Editorial: Peter Frampton DIDN’T Ruin Music
I’m sure many of you by now have seen the recent poll from Spike.com in which Peter Frampton’s seminal live album Frampton Comes Alive! was named #1 in a poll called “The Top 10 Classic Albums That Accidentally Ruined Music”.
“Frampton Comes Alive! literally changed music overnight and turned the record industry into very big business,” Spike.com claims. ”The fact that Frampton Comes Alive! went on to become the biggest selling live album ever in such a short period of time showed that there was big money to be made in music. This made labels totally rethink everything and pushed music further away from its artistic roots and brought it face-to-face with Wall Street. It ushered in the era of pop stars and turned musicians into products and brands overnight.”
This is a perfect example of what I call “created context”. It’s a type of slanted journalism in which the person writing the article creates a “problem” out of thin air, then employs pretzel logic to “prove” the pointless point that he is arguing. In this case the laughably thin premise is that if only Frampton hadn’t come alive, the music business wouldn’t have turned into such a big money-making machine. “It ushered in the era of pop stars and turned musicians into products and brands overnight”? REALLY?!
Uh, ’scuse me, Spike, I think you might have missed a few people. Prior to the success of Frampton Comes Alive! there was this band called The Beatles, remember them? You can look them up on Google, I’m sure you’ll find all kinds of stuff. The Beatles sold an awful lot of records that made an awful lot of money for record companies, and there was a mountain of related merchandising, magazines and such. I would say The Beatles qualified as a brand, wouldn’t you? How about The Rolling Stones? Or if it’s more of a “pop star” slant you’re looking for, how about David Cassidy? Ricky Nelson? Herman’s Hermits? Cliff Richard? Before that there was this guy named Elvis Presley, I understand he was pretty big in his time, and you may recall there was a little bit of marketing undertaken on his behalf, too.
The point I’m trying to make is that rock music has always been big business, from its very inception on. Elvis Presley may have been the King of Rock and Roll, but he was also a savvy entertainer who knew how to use sex appeal to sell himself. Chuck Berry is inaurguably the most influential guitarist the rock idiom has ever known, but he’s also a hard-nosed businessman who freely admits that he plays music for money. The Rolling Stones are often called “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World”, but they aren’t exactly immune to the siren song of cold hard commerce. Let’s face it, it’s a huge part of the rock and roll dream. Every kid who ever picked up an instrument or formed a garage band dreamed of fortune, fame and screaming girls. What’s wrong with that?
Before there even was such a thing as rock and roll we had Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and the like, and before that there was vaudeville, traveling minstrel shows, or classical composers who lived in castles and wrote music on demand for the pleasure of kings and queens. Not to put too fine a point on it, the music business is and always has been about exploiting people with musical ability for profit. If they couldn’t make a buck from it, record companies would have never existed. The success of Frampton Comes Alive! might have made that more obvious, but it’s not like record companies were out to serve the public good before that and then suddenly turned mercenary. That’s nonsense. Frampton was not the first star to go through the build-you-up-to-knock-you-down syndrome, nor the last. It’s just that because of the overwhelming success of that one album, he’s one of the most obvious examples. As a result critics tend to forget or dismiss his extremely influential work in Humble Pie, or as a respected session player that worked with George Harrison, Harry Nilsson, John Entwistle and more. Or the long career he’s enjoyed since then, which includes winning a Grammy in 2007 for his instrumental album Fingerprints.
Peter Frampton has had a four-decade career in music and is still going strong, releasing some of the best music of his career and continuing to tour and please fans all over the world. And sure, we’re all going to keep on hearing “Show Me The Way”, “Do You Feel Like We Do” and “Baby I Love Your Way” on the radio every day until we’re all dead. And yeah, he’s probably made some good money from that.
Can somebody please explain to me what’s wrong with that?
