The Oppenheimer Report 8/18/14

Here is my indignant rant of the week. Shauna and I are fans of Jann Arden’s music and songwriting and of late, we have been following her on Facebook. We saw her in concert last year and she’s really funny. Her comments on Facebook are witty and she is a good storyteller. She’s been writing a lot lately about caregiving issues with regard to her elderly parents (who sound like a hoot) and this is of particular interest to me.

The other day, Shauna alerted me to a controversial opinion Jann had posted on her page about a new radio phenomenon. Radio editing has always been an unsavory reality of music broadcasting, and it is not uncommon for a 4-minute-long pop song to be whittled down by 30 or 40 seconds in order to fit the radio “format.” This was usually done with the reluctant approval of the artist, or of his or her record company, but of late, the process has been taken to the extreme. Apparently, there is a top 40 radio station in Calgary called AMP, part of a chain of stations across Canada. They have implemented a new format called QuickHitz, which essentially takes pop songs and cuts them in half for their attention-challenged listeners.  I assume that the thinking here is that listeners do not have sufficient attention to sit through an entire 3:30 minute song, and this allows the station to pack in twice as many hits in an hour. If the artist does not consent, they are not aired, and most artists probably want the exposure, however truncated.

I’m not a big fan of top 40 radio, but this seems to be a new low. To me, this is symptomatic of two things. One, it’s another canary in the coal mine for conventional radio. It indicates to me that the music industry is changing and big radio broadcasters of pop music will do just about anything to survive. They are struggling to compete with the growing popularity of satellite radio and the omnipresent availability of just about any on-demand music one wants to hear on the internet. The other red flag is the dumbing down of the listening audience. Perhaps this is what the listeners want, who knows, but in scrambling to satisfy this “demand” by cutting pop songs in half, are not the broadcasters contributing to the death of this art form? Let’s feed the perceived ADD shall we? OK, one could argue that omitting a couple of the forty “baby’s” in Justin Beiber’s hit single Baby might not make much difference to the song, but is this not a slippery slope? Just as reality television is, in my opinion, eroding the intelligence of its viewers, so will the abbreviated song undermine the integrity of song writing. As much as I have begun to embrace the great Satan of social media, I feel the immediacy of Twitter, and Instagram, and Facebook feeds the impatience of a short attention span society. It is most certainly diluting people’s communication skills. I believe the shorter our attention spans become, the less we absorb. What part of Beethovan’s 9^th would you suggest we cut out; after all it is kind of long? And maybe we don’t need the entire statue of David, just cut him off above the balls. Pop songs do not require a lot of grey matter; if a pop song has merit, it has merit in its entirety. Jeesh. There, rant presented and vented.

Cole Porter must be rolling in his grave.   

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED