(2024-01-23) The Truly Greatest Hits Edition

The (Truly) Greatest Hits Edition. Sam Valenti (SV4) is an old friend of WITI. He’s the founder of Ghostly International and runs the essential music Substack Herb Sundays.

Sam here. A few years ago, Patrick Adams, a music producer I love, passed. While he received a kind obit from the Times and various music sites, his work requires a bit of effort to access.

he's a producer, not the title artist

Even more prominent artists' “top songs” often throw up some surprises and can differ significantly across music services

Why is this interesting?

I've been thinking about the death of the pop culture canon as we know it and wrote about it last year. Since then there have been continued threats on the establishment and maintenance of respected canon in the music industry, even as recent as this week. Few formats, for example, have been more canon-defining for musical artists than their Greatest Hits package.

In an on-demand era, the need for these packages understandably has disappeared

If, in the streaming age, we've seen the venerable Best Of and Greatest Hits compilation fall away, is there still use in the canon-defining package? DSPs might say yes.

These generative playlists are helpful primer guides but lack something vital for canon formation: a curator’s touch. Consider the most controversial GH of all time: Legend: The making of Legend was a highly choreographed event seeking to market Bob Marley posthumously as a stoner love prophet while sanding down his revolutionary edges for generations of college kids.

*In the 2022 memoir The Islander by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, he breaks down the origin story of Legend as the vision of then recently hired Dave Robinson (co-founder of legendary label Stiff Records), which sent the posthumous Marley brand into a supernova.

“Dave also shrewdly and actively chased a wider audience for Bob Marley, even though we thought we had already reached a wider audience.*

Legend has since sold over 12 million copies worldwide, not including the millions of other cassette and CD bootlegs that abound.

A renewed GH campaign, with video or written liner notes from one of the many talented music journalists in the game righ now, could also help chip away at a mountain of resurgent music and add another path to discovery akin to sync licensing

I’m now of the mind that all artists should be making these Best Ofs, even if just as an edited playlist, ideally made by the artist or group themselves.

Given my love for the trusty Greatest Hits, I was pleased when I saw the band Spoon releasing one in 2019.

Artists can control their image and story more than we may realize and maybe better enabled to do while active and engaged with their audience.

The Greatest Hit (Death Of Canon cont.)

The Canon Machine

The idea of canon implies that each generation should pass down the awareness and appreciation of certain art, yet there’s been a shift in the ‘20s in that we now mainly hope that these important artifacts bubble up from youth culture (TikTok hits, syncs in youth-oriented shows, etc.), a wild inversion from the top-down days of yore.

I'd argue that Canon induction was pretty automatic (if studios would spend) up until around the ‘00s.

In 2024, I currently watch, amidst hundreds of new title options, an appealing digital Spider-Man cartoon with my son, which Frankensteins the multiverse brilliance of the "Spider-Verse" films, conveniently allowing us to have multiple Spideys

At least now I have an onramp to share my knowledge of this IP with him, and then the kind people at Lego step into their part. It takes this amount of convergence and new material to create and hold a contemporary fan, a literal barrage

So, how do we extend the musical canon to a new generation? Well-meaning parents like me and Matthew Schnipper... We can buy the gear and do our best but need more support. For the biggest names, Broadway and biopics are a safe strategy for many artists

AI will probably be the biggest boon to canon-remaking in music. Now labels can easily add a contemporary rap or pop verse (if they need to launch a new act) to aged hits easily, and more importantly, we can allow, say, Frank Sinatra to sing a commissioned Casamigos ditty

Maybe this will help retain some of the canon of yore, but your kids will think Sinatra was a Tequila guy and that his biggest song was "Mexican Romance" or something he never sang, so I'm not optimistic.

Most popular musicians now fight for mindshare alongside prestige television and games and win market share in what they can get into the culture with memes or moments. The artist is a bigger enterprise than any of their new catalog, and their biography is more crucial in creating context than often unremarkable songs.

I couldn’t have gotten him into Todd McFarlane illustrated Spider-Man comics of my youth; probably too arcane/too slow, and too violent. This approach to radical youth induction is critical to modern canon-making.