I think it's a function of the immediacy of stardom

Back In The Day (he said, leaning on his zimmer) it was quite common even once you were through the filter of the A+R man (always a man), for your first few albums not to be a huge success. If a record company believed in you they'd keep supporting you and eventually you'd be quite good. All this time you were gigging regularly, learning how to do that really well. Think of the Beatles in Hamburg, the Stones, the Who, Queen - all of them grafted really hard before they hit the bigtime.

These days most of the filters are gone. Stardom is instant. The grind to get to the top is often bypassed. And so you get acts who can cut a cute video but don't know how to perform live. Bypassing the thousands of gigs and immediate interaction with fans at those gigs must give a very different experience to the musicians, and mean they are much less grounded in/connected to the people they are writing for/about.

Not so long ago I saw a list of the top grossing live acts. All of them, I think, were acts I myself had listened to while youngish. I was very taken aback - I expected the old bands with one or two truly stellar exceptions to be way down the list, and loads of new acts up there. I put this down to the same thing - newer acts simply don't go through the same process, which mandates learning to perform live, that the older acts used to.

Posted By: Old Man, Jan 11, 14:00:42