The Pop Crisis
COOK, BRUCE
On Music THE POP CRISIS BY BRUCE LOOK The economics of the music business at present is such that a number of big-name performers who have been around for years are practically being forced into...
...What I would suggest, though, is that far from being a compromise, the kind of music sung by Bennett and Bassey has a consistency, and a tradition, that reaches back beyond the '30s...
...Not many singers can move with the same ease and authority through the minor changes of "Exclusively for Me,' by Colin Bluestone and David Jones, or "Wheelers and Dealers," by David Frischberg...
...There is surely something odd in the immense popularity of a piece about a fatherless boy who is rendered deaf, dumb and blind when he happens to view his mother having sexual intercourse with a man she has presented as his uncle...
...Were the bald economic realities not there- to convince us of this, I think we would be able to deduce some sort of crisis from what currently passes for pop-from the lyrics, from the music (subtler than ever before), even from the extremely intense performances...
...Rock lyrics, for all their vaunted "poetry," tend to be rather abstract, making few concessions to romantic love...
...I hope not...
...ever put to music...
...All these developments in pop form a kind of nexus in a current album by one of the best and most underrated singers in the field, Lani Hall...
...Before that, they found expression in prose and verse romances, and they probably had their origin in the code of courtly love...
...Recent examples of this include Helen Reddy's weird "Angie Baby," from her new LP, Free and Easy (Capitol ST-11348), and the ecology-minded "Please Don't Sell Nova Scotia," from Anne Murray's Highly Prized Possession (Capitol ST-11354...
...The semantic riddle-me-this raises other questions, too...
...Pop" is a distinct form, expressing a distinct set of values-a sense of individual destiny...
...Many of the other songs could not have been imagined 25 years ago, during the heyday of pop...
...Lani Hall herself seems the quintessential pop singer...
...Except for Elvis Presley and the early "raunch and roll" performers, most people who made rock music seem a peculiarly asexual lot...
...These, of course, are the concerns of rock writers-in fact, "Banquet" is by Joni Mitchell...
...You could call them "movie" values, referring to the pre-Easy Rider cinema, that is, but they were also the values of popular fiction...
...Instead, they are romantic about the brotherhood of man, freedom, the environment, etc., things that pertain less to the individual than to the group...
...Their records may be selling as well as they ever did, but the break-even point is so much higher now the companies feel compelled to let them go, or at least to trim their budgets...
...In addition, she has a sense of dynamics that is just about unmatched-only Barbra Streisand comes close...
...They are like the last love songs...
...But rock and sex have always had a rather ambivalent relationship...
...Hall sings of protecting the environment in "Save the Sunlight...
...In short, they have been around a long time, although they are no longer "popular...
...She and her husband, Herb Alport, who produced the album, have chosen the material very well...
...What do we call nonclassical music that isn't rock and isn't jazz...
...Hence, neither is the music...
...The lyrics suit her as well...
...At any rate, pop is out and rock is in...
...Listen to "Hello It's Me" or "Time Will Tell" and you know the days of moon-June-spoon are gone forever...
...You can get an idea of what is replacing them from the rock opera Tommy, a vulgar, confused and curiously antisexual work that has now been made into a grotesque film by Ken Russell...
...Banquet" and "Wheelers and Dealers" are, simply put, about greed...
...I'm as sentimental as the next 40-year-old about individual destiny and romantic love, but I'm not blind to the fact that these values have often been used to put a good face on sheer human greed...
...Maybe this ethos is the proper one for the age of overpopulation and scarcity we are entering...
...The plaintiveness in her voice perfectly fits Todd Rundgren's "Hello It's Me," with its message to a lover who has gone his own way...
...Yet, Lani Hall invests the words with a feeling of adult concern that turns them into treatments of real human problems, not just causes to demonstrate for or against...
...and a conviction that while things may not always turn out right, it does matter how they turn out...
...And there's hardly another American north of Brazil who can wail and sputter in fluent, nonstop Portuguese, as she does on Edu Lobo's "Corrida de Jangada...
...Since we tend to think of Bennett as a popular singer, his case is particularly interesting, raising the question: Is a popular singer one who is popular, or merely one who sings a certain kind of song...
...Is it, as some call it, "middle-of-the-road" music 'music-a label that not only begs the issue, but suggests choice or calculation by straight-ahead, flat-out performers like Bennett or Shirley Bassey, who wouldn't be able to sing differently if they wanted to...
...a belief in romantic love...
...I do not intend to devise some new musical category here...
...Indeed, the timbre of their voices is similar and both bring out the drama in a song...
...But even if it is, one could hardly do better than to listen to Hello It's Me...
...Even so fine and well-established a performer as Tony Bennett has been obliged to follow this course, after failing to reach an agreement with Columbia...
...On Music THE POP CRISIS BY BRUCE LOOK The economics of the music business at present is such that a number of big-name performers who have been around for years are practically being forced into retirement...
...Their values are almost precisely the reverse of the old pop songs...
...Her dramatic sense makes "Time Will Tell" a soliloquy of real poignance...
...If you don't know Lani Hall, then try to imagine Barbra Streisand with warmth...
...Much of it has a fin de siecle quality, a richness that is perhaps not quite healthy...
...The years she spent with Sergio Mendes' Brasil '66 have also given her a technical mastery most other singers can only envy...
...Entitled Hello It's Me (A&M SP-4508), it is better than anything of its kind that I have come across in more than a year and it exemplifies what is happening in the music...
...This song by Richard Mattley and David Shire is clearly one of the most neurotic expressions of romantic love-"Did I feel it...
...Did you fake it...
...Taken together, these two numbers seem a kind of final statement, a glum commentary, on the old notions of romance...
...Is it "pop"-a category that is both inexact and vaguely pejorative...
...Many jazz artists have even been founding their own mailorder record labels because they can't get the terms-big advances, top royalty schedules, favorable advertising clauses-they consider suitable...
...Her voice has a plaintive quality that communicates emotion restrained, sadness kept secret...
...With the rest, one gets the feeling that pop writers and performers are trying to treat the same material, and say the same things, as their counterparts in rock, albeit in a more sophisticated way...
...From a purely musical standpoint, Lani Hall puts a stamp of ownership on all the songs she sings...
...Is pop music in its last phase...
Vol. 58 • April 1975 • No. 9
