great thing, but it must not forget the raw impact it once had. Hip-Hop was not only a pivotal point in music, but also culture. Hip-hop died when it became the very thing it was originally against. Of course, I don’t believe all hip-hop today is trivial. There are many sublime artists today who raise the bar to staggering heights. Sage Francis is the smartest, most profound rapper/lyricist I have come across. He does not depend on fame and auto-tune to create his image, rather speaks from the soul regarding a sociological, ideological and political culture that he is surrounded in. Other artists who bring something climatic to the table include: M.I.A., Lauryn Hill, Q-Tip, K’NAAN, El-P and RJD2. Whether through rhymes, graffiti, clothing, and the like, hip-hop is an art form and should remain as such. Anyone who takes shortcuts into hip-hop or uses it for fame and fortune is completely disrespectful to the entire culture and what it represents. Although I am aware there are other issues within the hip-hop lifestyle that more or less changed the world, I covered the most crucial shards. For now, however, we need to be critical listeners and decide what is appropriate for the human race.




© Ajay Patel