Supergroup: Hype or Tripe?

 - Thomas Hewson

I guess I’m slightly frustrated by the term ‘supergroup’ and the mundanities that relay around it. Could it be that by placing the word ‘super’ in the forefront your expectations hit the roof, only to be let down upon encounter…like a foreigner stumbling across Superdrug for the first time? The term can break a band all too easily because we’re all under the assumption that it’s going to be the benefits of each of the corresponding bands crammed into one burger-stall quarter pounder, only to realize when you bite into it that it’s all the gristle and off-cuts the cow itself would have been happy to lose. Whether these bands form ‘supergroups’ as a means unto themselves seems unlikely, but knowingly producing music with other famous tooting musicians is a daring prospect, especially if the outcome is a cocktail of recycled ‘creative juices’.

Could it be the media who are to blame for over-feeding our expectations? Or are the musician’s legacies the poison taste: their successes being the inevitable downfall of these ‘supergroups’? Let’s take a look at The Dead Weather. Their debut album ‘Horehound’ was released this summer and the hype that surrounded this album entered dangerous territories. As you already know, the group comprises of never-too-busy Jack White, Alison Mosshart, Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs <http://www.the-fly.co.uk/artist/the-raconteurs> and Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age<http://www.the-fly.co.uk/artist/queens-of-the-stone-age>. ‘Horehound’ received average reviews all round (understatement), and with these reviews being a strong influence on the public’s reaction to the material it makes you wonder, if the media were deprived of basing judgment, would there still be similar reactions amongst the public? Well with Jack White & Co...Yes. Even if The Dead Weather were simply nameless beginners to the circuit, it seems that they’ve brought ideas to the table but haven’t really figured out the benefits of using them together, like a rushed Ready Steady Cook challenge<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM3pDq-ZQhs>. I suppose White hasn’t really been on form since ‘Elephant’ anyway, so we should have seen it coming...even if he is the drummer. The buzz that surrounded The Dead Weather has already fizzed out; not showing much promise for longevity. I suppose their future doesn’t look too promising now White now been penning some tracks with, wait for it...KEITH RICHARDS (you know, that chap from that band). Maybe someone should tell him that quantity isn’t always quality. Maybe he’s commitment-phobic, or maybe he just likes to have as much fun as possible (understandable!), but too much fun isn’t good for anybody, and some of the material he has been churning out recently is damaging.

With these big names coming together, the commitment of the band seems questionable. What’s the life span of these groups anyway? Hmmm, this brings me onto Mongrel, the so called ‘indie supergroup’. You’ve got The Rev, Babyshambles<http://www.the-fly.co.uk/artist/babyshambles>, a former Arctic Monkey <> and a host of poets like Lowkey. This has got to be something special for sure right? Err, well although live they do what they should and get the crowds’ belief in the beat, on record it’s a different story. Their album quite simply didn’t get the response they wanted. I think Mongrel’s problem was the issue of too much. Mongrel, alongside many other ‘supergroups’ have such little time to develop and find their sound, which means they rush and cram, R-U-S-H and C-R-A-M too much into their tunes. In Mongrel’s case it was quite lecturing. Politics and music require certain measures of each to work, and having too much information/anguish with the current affairs pumped into a song turns many away.

Is it the celebrity lifestyle that’s to blame, musicians having too much opportunity and time to experiment with one another? I’m not sure, these ‘supergroups’ always sound rushed and underdeveloped to me. Ach, it’s a difficult one. There has been one exception to the rule recently though. Them Crooked Vultures; Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) are rising above the buzz. After playing a couple of secret shows at the Reading & Leeds festivals, and a support slot with Arctic Monkeys, they have had people in awe. Not only are they utilizing the ‘fun factor’ of being in a band but they haven’t gone overboard on ideas. The tracks sound how you would imagine, and let’s face it; Grohl’s always belonged on drums! BUT we have to wait and see what happens when they release some material; having the tunes already means the media shouldn’t be an issue, but longevity?

Expectation is high for Them Crooked Vultures, so high that we might find ourselves as the problem. Will we be expecting too much? Are we to blame for The Dead Weather and Mongrel’s mediocre responses...or was it their bad songs? Is the term ‘supergroup’ itself both irrelevant and suppressing? I’m not sure. I’m pretty confident that if a ‘supergroup’ has the tunes to survive then they will. Maybe it’s just the ‘supergroups’ that have been coming out recently haven’t really been exciting or worth bothering for so we’ll always be pessimistic until something great happens.

THE INTERNET HAS RUINED MUSIC

 - Tom Lowe

Have you got Spotify yet? If you haven’t, the process goes something like this. Firstly your life goes through an unbelievable improvement as you realise in a euphoric rush of disbelief that you can get any music you want, right now, even quicker than YouTube. Then the adverts start. That’s fine, you say, it’s a small price to pay for all the music in the entire world right now. But already there’s a creeping claustrophobia chipping away your patience day by day, until three weeks later you’re throwing kitchen appliances out the window and cooing as yet another newfound sonic cathedral is interrupted halfway through by GaGa crooning from the bottom left corner.  Oh, you’re smiling now. Give it three weeks.

Spotify is the perfect example of why the internet has ruined music in the 21st century. As consumers we are over-exposed and over-fed with auditory fast-food thrown down our throats, and there are signs that we are finally full: both legal and illegal downloads decreased in 2008. Music has crept into every aspect of our lives, blaring from televisions as we eat, computers as we work and headphones as we sleep. Until the 1870s the only way to hear music was to see it performed live; now we hardly ever turn it off. Has music just become background noise?

Music fans today have rapidly become used to the idea of instant gratification, stripping artists of their mystery in the process. Curiosity in a new band lasts for the good 15 seconds it takes to locate their MySpace page; within a week you’re bored and you’ll never listen to them again. Not long ago the only way to hear new, unreleased music was to see the band live, surely a more exhilarating and personal experience than staring at a computer screen. As access to music increases, we are consuming new bands at a faster and faster rate. Artists and scenes rush by in a generic blur, and the music industry in general is moving at an unsustainably rapid pace. Bands are torn out of obscurity and hurled into the limelight for a brief and confusing period of time before being dropped by their label as the fabricated scene they unluckily (and probably unintentionally) belong to is trashed by the next big thing (remember Scroobius Pip/ Joe Lean?). The upshot of this is that new bands are treated like battery hens, exploited and discarded before they have a chance to prove themselves to the industry.

A recent article in Drowned in Sound suggested that by embracing modern trash culture, record labels have forgotten how to nurture so called ‘album artists’. These bands traditionally make up the alternative scene, The Smiths and the Pixies for example, which survives on album sales and are less constrained by the pressure to be an instant success which often kills ‘singles’ artists. These are important to labels as a slow burning means of income; while the bands benefit from their tenure in the wings by being given time to mature as musicians before moving up into the pop charts. This symbiotic relationship began to break down in the 90s when grunge and Britpop bought alternative bands to mainstream attention. Labels greedily tried to buy into the zeitgeist and unwittingly transformed the whole scene into the same chart-topping production line as the pop industry.

Unfortunately this mass-commercialisation came just as the rise of illegal file-sharing was stealing a large proportion of the industry’s revenue. Between 1999 and 2003 music sales dropped globally by $6 billion, and with labels becoming more tight-fisted with their money, they are less inclined to take risks. Note how many established acts and band reunions have taken the limelight in recent years (Take That, Blur, The Verve), and consider how radio one nowadays sounds like a very well-produced smear of white noise with someone yelping in the background. Pop music appears to be getting more and more generic, and this might be something to do with our growing dependence on the internet.

So where has our diversity gone? The internet has shattered local scenes, previously the breeding grounds for some of the most original and groundbreaking music (see the rise of house music in early 80s Chicago), and destroyed what semblance there was of an underground. This isn’t just a pretentious fantasy world concocted by grovelling NME journalists but a real space where artists used to build a following through small local gigs. Perhaps some past-hyped scenes never came to fruition because of this (West Midlands possibly?).

Never have I doubted the potential of this generation of artists – there is a quota of raw talent out there which never really changes – but the nature of the music industry and the speed with which we consume music as fans has been transformed over the past 10 years. We have become so over-saturated with the same meaningless songs that we seem to be permanently waiting for the next big thing to come and blow it all away. Granted, this whole argument might be a bit cynical, but the existence of a genuinely original new-music industry which doesn’t rely on the tried and tested cash cow of revivalism (Libertines/Strokes/Klaxons, admit it) is seriously in jeopardy if the labels don’t change their behaviour.