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Did you know that Collective Soul has a new album? A double? Hell, there aren't even any details in Wikipedia. This is the challenge of legacy acts, they might be able to sell tickets, but no one is interested in their new music, if they play it live they risk alienating paying customers, but the dirty little secret is most of the new work is substandard, a pale imitation of what made their rep.
Used to be you were a member of a club, centered around a radio station that you were devoted to. Especially before they got bogus deejays without personalities who all sounded the same. You got your news, it was one stop listening, and you were introduced to music that got the stamp of approval of the gatekeepers.
Who get a bad name. And I hear you. It was hard to get through if you were new and different or without push. But now with all the gatekeepers gone you don't know where to start, what to listen to, you're subjected to pure hype, and we've never trusted that.
But it gets even worse, if you happen to find something you like you feel like a party of one, who are your compatriots who are invested in it? You may be playing it, but the boys of summer have left the beach, there's nobody there but you, and that's lonely.
Now I liked Collective Soul's "December" and "The World I Know," I must admit that I was exposed to them by MTV, otherwise they might not have crossed my radar. But they did, and I'm not the only one who got exposed and listened and loved, those were gigantic hits on a major label, Atlantic, you can still picture the videos in your mind's eye, at least I can.
But that was thirty years ago.
What happened in the interim?
Napster. The death of MTV. Hip-hop and pop took over the hit parade. As for rock... You've got the heavy Active Rock on a radio format that draws a de minimis audience. I mean I see the number ones in that world and they almost never cross over elsewhere. Nor would you expect them to. They're heavy, and noisy. Not mass appeal. Which is fine, but...
I pulled up Collective Soul's "Here to Eternity" on Spotify to familiarize myself with it for a conversation with Ed Roland. And I was confronted with truly anemic streaming numbers. In most cases barely more than 10,000.
So when you're researching an act, new or not, you immediately go to the tracks with the greatest number of streams, to see what the rest of the world has anointed.
The first cut of "Here to Eternity," "Mother's Love," didn't reach me. It was surprisingly heavy for an opening track. There was melody in the chorus, but I didn't hear the song and think I needed to hear it again.
Ditto the follow-up, "Bluer Than So Blue." Which also has triple digit thousand streams, 124,636 to "Mother's Love"'s 234,684. No one is getting rich on these numbers. Then again, the album has been in the marketplace for less than a week.
Listening to "Bluer Than So Blue" again right now, I'm starting to get it. We used to invest in our records and play them until we got them. Usually a track or two reached out on the first spin, but it took a while for the rest to reveal themselves.
And I must admit, I see this listening as work. But then Spotify drifts into track 3, "Let It Flow." AND I HEAR THAT RIFF!
I was positively stunned. This is the sound I love. This is rock. Not rock and roll, like in the fifties. Not prog rock like in the seventies. Not punk rock. But the kind of thing radio played for decades, that lived on MTV, that you never hear anymore. It's too straightforward. And today if it's not edgy, it's pooh-poohed. Don't work in a passé genre and expect anybody to care. Get those 808 beats, they even feature them in country today, it's the law, without the 808 and its fake handclaps you can't have a hit, who decided this?
There's no drum machine in "Let It Flow." Just slashing guitar. And a catchy chorus. Sounds easy, but it's not. Listening to "Let It Flow" is like discovering a Dead Sea Scroll, an oasis in the desert. This is the sound that nobody takes seriously today, in an era of image and brand extensions, but this is the sound I love. I got it in just a few seconds, and with the change I was immediately enraptured. And this never happens.
A song you get the first time through. That you want to hear again. That you listen to and you feel good. This is the power of music, rock music.
And I'd like to tell you listening to "Let It Flow" again right now I'm re-evaluating, believing it's not as good. But that would be untrue. It's just as satisfying, the little flourishes resonate. I'm wincing to the guitar at 2:05. And there is only 3:18, "Let It Flow" is not bloated, it's compact.
So I retrieved the album sticker from the garbage, I remembered it had featured a couple of cuts.
But neither was "Let It Flow." One was "Mother's Love," the other "Keep It On Track," which I hadn't gotten to yet.
So I skipped over to cut 11 to play "Keep It On Track," and I immediately realized why they'd picked it to emphasize. It was more complicated, but it didn't resonate with me like the more straight-ahead, simple "Let It Flow."
I know I'm setting myself up for abuse. Collective Soul is not an approved band, this sound has been excommunicated, but damn did I enjoy listening to it. It gave me the hit I look for from music, it energized me. Isn't there room for this music in today's world?
Appears not.
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