Stepping in for Ms. Holly...it's the Rampant Ego Show! ;-)
Tony Wilson believed in Boethius’s wheel, that which raises us up to heights will also bring us low in the end. I’m with the late Mr. Wilson (who if you do not know, you should read more. No, just kidding. But wikipedia him.) , but I describe it in a different way. I look at music as a sine wave. Up, down, cyclical. What I’d like to write about tonight (because iheartsarahduh is out and about) is songwriting.
You ever hear of the term A&R? Stands for “artists and relationships”. These folks bring talent into record labels and keep them comfortable, for lack of a better word. Wasn’t always this way. Most of the best artists, pre-1960’s, were not songwriters. They were singers, true. Interpreters, absolutely. But not songwriters. Songs were written in places like the Brill Building, off of Broadway in Manhattan, or Nashville, or Detroit, by folks like Gamble and Huff or Hayes/Prater. Not that some of those folks didn’t end up being or weren’t artists themselves, though. Carole King wrote some of the most famous soul songs of all time (Natural Woman? King original). Isaac Hayes wrote most of the Sam and Dave songbook. Willie Nelson wrote some of the most famous country songs you can think of. The mechanic, however, was “a singer and a song”. A&R folks were hired to bring people together with music. Frank Sinatra wasn’t a famous songwriter, but he had folks bring him music to interpret. Billie Holliday, by and large, was the same. Honestly, I’ve heard stories about some of the projects Frank chose for himself, and I’m okay with him not writing songs. Really.
Things change in the 60’s. As bands like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Kinks, and other popular musicians start to insist on writing their own songs, the amount of interpreted music starts to lessen. Oh, sure, there are still a ton of songs that are written “for” or given to artists to do; not everyone is a writer, after all. However, a large part of popular music becomes songs written by someone for themselves. It attempts to keep songwriting and mechanical royalties rooted in the same people. The form reaches its apex/apotheosis with the rise of the singer/songwriter in the 1970’s. Now, it’s not even a band writing its own songs and playing them; it’s one person, writing songs for themselves to sing, sometimes alone on stage, with no one but themselves and a guitar. As a fan of Warren Zevon, I heartily endorse the form. How could I not?
Now, it should be said that the needle has not swung all the way back to “a singer and a song”. Far from it. Folks are still writing songs for themselves to perform and sing. Ask folks like Jonathan Coulton, Amanda Palmer, and so many others standing onstage, singing about what they like. However, a great deal of pop music has done so. Rihanna doesn’t write her own music. Neither does Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, or Miley Cyrus. And honestly? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. They have smart people working for them at the record company who look for good songs that fit them. They are looking for a song for their singer to sing. And they’re doing a fairly good job doing it. Look at the top 40 charts, after all. The wave has come back. Even if the artists riding it aren’t selling quite as many records as the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Carly Simon were in the 1970’s. It’s okay not to write your own songs again.
EDIT
All the above is true. HOWEVER. What I cannot and will not groove on is someone trading on their "realness" or "authenticity" because they claim to write their own songs and do not. That is not okay, not cool, and it really bothers me. The original furor over Avril Lavigne, prior to that first record coming out...that was a real shit storm. What happened was that there was a lot of "noise" about this young woman writing these very personal songs. This was on official websites and forums and such, pre blog. I recall people getting very defensive about the possibility that Avril hadn't written those songs. How dare someone question the "realness"! And yet, when the record came out, it turned out that the majority of the record was written and produced by The Matrix, which is no bad thing. Claiming, however to have written them? Trading on that kind of cred...yeah, it's shady. Don't try to be on the other end of the sine wave when you're not.