A couple thoughts that I couldn’t work into the earlier post:
–You may think I’m being melodramatic, but look at the face of Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad and The Queen) when he talks about Glee:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AXO6qH04fA]
–I don’t buy for a second that music being featured on Glee is good for musicians because it exposes people to their music (at least when talking about Glee covers released commercially. If the music stayed on the show, I probably wouldn’t have anything to say). I’m not saying that the original song artists are being exploited financially (although some of them probably are, as I would imagine that only the credited songwriters are paid), I’m saying that its dirty money.
–Interestingly, that same conversation happened about the legitimacy of samples in hip-hop. I think a continuum from good sampling and bad sampling has emerged: Kanye West (just as an example) sampling “21st Century Schizoid Man” in “POWER” is brilliant, while Kanye West lifting “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” wholesale in “Stronger” is lazy. Of course, that was a hit too, so maybe we’re just fucked.
–If anyone wanted to know why could never in any way get on board with Greg Sandow’s idea that the classical music should look to Glee to see how can it can become culturally relevant again, that was it.
–It’s really strange to me that we have a force on the music charts that is such a cipher. Look at the other top 10 artists I mentioned in the first section, all of which have their own flavor completely different from each other. And all of them were tremendously influential–you could probably find a direct musical descendant of each of them on the top 100 list I liked to. How could Glee possibly be influential? The sound of their music seems to have no connection to the popularity of their music, it’s simply an expression of a marketing machine. In other words, no musician would ever want to copy their sound (they don’t have one) or their song strategies (they don’t have one), and if they did, there’s no way they would succeed anyway. It’s like a weird backwards culture where Kidz Bop was the number 1 recording artist of all time.
–I spontaneously made the Kidz Bop/Glee comparison, but a quick Google search shows me that I’m not the first. It should be a bigger part of the conversation. As much as I hate the use of music to signal social status and identity, if I could shame people into not buying Glee music, I would.
-I’ve written way too much about this.