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Music for
Grown-Ups Newsletter
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24/02/2004 From Norah Jones to Amy Winehouse - chickpop dominating the supermarket album charts
The music biz campaign to sell bland melodic pop to the older market is working well, with an unprecedented number of slots in supermarket top ten album chart now taken by suddenly famous diva megastars, most of whom look as though they're light years away from leaving school. Katie Melua, Norah Jones, Joss Stone, LeeAnn Rimes, Dido, Amy Winehouse … a new one seems to come along every five minutes. It's difficult to escape them, as the record biz promo blitz, targeting 30+ consumers, is ably abetted by a largely uncritical mainstream media - radio, TV and the press. Are these newly-famous songbirds worth a listen? Well, it's a matter of taste. In all cases, one listen was once too much for me. Good luck to them, but they ain't for me. Is it music for grown-ups? Hardly. The acid test will be to listen to them once the massive promo budgets have been exhausted - then you'll find out how good they really are. It'll be interesting to judge how authentically they convey adult emotions, for example. If they sound convincing in a couple of years, fine. Add them to your list of preferred artists. But the clincher against investing time and money on such heavily-promoted artists is the "opportunity cost" argument: if you spend time listening to Norah Jones or Katie Melua, you have decided not to spend the same time listening to Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday. You have chosen to listen to writers who are very unlikely to match the masterworks of great lyricists like Cole Porter. Nuff said? Gerry Smith
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