#leithrecords

Iggy Pop’s voice has gotten as old as he is. And it sounds brilliant. On his new album, Post Pop Depression, he tells twisted tales about life on the front line of Rock N Roll. A high pitched voice wouldn’t work. You need to sound like you’ve munched nails and pissed rust, but in a walking poem kinda way.

Iggy, or James Newell Osterberg Junior, to his Mum, didn’t always have a mega deep voice. He used to be a Tenor, like Pavarotti. But now he’s a Baritone. The storyteller register.

Just in case you don’t know, male voices are grouped into Bass singers at the bottom, Baritones in the middle, but still low, and Tenor singers up top. And if your balls haven’t dropped or you’ve been castrated, you’re called a Counter Tenor. Like that little weirdo that sang, The Snowman theme.

Baritones and Bass singers have gravitas. If Leonard Cohen read transcripts of Geordie Shore episodes, they’d sound mystical, moving and thunderous.

Aside from Johnny Cash, men’s voices don’t start out gravelly. Tom Waits didn’t always sound like he eats fags. Bob Dylan used to be whiny, now he sounds like an OAP Donald Duck, on the Benylin.

Young and exciting frontmen that scream and shout belong on a stage, but at 3am, with your headphones on, you want an old timer with withered tones singing about the one that got away. The young Iggy used to mainline smack and scream a top C, now he grumbles low notes into his Horlicks spattered mic, and it’s just as engaging.

Maybe one day, when Beiber is old and grey, he’ll be a baritone too and growl about the old days.

It was only a matter of time before we wrote about Kayne. You knew it was coming.

But rather than talk about the sociopathic shitshow that is his Twitter feed, there’s is a lot going on with Yeezy that’s worth discussing.

Specifically, his new album. Is it finished? What’s the album cover? Does it come with a free pair of shoes?  

Kayne’s latest album - The Life of Pablo - is only available on Tidal. Which nobody seems to have, but that hasn’t stopped everyone including your gran from hearing the record. Hey, if Kayne’s pirating, why shouldn’t we?

A few weeks back he threatened to change one of the tracks, and a few days ago he did just that, adding a couple of guest verses and tinkering with the EQ here and there.

Pretty cosmetic changes maybe, but if you paid £15 for the album from Kanye’s own website when it was first released, what do you own now? And worse still, if you found yourself subscribing to Tidal, what are you really buying into if, like most of us, you subscribe to a streaming service?

The decimation of the paid music world at the hands of streaming (touched on in George’s article last week) is also restructuring what we consider a musical commodity to be and how we attribute value to it.

When Frank Sinatra released In the Wee Small Hours in 1955, and all its songs were kind of related to stuff about those titular hours - loneliness, longing, regret… (because that’s what everyone thinks about at 3 in the morning, right?) - the format of the commodity gave the content structure.

You knew what you owned, it was finished. And there was a loose concept behind it, so that in theory you might feel more tempted to listen to that album at that time of day, etc. The product and the experience were closely linked.

Now there’s mixtapes, free downloads, tasters, leaks - everything the digital world does seems to be dismantling the idea of what an album should be. And not for bad, either - as a little known artist once predicted, there are now more routes than ever for musical artists to find ways to their listeners.

There’s a flip side though, and when Kanye talks about his latest release as a *insert quote here*, I fear it’s less about technology enhancing the freedom of creativity, and more about the appropriation of the album as clickbait.

Do the changes Kanye made to his latest fundamentally change it as a piece of content? Not really. Does it make it better? Debatable. But does the fact that he’s tweeted about it increase the chance that’ll you’ll spend more time reading about Tidal today?

Oh, better go, he’s just started tweeting about changing the name again...

@deas_tom

Save for the odd Youtube comment of praise, Lady Gaga’s tribute to David Bowie at this year’s Grammy’s received an overwhelmingly negative backlash, not least from David’s own son.

Like a Bowie based fever dream, Gaga flaunted around the stage in a range of different costumes, played a pneumatic moving keyboard and cavorted awkwardly with Nile Rogers, who was clearly disappointed that he didn’t have his own spotlight for the whole performance. It was kind of frightening, a strange pantomime to the pop idol.

Back across the pond, the Brits tribute was by and large received as a much more appropriate affair. There was a lovely speech from Gary Oldman, followed by an instrumental medley from session musicians who had worked with Bowie; the empty space at the front of the stage where the artist would have stood a touching moment. Then Lorde sang Life on Mars, not - as Gaga did - dressed as a kind of quasi-Stardust with extra cleavage, but as herself.  

So everyone’s down on Gaga. Because it sort of feels like she’s appropriating Bowie’s creativity, making her tribute just as much about her as him? Who knows. But Lorde’s performance, with the whole stage bathed in red light, no spotlight, seemed restrained and respectful in comparison.

That said, shouldn’t everyone be able to celebrate the artist however they see fit? It’s an unfortunate symptom of our era that we should feel we have the authority to decide whether or not this or that respect or tribute is ‘valid’.

I mean, every tribute is surely worth something if at the very least all it does is remember how much of a legendary figure someone was, and continues to be.

Every tribute.

… right?