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South Korean novelty star Psy?s Gangnam Style has racked up more than one billion views on YouTube.
Photograph by: GREG WOOD , AFP/Getty Images
Was there clearer evidence of our spiralling cultural decline this year than the fact that South Korean pop star Psy?s goofy novelty hit Gangnam Style became YouTube?s most-watched video ever, with more than a billion views?
Now trailing behind the pudgy international superstar and future one-hit wonder? Our own Justin Bieber, whose insipid 2010 song Baby had been watched and heard by nearly 815 million as of Tuesday.
Tween idol Bieber provided one of the most indelibly groan-inducing entertainment-related images of the year when he accepted a Diamond Jubilee medal from Prime Minister Stephen Harper in November, dressed in half-buttoned overalls, a white T-shirt and a backward-facing cap. This summit meeting of the Deeply Uncool seemed so wrong on so many levels that it was hard to know where to start commenting. Let?s just say ?Biebs, even John Lennon wore a suit and tie to meet Pierre Trudeau? and leave it at that.
Psy and Bieber illustrated once again how Internet-based much of our listening experience has become. To reflect that new reality, the industry bible Billboard made a controversial decision in October to count digital sales and online streams, along with radio airplay, in the charts for their major formats.
Critics said this change favours superstars and artists who cross over into pop. They worry that country artists and R&B singers who favour a more purist approach will be pressured to come up with the pop goods.
Country fan Kyle Coroneos, who writes a blog for the Saving Country Music website, suggested to the New York Times that ?country? acts who are more pop-oriented, like Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum, will crowd the Top 10, while more old-school country artists will struggle. The same could go for R&B and hip hop, the article suggests.
Swift?s hit We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together would be a fine example. The country constituency that embraced Swift from the beginning would be hard-pressed to find even a trace of country in the song ? or even in the album that spawned it, Red. But online excitement helped the song get to No. 1.
?I have a theory all the genres of music are coagulating into one big monogenre, and this (change) emphasizes that,? Coroneos told the Times.
The physical album continued its gradual decline: 28,772,200 units were sold in Canada, in physical and digital formats combined. That?s down two per cent from last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
But digital tracks were up 23 per cent, with 107,441,400 sold, the sales tracking system reported. When you factor in track equivalent sales ? with 10 track downloads considered as an album ? album sales are actually up four per cent from last year, Nielsen Canadian operations director Paul Tuch said.
The solid figures were helped by the woman who was last year?s big story: Adele?s unstoppable 21, released at the beginning of 2011, was Canada?s bestselling album this year, followed by review-proof product like One Direction?s Up All Night and Swift?s Red. C?line Dion?s Sans attendre came in at No. 4.
Critics? Who needs ?em?
Like the Psy phenomenon, the Lana Del Rey fiasco nicely illustrated our apparent need to celebrate celebrity. Before you could say ?Lana Del Who?,? the semi-competent singer?s album Born to Die, released in January, was being hyped, in the words of one absurd puff piece, as ?one of the most eagerly awaited events in the industry this year.? The tiresome trifle that landed in stores was, unsurprisingly, an anticlimax ? but that didn?t stop a deluxe edition from being issued later in the year.
How much perspective have we actually lost on art? Consider Madonna, the queen of self-promotion, who brandished a gun onstage as part of her MDNA tour act, which stopped in Montreal in August. At one point during the performance, she ?fired? the stage weapon straight into the audience while blood images spattered on a video screen. Predictably, the piece of theatre didn?t play so well in Colorado, where James Holmes had opened fire on an audience at the premi?re of The Dark Knight Rises, killing 12 and injuring 58. To remove the segment, said Madonna?s publicist, Liz Rosenberg, would have been ?like taking out the third act of Hamlet.?
Meanwhile, Madge progeny Rihanna and Ke$ha released patience-testing albums ? self-importantly titled Unapologetic and Warrior, respectively ? that had little to celebrate but the singers? own fame, notoriety and screw-you-I-do-what-I-want philosophy.
Both discs showed the continuing influence of electronic dance music, which impressively raised its profile in 2012. DJs and laptop wizards courted celebrity status, with Deadmau5 making the cover of Rolling Stone while Skrillex, Ti?sto, David Guetta and Swedish House Mafia filled arenas.
Labels had a rough year ? again ? with Universal?s takeover of EMI receiving the regulatory go-ahead. That leaves only three major labels. Artists financing their own releases through fan sponsorship via Kickstarter and similar business-initiative programs ? a trend to watch ? also helped weaken the music industry?s hold on what you hear.
Impervious to the fickle whims of technology, veteran rockers held their own. Leonard Cohen?s Old Ideas, released in January, went to No. 3 on the Billboard chart (No. 1 in Canada), and the beloved songwriter and poet performed two deliriously received shows at the Bell Centre, Nov. 28 and 29.
Bob Dylan?s masterful Tempest, released in September, also reached No. 3. His Bobness, however, drew mixed reviews from fans and critics for his Nov. 16 concert at the Bell Centre.
Not so with James Taylor, who held court for two nights at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts during the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Taylor?s generous set of classics, played faithfully and affectionately, drew negative reaction only because of the room?s typically unreliable sound.
Autobiographies by older rockers were flying off the shelves, with Pete Townshend, Neil Young and Rod Stewart all reminiscing their way to the upper reaches of the New York Times non-fiction bestseller lists.
The Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys celebrated 50 years in the business, with the surviving Beach Boys embarking on an anniversary reunion tour that fizzled out in discord ? but not before they performed a goosebump-inducing June concert at the Bell Centre.
Closer to home, an A-list gathering of anglophone and francophone artists provided another of the year?s emotional highlights with a concert held Oct. 1 to benefit the family of Denis Blanchette. Blanchette was the technician killed during the Parti Qu?b?cois victory party at Metropolis after the Sept. 4 election. C?line Dion, Arcade Fire, Coeur de pirate and Patrick Watson were among the performers who came together at the venue to try to provide a healing moment.
Watson and band were also among the Montreal artists who released stellar albums this year. The group?s Adventures in Your Own Backyard was punctuated by a memorable live performance in April at the Corona Theatre, which was later rebranded as the Virgin Mobile Corona Theatre.
In a robust year for musical releases in general, happily raved-about discs from Montreal were also delivered by Plants and Animals (The End of That), Grimes (Visions), Krief (Hundred Thousand Pieces), Niyaz (Sumud), Stars (The North), Danny Rebel and the KGB (Blastoff), Elisapie (Travelling Love) and Jorane (L?instant aim?), among others.
And we said goodbye to Etta James, Whitney Houston, Levon Helm, Donna Summer, Robin Gibb, Dick Clark, Marvin Hamlisch, Dave Brubeck, Ravi Shankar, Davy Jones and too many others who left the music world just a little sadder, colder and emptier.
Luckily, however, the music business is a cyclical and self-renewing beast. The way we listen will continue to change, formats will die and mega-hyped celebrities will mercifully disappear.
But we can safely predict, for next year and beyond, that music?s magical moments will continue to find a way to our hearts ? charts and YouTube hits be damned.
bperusse@montrealgazette.com
Twitter: @bernieperusse
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/music/Rewind+2012+year+music/7742955/story.html
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