No. 32 - Confessions of a B (or C or D)-list rock star
Celebrating music's forever tiny-font artists
In our extremely noisy pop culture landscape, we tend to focus on superstars. In part, this is purely functional; streaming has given us access to everything-all-the-time, but the reality of sorting through literally everything often means defaulting to the artists we know best from any given genre or era. If 2000s New York rock feels like it’s going to scratch an itch, it’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, the Strokes and Interpol. Whereas when I’m feeling more of a 70s hard rock thing, I scroll over to Zepplin, Floyd, AC/DC, and Kiss.
But scratch the surface of any era of music history and you’ll quickly find them: the B (and C and D) team. Focusing on the giants of a genre or scene discounts the shades of sounds and styles that make up the larger milieu of any given time and place. For every Strokes, there was a Longwave, Ambulance Ltd or French Kicks. For every AC/DC, a UFO, Montrose or Blue Oyster Cult.
Like unicorn tech companies, the heavyweights take up the majority of the press coverage, get the big tours and make the grand artistic statements. But it’s the B-level artists — music’s middle class — that make-up the broader eco-system, fleshing out music festival line-ups in teeny-tiny font. Maybe it’s just one album, or even a single that defines them, or maybe they eventually transcend a scene and forge a lengthy career doing their own thing. But each one is pushing the envelope of a sound in some small (or maybe big!) way.
Thing is, this tier of artists isn’t doing so well these days. In a recent edition of her great Regs to Riches newsletter, Vass Bednar wrote about how a lack of competition in the arts has led to a winner-take-all market, where the rewards, both monetary and cultural, are increasingly reaped by fewer and fewer artists.
Gesturing at the potemkin of choice ignores two critical facets of how a lack of competition is constraining culture: the first is the critical role of gatekeeping intermediaries in distributing cultural content, and the second is how consumptive data may be used by incumbent platforms to de-risk audiovisual decision-making that optimises for eyeballs.
Ted Gioia made similar observations in a recent edition of his own newsletter, The Honest Broker where he examined what he sees as the failed promise of the long tail, “a business strategy that allows companies to realize significant profits by selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items.” The end result, proponents argued, was a flourishing of alternative voices both culturally and financially.
I’m not saying that all those ‘underground fringes’ that Anderson celebrated have disappeared—I’m merely claiming that they have less cultural impact than at almost any point in modern history. To operate on the fringe is almost akin to wearing an invisibility cloak from one of those Harry Potter stories.
The trends both Bednar and Gioia are seeing are troubling for multiple reasons. First and foremost is the threat to the bottom line of working musicians, not to mention all the ancillary business around them (labels, venues, etc.).
Now that I’m in my 40s and not writing about new albums and artists on a weekly basis, I’m finding it hard and harder to keep up with the churn of new music. One consequence of that is that I (and I suspect lots of other people in my position) tend to increasingly lean on more of those superstars and fewer B-listers, which is a shame. Most of my 15 + years getting paid (very small amounts) to review records and interview artists was spent wading in the ranks of music’s not-so-superstars.
It’s fun to interview big stars, but they’re genreally pretty media trained and know how share just enough of themselves without actually giving folks a look behind the curtain. Lower tier artists are a lot more rewarding to talk to and frankly I often find their music far more engaging than hyped records seeking to make some grand artistic statement.
But there’s a more amorphous threat here as well.
Individually, music’s lower tier tend to not significantly contribute to the broader musical conversation. But taken as a whole, they help push a sound or scene into the larger public consciousness.
There are entire ecosystems built up around these artists. The original Nuggets compilation, which gathered 60s garage rock hits, helped birth punk. Northern Soul was an entire movement based on forgotten or never-were soul hits. In the 21st century, labels like Numero Group, Souljazz, and Light in the Attic basically exist to exhume, compile and reassess.
Sometimes the “uncovered” artists can upend our popular understanding of a genre or scene, as with the 2014 Paradise of Bachelors reissue of the debut album from Lavender Country, now widely understood to be the first country record from an openly gay artist. Other times, they simply rediscover a cool artist whose music deserves a wider audience than it found initially.
More often than not though, B, C and D-list artists simply fall into obscurity, known only to those few original fans, or maybe a single hit whose popularity has long since eclipsed the reputation of the original artist. And that’s just fine!
But none of this happens without music’s all-important middle tier, which hasn’t disappeared and is unlikely to do so anytime soon. But I don’t think they’re getting the visibility that they once had. Where previous eras B-listers might have had a minor hit on rock or rap radio, or enjoyed a brief moment of Internet hype, today’s B-list artists are more likely to be relegated to “Spotifycore,” filling the playlist gaps wherever they might fit in, but never really leaving a major impression on the general public. That label ad dollars appear to be filtering up to superstars of both today and yesterday even more than in the past doesn’t give one much confidence that this cycle can be broken.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
Speaking of B-team bands, I recently read Michael Barclay’s fantastic new book, Hearts of Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000–2005. While the book covers the rise of Canadian indie superstars like Broken Social Scene, New Pornographers and Feist, it also touches on a lot of artists whose legacies are, rightly or wrongly, not as well established. I wrote about some of my favourite such bands that were mentioned in Barclay’s book for Exclaim!
Kool Kids Recommendation Club
Way back in KKMC No. 7, I talked about pop-punk’s surprisingly enduring influence and mutability of pop-punk. The genre currently having a moment via Olivia Rodrigo, Machine Gun Kelly and the arrival of Avril Lavigne, Legacy Artist. But I’d argue Montreal’s Sophia Bel is bending pop-punk’s aesthetics to her own musical vision better than anyone else at the moment. Pieces of Anxious Avoidant sound familiar but there’s a singular vision at work. From the combination of sounds - pop-punk, folk, pop, emo - to the specificity of the anxieties she’s avoiding, you get an extremely clear sense of who Bel is, or at least, the version she’s willing to share.
Weaves were one of my favourite Toronto bands. 2017’sWide Open, which was short listed for that year’s Polaris Music Prize, was a brilliant slab of off-kilter indie rock. So I was a bit surprised and sad to recently learn that they’d split up. Still, their demise coincided with the birth of Jasmyn Burke: solo artist. After relocating to Hamilton, Burke wrote the bulk of In the Wild, her debut album as Jasmyn, which dropped earlier this month on Royal Mountain. Weaves always sounded like the entire group was being bent in-and-out of tune and while the guitars might have been replaced by a lot of digiral beeps and beats, that sound — thankfully — remains.
I didn’t mention Sweden’s Viagra Boys in my post-punk round-up from last year due to the fact that I hadn’t really had a chance to dig into Welfare Jazz, their big breakout record. Welp, now I get to right my previous wrongs. “Ain’t No Thief” is the first single from the Stockholm group’s third album, Cave World, out July 8. The track builds on everything that made Welfare Jazz work while sharpening the hooks, groove, and lyrical wit as singer Sebastian Murphy makes plausible arguments as to why his coat and ligher are not, in fact, someone else’s. They just have the same stuff, man.
Sam Bielanski is back with a new ripper from their Pony project. Unable to tour last year’s TV Baby, they’ve dropped the standalone “Did it Again” as a teaser for their upcoming tour with fellow Torontonians Fucked Up. The song falls right in line with Pony’s penchant for channeling 90s bubble-gum alt-rock, altough everything feels a little sharper, the sound a bit thicker than the material in TV Baby.
Forming around that same time that US Girls started popping off, Badge Epoque Ensemble missed a lot of that hype that flowed to larger community of musicians that collaborate with and/or operate in tandem with Meg Remy and co. But they are very much a part of that same scene. “Zodiac,” the first track off their forthcoming record Clouds of Joy, is a wicked piece of 70s AM radio R&B with Toronto singer James Baley taking centre stage. It’s accompanying video lays out the crew’s origin story, which basically begins with drummer Jay Andersen and mulit-instrumentalist (and Meg Remy’s partner) Max Turnbull deciding to jam together after hovering in each other’s orbits for years.
Kate Lahey has been making music as Weary for more than half-a-decade but her latest track, “Scraped Knee” feels like a creative breakthrough. Her previous album garnered acclaim and a number of awards in her native Newfoundland. But the new track, the first off Hush which drops August 12, has a momentum to it that belies Lahey’s languid delivery. It’s really easy to write easy going tracks that sound easy going. It’s a lot harder to write inscive ones that sound the same.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
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