Billboard charts and the 1970s revival of pop music from the 1950s

 

For people of a certain age, "Billboard charts" is synonymous with fame. Basically, if your band or record or composition appeared on one of the Billboard charts tracking album or single releases, you are part of pop music history, even if it was #99 on the Billboard Hot 100 or a one-hit wonder on the Adult Contemporary chart in September of 1986.

What can explain pop artists re-appearing on the Billboard charts after a long hiatus? In a discussion of late-20th century pop music trends, there was a comment from a younger person, expressing surprise about early 60s crooner Frankie Valli showing up more than a decade after his last appearance, when Billboard mostly featured disco, "AOR" (album-oriented rock), and New Wave:

The fact that Valli topped the charts again in 1978 with “Grease” still boggles my mind.

Reading this, I thought: Not if you were living through the 1950s nostalgia revival which was going strong at the time and lingered through the early 80s.

50s nostalgia was everywhere. It was on TV (Happy Days and Sha Na Na), the movies (American Graffiti, Porky's) and the radio. Not only were there retro musical acts like The Stray Cats, there were retro projects by established artists returning to the music they grew up with, such as Robert Plant's The Honeydrippers as well as individual songs by 70s stars like Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love."

By the mid 80s, the 50s nostalgia trend had mostly faded away in the larger pop culture sphere. There were still movies about the 50s, but they tended to be serious stories or biopics as opposed to Baby Boomers reliving youthful times.

In the music arena, the Stray Cats and a few newer bands like Reverend Horton Heat and Guana Batz carried the 50s torch, but on a much smaller stage, and maybe dialed ahead a few years to the early 60s. 

Billy Joel's "For The Longest Time" and Robert Plant were two of the last major acts to attempt to surf the 50s retro wave. When I saw Plant at the Worcester Centrum in 1985, The Honeydrippers segment at the end of the set felt silly and forced. The legions of fans wearing Zoso t-shirts would have much rather liked an obscure Led Zeppelin track. 

But then again, this was the era of Payola 2.0, when record company executives could sideline heavy metal fans and pretend long-haired rockers wanted to listen to "Sea of Love." Of course, no one wanted to hear it. Nostalgia rock faded to the margins, and people mostly forgot the late 70s revival. 

A late review of Blade Runner 2049

Friends have asked me about Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the ground-breaking 1982 film by Director Ridley Scott and a very talented cast, crew, and composer. I was 13 when the first film came out and it made a huge impact -- it was a dystopian future, to be sure, but one that was fascinating and different than the "clean" utopias depicted in Star Trek or the alien-infused space opera of Star Wars.

Back to Blade Runner 2049. I saw it on IMAX and went on an afternoon when I knew there wouldn't be many other people in the theater to disturb my experience. The film was beautifully shot, and had some incredible scenes, including the climactic, desperate fight scene outside the city's sea wall. I really liked the score by Hans Zimmer, too. He had a tough job, not only being brought in to replace the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, but also living up to the incredible soundtrack from the first film by Vangelis (which has perhaps the most dedicated cult following of any film soundtrack, judging by the mods and remixes created by fans, such as the Esper Edition. I've included one of them below).

Nevertheless, there were some serious flaws in BR49. Ryan Gosling had the lead role, and was an obvious pick (Hollywood always goes for leading men with strong "brands," which it had done when Harrison Ford in the first film). But I believe Gosling was the wrong person for the role -- he was too emotionless and almost mechanical in the fight scenes. Yes, he's a synthetic human, but considering they were designed to be "More Human than Human," I expected more humanity in Gosling's character in the 2049 generation.

There was another element that bothered me. Los Angeles 2049 has clear Asian influences, including Chinese and Japanese signage everywhere, and a cafeteria that has Asian dishes and themes. Yet there were hardly any Asian people in any roles, even extras.

Taking things one step further: Assuming demographic trends persist, in the far future society "minorities" will be white and the population will be mostly black, brown, yellow, and multiracial. Yet every major and most minor roles in Blade Runner 2049 are white, except for Olmos (reprised from the first film for about a minute), the east African shopkeeper (another short scene), and the junkyard orphanage owner.

The 1982 film was far better in this respect, imagining a future where society did include lots of people from different backgrounds and cultural influences from across the Pacific -- and even a street language based on Japanese, German, and English! 

Blade Runner 2049 isn't the only science fiction film that gets the future humanity wrong. In my long experience watching science fiction movies, only Luc Besson's 1997 film The Fifth Element tried to get humanity right, at least with secondary characters and extras who were black, mixed race, and Asian.

Despite all of this, I would like to see Blade Runner 2049 once more. I had trouble following some of the plot threads and details, and would like to see it at least once more to wrap my head around them and help me fathom the meaning of the story.

OK Go's YouTube problem

By its own account, OK Go owes its success to YouTube. The band says that a viral video at the dawn of the Internet video era (this would be "A Million Ways," or "Here It Goes Again", about four years ago) put it on the map, and since that time, it has seen YouTube as an important part of its marketing strategy.

But there's a little problem now, says OK Go in an open letter: While anyone can view the band's new videos on YouTube, you can't embed them in a blog post, like I did a few days ago with Hug a Pug. This means the viral potential is severely limited, as the video can't be easily shared with fans' own mini-audiences on blogs and fan sites.

Why has OK Go's record label, EMI, hobbled one of its most popular artists by disabling embedding of the band's videos? Because there is no way to monetize the videos, says vocalist Damian Kulash. YouTube runs ads next to and over videos showing on the site, and the videos producers can get a small cut of the ad revenue. On embedded videos, YouTube can also show ads, but respectable (i.e., deep-pocketed) advertisers often don't want to have their ads running in unknown blogs or sites that post the videos.

Kulash says that the issue illustrates the larger problem of a 20th-century industry trying to keep up with the new digital reality (sound familiar?):

What we’re really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We’re stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who’d want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.

So what about Hug A Pug, a YouTube video which can be embedded on blogs? Well, as I pointed out in my earlier post, the company that produced the music video (Ganz) is not trying to sell songs. They're trying to sell something else. Songs like Hug A Pug are purely promotions for other products -- namely, Ganz's stuffed animal line (Webkinz), and the virtual world based on the animals (Webkinz World). In other words, Hug A Pug doesn't need to run ads because it is the ad.

There are alternatives for embedding video, including MySpace and Vimeo, and OK Go has made its latest music video available on both services (see video below). But YouTube's huge reach and advertising potential are issues that the music industry are trying to balance, which means that for the time being the song won't be seen that much outside of YouTube.com and a few other sanctioned places.


OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

(Link: Hacker News)