Live Dead

Live music is called live music for a reason. It wishes to imply that its opponent – recorded music – is dead. The use of the term ‘live’ to describe a performance that is ‘heard or watched at the time of its occurrence’ only arose in the 1930s. Musicians’ unions promoted this usage vigourously, as they campaigned hard to ‘keep music live’. They targetted recorded music, describing it as a ‘grave threat’, a ‘serious danger’ and an ‘ever-present menace’. Their great fear was that records would take the place of performing musicians: ‘The musician may well become extinct and music may cease to be written’.

            To a certain extent their terminology was appropriate. The term ‘record’ has preservative connotations. To record is to embalm sounds that would otherwise pass. Death haunted the earliest phonographic reveries. The first article about sound recording declared, ‘certainly nothing can be conceived more likely to create the profoundest of sensations, to arouse the liveliest of human emotions, than once more to hear the familiar voices of the dead’. Thomas Edison, the inventor of sound recording, promised an epitaph that would last through the ages: ‘This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words: and, centuries after you have crumbled into dust, may repeat every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word’.

            And yet the promotion of the term ‘live music’ has been more duplicitous than first appears. By the 1930s records were very much seen as living things. This is because Edison was a liar. His original tinfoil recordings lasted days rather than centuries; they were destroyed when they were removed from the phonograph. Shellac and vinyl offered improvements upon this format, but they too proved susceptible to ageing processes. Consequently, the preservative function of records was downplayed. In its place came a recording industry that focused on a fast turnover of products. It didn’t want you to keep your records forever. It wanted you to buy new ones.

            This had phenomenological ramifications. Records felt alive precisely because you could play them to death. Analogue records aged in step with their owners, acquiring the same scuffs, knocks and dust as they passed through time. Elvis Costello made this point clear in ‘45’, his paean to the 7” single: ‘Every scratch, every click, every heartbeat, every breath that I bless’. This ethos casts the musicians’ unions’ campaigns in a different light. They weren’t attacking records because they thought they were lifeless; they feared them because they are very much alive.

            And were they trying to cover up the fact that it is live performance that is morbid? One reason to see an artist in the flesh is to witness them before that flesh withers. This much has become apparent following the rash of popular music deaths this year. How did people respond to the passing of David Bowie and Prince? By boasting that they had seen them when they were alive. Social media was awash with pictures of ticket stubs, as people sought to prove that they were once in the same room as the recently deceased.

The death cult of live performance increases as artists and audiences grow older. There is a sense of chalking musicians off your list before they pass away. It is not only confined to OAP artists, however. One of the reasons why people pay to see unpredictable and doomed performers such as Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty is in the hope that the artist will die young. The viewer will then be able to speak from the privileged position of having seen them while they fretted their hour on the stage.

Gig-goers are a cruel bunch.

The Aura Restorer

If the ‘aura’ of recorded music is complex, the aura of live popular music performance is even more so. This all stems from the fact that recordings are no longer doing the job of recording. They do not reproduce existing events; they are events in themselves. ‘Accordingly’, as Sarah Thornton noted, records have ‘shifted from being a secondary or derivative form to a primary, original one’. This has had a knock-on effect for performance. Where records once sought to recreate the acts of performers, performance is now secondary to recording.

Walter Benjamin claimed ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’. He proposed two ways in which reproductions have democratic potential. They escape the cult or originals (offering instead ‘a plurality of copies’) and they break with tradition (rather than being tied to a specific place or time, they could ‘meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation’). Live performance reverses both processes. Fans experience a unique event and they are tied to its co-ordinates. On top of that, they attend gigs to experience the ‘aura’ of stars. They willingly fall under their ‘phoney spell’.

It looks, therefore, as though live performance will undo all the good, democratising work of reproduction. This is not quite the case, however. And this is because records come first. Audiences take their knowledge and experience of records with them when they go to see a live act. This complicates the experience. Take the following quote, for example. In 1963, a Beatles fan was asked why she and other girls screamed throughout the band’s performances. She replied: ‘We came to see the Beatles. We can hear them on records. Anyway, we might be disappointed if we heard them in real life’.

This is profoundly philosophical. It also cuts through so much of the bullshit about live music. In witnessing a band live, the actual quality of the music is not the priority. What matters, if you want it, is the aura of being in the same room as that band. Even then, though, the real love is not for the act, it is for their records. So why bother going to see the band at all?

What makes it worthwhile is the communal experience of gathering with other fans. It is a chance to make transform a private listening experience into a public event. The deep knowledge of the recorded music has an outlet. That knowledge can now be shared, along with the passion, belief and fantasies that have accumulated. And this doesn’t apply solely to girl fans screaming at their teen idols, it applies to every live music experience that takes as its starting point the popularity of the artist’s recordings. The greatest live performers know this too. Take Prince, for example. If any performer deserved star treatment he did. He had the songs, the talent, the vision and the charisma. And yet he toyed with all of this. Knowing that the real action was taking place in the auditorium, his shows were not centred on his acceptance of the fans’ devotion, but on the playful giving of that devotion.

            The Beatles’ quote comes from Electric Shock, Peter Doggett’s monumental history of pop music. Later in the same book he contemplates the popularity of tribute bands. In the process he condemns the ‘vast audience for whom it barely matters whether they are witnessing an authentic pop idol or a workmanlike facsimile: all they want is the chance to relive some precious pop memories’.

Doggett’s denigration is misplaced. Witnessing a tribute band can be superior to the experience of seeing the ‘real’ act. It is also, in some ways, truer to the relationship that the fan has with recorded music. Conventional live performance restores something of the ‘domain of tradition’. Rather than experiencing art democratically, as fans have done with recordings, fans can become overwhelmed by the presence of the stars. Tribute bands, instead, offer a reproduction of reproductions. They are there to recreate the hit records, the famous TV appearances and/or the ‘live’ performances that have been witnessed on film. It is precisely because they aren’t the real thing that they set the fans free.

And then there’s karaoke . . . 

The Loser's Standing Small

Poor Prince. Even in death he is not getting the support he deserves. His 1990s battle against Warner mystified many of his fans. It continues to frustrate some journalists. Here, for example, is Barney Rooney, writing in the Guardian,  ‘It’s difficult not to feel that Prince eventually became his worst enemy. Instead of settling for a role as a treasured cult act, he fought the industry, bit the hands that fed him, and painted “Slave” on his face’. And here is the Independent’s Ben Chu, ‘there has been a lot of purple prose in recent days talking about how Prince valiantly stood up for all musicians with his various battles with record labels. But it’s nonsense. When big acts attack the funding model of record companies what they are doing, whether they know it or not, is pulling up the ladder behind them’.

            There are at least two factors that are coming into play here. One is the record industry’s romantic ideology. It has always been acceptable – even encouraged – for artists to fight against their record companies, but to do so they have to fall on the right side of the art/commerce divide. They receive more sympathy if they are fighting for their musical expression than if they are fighting for their contractual rights. And they receive more sympathy if they are not seen to have done well. The complaints of rich people usually fall on deaf ears.

            And this is where the second factor comes into play. The music business has a famous statistic: only one in ten succeeds. Prince was certainly on the preferable side of this divide. He was among the minority who prospered, while the majority around him failed.

            Unfortunately for Prince, the record industry’s success ratio has been presented in ‘winner takes it all’ terms. This idea goes back at least as far as 1776, albeit that the formula was doubled in those days. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith wrote about ‘the exorbitant rewards of players, opera-singers, opera-dancers etc.’ and noted that ‘in a profession where twenty fail for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty’.

This is not how things work in the record industry. The losers are the unprofitable artists who are dropped by their record companies. These artists take nothing, but at least they are not left in debt: their labels waive any money that is in arrears. The winners are those who have achieved profitability. Their gains outweigh the losses of the failures.

However, rather than taking the spoils from the unsuccessful artists, it is the unsuccessful artists who rob the winners of their spoils. Or at least this is the case when it comes to copyright. British law suggests that the owner of sound recording copyright is the party who ‘made and paid’ for the arrangements for the recording to take place. The record companies usually claim this honour, arguing that they draw up the plans for the recordings and they provide the funds.

But they don’t pay for those recordings, artists do. The budgets for recordings are issued in the form of advances. Artists then pay back these advances from their recording royalties. A recouped artist could claim that they have paid for their recording in full.

And yet the record companies still cling on to their copyrights. They defend this practice by referring to their success ratio. The copyrights of the 10% of the artists who succeed are compensation for the debts of the 90% of failures. When it comes to the ownership sound recording copyright it is not the successful artist who takes all; more commonly it is the record company.

It is this practice that Prince was fighting against. He had a right to be hostile. 

Prince

And so, after saying goodbye to the greatest male artist of the 1970s on January 10, we now say goodbye to the greatest male artist of the 1980s on April 21. It goes without saying that Prince was the most fantastic live performer I ever witnessed. 2016 (What the Fuck is Going On?)