December 19th, 2007
Robin Mookerjee is a songwriter obsessed with music. Is this a good thing? Or a bad thing? read his story and check his website.
Confessions of a no-frills indie songwriter
I’m really a fan as much as a songwriter, but a lot of songwriters say that. Elvis Costello, Elton John. They were fans first. But I was a serious fan, probably like most people who listen to “dark” music. Great songs got me through my adolescence. They got me through breakups. They kept me company.
So, you can tell I’m a music geek. I wanted to write songs before I wanted a tricycle. I came from a classical music family. Popular music was practically banned – it was trash. They made me take violin lessons. So, naturally, I got an electric guitar. And – no kidding – it was from SEARS. I learned chords. I wanted to be a new waver. I got older and got an asymmetric haircut. No matter what else I did, music was always first for me.
But I NEVER had hip taste, and I was kind of ashamed of that. I liked some alternative and punk bands, but I liked top forty groups, commercial stuff – whatever struck me as real. My friends hated anything with synthesizers, so I hid my New Order cds. I’m kind of disagreeable that way. That’s why it was weird when I became involved with a VERY HIP band. They were everything: goth, emo, industrial, electro, Madchester, trance, ambient, straight rock… Everything except metal, hip hop, or country. This band, Bleak House, in Pennsylvania, was driven by big egos and weird hair. The local bars where we played had country music on the jukebox. They took one look at us with our weird clothes and hair and yelling at us. It was the egos that sunk the band. I couldn’t get along with the drummer who smoked pot all day and watched the Cartoon Channel, or the bassist, my ex-girlfriend, who thought she could sing like Aretha Franklin. We broke up.
That’s when it hit me. I wasn’t hip and never would be. I liked songs that rocked, sure, with attitude, but also sentimental heartfelt stuff. Most of all, I loved an amazing melody. I wanted to crack the secret of how songwriters came up with a melody that everyone wanted to hum. That is my obsession. Unfortunately, I had a day job and not much time to pursue this obsession, except in my mind.
End of story? No, because one Christmas my sister sent me a digital recording program - Cakewalk. One weekend I learned it. I’m still not that good at using these programs – I’m a songwriter, not a producer – but, anyway, I got TOTALLY OBSESSED with music again. I started recording and writing songs, and I couldn’t stop. And a funny thing happened. I decided to be myself. I wasn’t an acid-rave-nu-techno-retro-psychedelic punk. I was a guy who LOVED great songs. Everything from the Stones to Paul Simon to Dire Straits to The Cure to Smashing Pumpkins to Coldplay… Even Hall & Oates. Anything with a great melody and some heart and soul. The songs started pouring out of me, and I got some musicians in to help with bass and percussion parts. They sounded okay. They had hooks. I thought some as hits, at least the kind of song that used to be a hit, and I could imagine some tracks as somebody’s favorite song.
And another funny thing happened. The songs came out like Elliot Smith or Nick Drake or something. Not the tunes, which were pure pop, but the lyrics. They were about loss, death, uncertainty, basically saying “What’s it all about?” I never knew I was that morbid. Writing is funny that way. Like looking into a mirror and seeing someone else. Some songs were your basic, “I got dumped and I can’t deal with it” type thin. But none were particularly cheerful. So I called the album MISERABLISM.
Now I perform them in little bars in Brooklyn. Places where everyone is a garage punk / grindcore / progressive house / nu-metal / swamp-punk. And they actually like it, even though I’m basically just a guy who writes songs. My songs are for other people who needed pop music to survive growing up in America. That’s why their a bit sad. Because sad songs make you feel a little better.
It feels great just knowing my little creations are on people’s iPod playlists as they jog around and around a New York City park. Now I’m hooked, talking to record labels and renting time at a high class studio, very different from the pure indie setup on which I recorded “Miserablism.”
Posted in Arts, Music, People | 2 Comments »
December 12th, 2007
Today we post this exclusive work of Robert Karl Stonjek. It’s an unpublished ‘meditation’ he wrote in the mid 90s.
Portrait
I had been instructed to ‘just sit’ under this particular tree. I don’t think he had decided on this particular tree beforehand, we just wandered about in the bush for a while, then into a clearing whereupon he said “this is definitely the right one, I can feel it. Can you?” I could, I was sure I could. I nodded.
I was instructed to just wander around, or sit if I wished, or sleep, or just do as I please. I was told not to wander to far, and if I had to urinate to do it over toward a particular bush that was pointed out to me. I was to just be there, that was the important thing - to be there all night. He would be back in the morning with his assistant. Some of my friends had insisted on coming along to watch.
I was told that there was a man in the bush, me, and by morning there should be just plants and animals. It all seemed to make sense. There was a kind of logic to it, but one can’t really explain what it is.
I stayed awake all night. The tiredness I experienced from the ordeal of a freezing night under a tree wondering what I really should be doing had caused some minor hallucinations - I seemed to see things out of the corners of my eyes but couldn’t make out just what they were. I thought “maybe I’m just tired”.
The assistant arrived first and quietly began placing plastic sheets on the ground. On one of them he set up the artist’s equipment, then he left.
About half an hour later, just as the sun began to appear, the assistant led in my two friends who were instructed, in a whisper, to sit on the plastic sheet and remain absolutely silent. I’d say the assistant is in his mid forties, the old artist could be any age between 50 and 75. He is so agile yet has a face that shows age. When he speaks he seems to be just as aware of the immediate future as the past, as if he does not travel along a thread of time as we do but swims in a pool of it.
When he arrived he did not come over to me but wandered over to a tree and asked it how my night had been. Upon reflection I remember that he was chatting to various bushes and flowers as well, asking them about me and whether or not we got along. My friends watched as if they shared a single eye between them.
The assistant quietly gave me instructions as the artist wandered about, gently moving me out of the way on one occasion, then instructing me to stay still at which point the artist walked straight into me, as if I were invisible to him. The artist announced that there was enough of my nature in the surrounding bush for him to work with. He squatted in front of one of the sheets of paper (there may have been a canvas there as well, I’m not sure). He proceeded to work with pastels, drawing the bush as it had been effected by me (the bush captures the spirit - the artist captures the bush).
After a couple of hours the deed was done and the assistant called us all over. He asked me what the significance of various items in the painting were. He seemed to have captured one of the odd wispy things I thought I saw during the night, almost as I had seen it - vague, just out of sight.
“You can’t draw someone’s spirit” he told me, “but I can draw the effect your spirit has on living things. During the night, they absorb as you radiate. During the daytime the flow of energy is reversed. At the right moment there is no difference between the two: there is a fulcrum, a crossing over point. All I have to do is capture the bush on paper, as it captured your spirit through the night, and we have a portrait of your spirit.”
I can never tire of looking at that drawing. As I stand before it I am gradually able to distinguish between a person looking at some depiction of bushland, and my spirit peering into its’ own reflection!!
Posted in Arts, Culture | 3 Comments »
December 6th, 2007
This is a post I’ve received from Julien Bernier-Haineault and he is a music producer from Quebec, Canada. He made several songs for a lot of bands that never really got appreciated to their real value.
He said me: It’s countless hours, in fact I could count it as months, I’ve put into this industry for very low results in the end. This is my first attempt at writing articles and I hope people gets the point across that this art is reserved to an elite and that you must obey to some fixed rules to get into their circle. I hope to help people understand what are those traps and guide them to avoid those.
Julien, your voice can be heard now, thanks to ManuelMarino.com!
The industry of Do-what’s-already-done
Lately I’ve questioned myself why was there so much newcomers in the music industry that didn’t grab my attention. Soul less recordings, heavy thumping bass, yells and screams is all I hear these days. Where is the hear candy? You know that kind of song you listen once and you’re not sure you like until you give it more listens. The kind of lyric that hooks you and makes you want to change something about you, or even the world. The strange feeling of nostalgia, of fear or faith. That is all gone since the music industry is now all about money and none about feelings. What people want these days are instant rewards, premature orgasms while what we need from the music industry is more like a long term relationship. Don’t get me wrong; I understand why people want it that way, but there’s one kind of songs that’ll eventually fade in history while the other one will be there to stay. I think music needs a second chance, a change in the way of thinking, a split for newcomers that don’t want to fit in the prefabricated mold that today’s industry is.
Most contemporary musicians want to have the right “recipe” for success. The recipe that would get their songs top the charts and generate a buzz. They want the special ingredient that would get them out of normal life and throw them right into the elitist artist world. And that is understandable since the industry demands it. Instant success stories are heard all over the newspapers but from experience I know that most of those stories are forgotten shortly after. And if they are not, maybe they should.
What’s sad is that the music that doesn’t fit the standards gets pushed on the midnight playlist on Tuesdays, or worst, not played at all. So the infamous Verse Chorus Verse type of song is filling the entire rush hour playlist. Miss “Perfect Body” and Mr. “Perfect Voice” are all over the radio stations. We’ve come to an era where the beauty of the singer is more important than the beauty of the song. And that’s where it must stop. Sure an anti-charismatic singer won’t attract much audience at first, but fans listen to the music more than looks at the eyes, do they?
I really don’t care what the band looks like. They could be just “okay” but if what they do is pure genius, nobody will notice. What people will notice after some time is the music, the real reason why the band existed in the first place. Since when does a rock star need to be a supermodel to sell tickets? What we want is presence not nude skin.
Maybe I’m wrong a little bit though, since so much people are going to Justin’s or Britney’ shows. As they say “sex sells” and this can’t be truer. A lot of artists are betting on this to make their stash bigger. Think Janet Jackson at the superbowl. Publicity, marketing and word of mouth are what is important now, no matter what you do to get it. Good or bad, talk about it, heh? That’s what they want… And it works! What’s sure though is that good rock music has left its place to rap, screaming rock and pop music this decade and I can only hope it will be back for the next.
Posted in Business, Music, People | 6 Comments »
December 3rd, 2007
Marcos Marado wrote this exclusive article. Is the situation really so dramatic as he explains? Leave your comments, this could be our first really important debate on ManuelMarino.com.
The State of Music Business
I’m, first of all, a passionate for music. My passion for music before I can recall it, and grew with the fact that I had the luck to have older brother and sisters whose music collection was wide enough to feed my music interests. Also since a little kid I was interested in technology, and started programming at the age of four. Being nowadays a music lover and also a musician, and at the same time graduated and working as a Computer Science Engineer, I feel myself lucky to have some ground bases to analyse the state of music business.
The music business is in a chaotic state. The record industry is declining, and is throwing the guilt of it to what they like to call “piracy” - the unauthorised downloading of music. While they blame it, the truth is the fault is from the music industry itself. Doug Morris, Universal Music CEO, recently admitted he knows nothing about the music industry of nowadays. They decided to sue their customers by suing music fans that do unauthorised downloads instead of suing those who really make money out of copyrighted works, and restricting their clients’ rights with technologies like DRM.
It is surely true that it’s hard to find a completely fair way of compensating musicians while promoting the access to culture, but there are efforts to design market models that work - at least better than the actual one. The biggest problem is that the music industry - defined by the four major labels - doesn’t get it. The music market has changed, music, musicians and music lovers adapted themselves to new trends and technologies, but the music industry decided to ignore all the signs, refusing to see the big elephant in the room, and kept doing business in an obsolete way. The proof that they simply don’t understand what’s going on is right in front of everyone wanting to see it, when we get news that Elton John wants the Internet shut’ed down, or when countries try to impose Internet Services Providers to “filter illegal downloads“, even if that’s technicly impossible to do (illegal stuff surely don’t have an evil bit), and the music industry does political pressure that even makes countries change their laws. They spend tons of money implementing DRM systems, and others sell the rights that were restricted to listeners back, making money from what they first took, even if it’s known that DRM systems cause sales losses, music artists and fans are against such systems and new businesses are arising just by the fact that they don’t adopt DRM technologies, radio stations create petitions against DRM. Now, it’s too late for them - but what’s going to happen to the music market?
Well, we’re also seeing a lot of emergent business models. First of all, we have to realize that while CD sales are decreasing, music consumption is rising twice as fast. Also, if you open your eyes and start considering the music business as everything around music and not just music sales, then you’ll see that, for instance, in North America, the music business will total $26.5 billion in 2011, growing at an average annual rate of 2.8% from $23.1 billion in 2006. Recorded music revenues will still declining as declining CD sales cancel out the sharp gains in digital sales. Music publishing and live music will grow. Norway has a party that wants to free file sharing and sampling, shorten the commercial copyright and ban DRM. The number of web services for bands is wildly growing. Artists have now the means of making money while giving music for free, for instance. Musicians are finding new ways of doing their work by themselves, even if sometimes things aren’t simple. While there’s no formula on how to create the perfect record label, there are some labels and distributors that understand nowadays music market and know how to do business in it.
The future is smiling at us - we just have to let obsolete formulas and vices die.
Of course, new issues to be solved will appear. New fights have to be fought and won, or we’ll end like citizens of a dystopian world.
But soon enough it is going to be a great time to live - as a musician, a music lover or even a technologist.
Posted in Business, Music, Technology | 51 Comments »
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