Posts by Simon Grigg
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I'm been qualitative
where is that edit button?: 'being'
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you're confusing me simon.
you're blowing Brendans trumpet with one .....mouth, and then with the other (you seem to have two) you're saying the system is greatly flawed and has failed to achieve the cultural aspects associated with a funding scheme set up to enhance and support our differences as a cultural aside from american UK or other influences.
No not at all. I think NZoA has done an amazing job of getting music made by New Zealanders on the radio. Whether it is Opshop or Savage, it is still music made by NZers. Anything else is a qualitative judgement. Full Stop.
However, in just doing that and not encouraging the points of difference, or allowing those that should be led to lead, it has also stymied the growth of what was made and slowed what could potentially be achieved. Tom mentioned electronic music and he's right..unless it fits a traditional band-makes-electronica format it's been ignored despite a huge international market.
But I'd also like to point out that the Kiwi Hit Discs have also snuck on, alongside the commercial (and I'm been qualitative now) dross that stands little international chance, the likes of the Lil Chief releases that are being praised in Mark's link above.
Every KHD has at least two tracks that don't stand a hope in hell of making radio and I guess are targeted towards development..a kind of underlying A&R push along.
I may be firing from a few angles but it ain't all as clear cut as that.
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damn it simon you beat me to the exact same though. can we have an ak/chch fight over this? :)
fire away, but you'll miss as I'm in Bali. I'm just an interested observer right now.
The death of radio is about as spot on as the much touted death of CDs..they still account for about 80% of sales and digital seems pretty stagnant right now.
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Chris C...I'm with you Graham, both a wonderful guy and major contributor for decades.
Chris was the tour manager on the Screaming Meemees album tour of NZ in 1982. I remember sitting down the band before to introduce them to their temporary boss, and he said, and the mists of the last 26 years mean I'm paraphrasing: We have a job to do. That job is to sell your record. You may not like me at the end of this job but we will do it well.
And do it well he did but I received at least a dozen calls from distraught band members complaining that he was a very hard task master, closing house bars after gigs, fining people for not rising etc.
When I arrived in Napier for the last part of the tour, we talked about it, and Chris said simply: this is an important record and needs to be heard. I'm not here to make friends. I'm here to get the music to as many people as possible.
I guess that held true all along (although despite it all he made many friends, myself included). As I said somewhere else NZ has been lucky enough to have a fair number of record execs who who were not only good at their jobs, but went so much further than they needed to, and Chris is one of those. I wish him well.
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With New Zealand being such a small market for musicians I never did quite understand why we wern't promoting NZ music which stood out from it's international competitors. It seems that product differentiation is viewed as a bad thing by most commercial radio - when in fact this has always been the thing which NZ bands have been able to use to draw attention to themselves on the international stage. The dunedin sound (enough of the groans people) is a very good example of this - and I know it's a long gone day, but internationally people were interested because it was different from other material that was presented to them at the time.
And that I agree with absolutely.
That was the crucial part of the whole endeavor. change radio not change us.
And that too, with some reservations as to our right to change companies who have been asked to pay millions for the right to broadcast, although the Broadcasting Act should have been more forthright in the requirements of those who purchased airwaves to play a percentage of NZ 's musical output.
Sadly, once again it's the brief that is at fault, and, to a lesser degree the implementation. I'm 100% with Rob when he says that Radio programmers should not be allowed to choose who gets funding. That simple fact in itself prevents acts who may have a chance to work outside NZs shores from getting a look in. Commercial radio is all about making sure things don't stick out.
NZ's two most internationally successful acts (neither of whom got initial NZ commercial play, excluding MaiFM) performing original material (sorry Gray...it does matter) are OMC and Split Enz / Crowded House, both of whom sounded oddly different at the time. They stood out.
I do think that it's time that the role and function of NZOA is relooked at - at very least to bring it into line with the changing nature of the music business.
But I also agree with Brendan, Radio is not going to go away, as long as we have cars and factories.
There is an argument that the Scribe success in Australia, and now the Savage pick-up in the US are examples of where the post 2000 funding has given legs to NZ acts but in both cases they've worked because of the above, they sound different. Savage, for all it's aspirations to be one, doesn't sound like an American hip-hop record, it sounds freakishly different and very South Auckland. And the NZ, almost cartoonish (which I don't mean negatively), hip-hop movement was driven out of the likes of Mai Fm and bFm (who gave Phil Bell and P-Money an on air presence years ago and had long championed NZ hip hop, with the likes of Simon Laan's AK89 tape). This had been brewing for years.
But, yes, encourage the diversity, the points of diffrence, don't limit the Air that NZoA aspires to as that found only on domestic radios, remove the programmers from the selection process (I'd add half a dozen switched on kids to the panels ahead of anybody from a network).
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Do some of these people moaning about the lack of NZ Music on the radio forget about Kiwi FM?
I don't think anyone is saying there is a lack of NZ music on the radio.
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It was hellishly interested and will make for a great radio series.
Agreed, but Chris' forthcoming pre-rock'n'roll book is what I'm really craving right now. I think it's still a way off though.
Hopefully it will open up a whole new appreciation of our urban culture and the way we actually lived rather than just the dry history.And knowing Chris, it will be more accurate than much of the published musical 'history' to date.
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being that no-one in the US quite "got" dance music.
Yep, agreed. In much of the world it's overwhelmingly the the dominant youth weekend pursuit. But in the USA it didn't really ever get beyond that odd old 'disco-shit" tag.
Like punk, these things tend to emerge from the American inner cities but its the rest of the world that often runs with them and realises their potential.
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Funny, I always thought of dance music as a very English thing
Tell that to Chicago, NYC and Düsseldorf
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Well If that is true then why haven't one, or several, of that legion of people who love country music and/or poprea get together and start a radio station?.
They have several times...they failed as I recall.