{"id":970,"date":"2002-04-20T19:17:00","date_gmt":"2002-04-21T02:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/wordpress\/?p=970"},"modified":"2002-04-20T19:17:00","modified_gmt":"2002-04-21T02:17:00","slug":"richard-marx-labels-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/uncategorized\/richard-marx-labels-etc","title":{"rendered":"Richard Marx, Labels, etc"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You know, Richard Marx must have a LOT of interesting relationship problems. I&#8217;ve been listening to his music lately, and he seems to face &#8211; and stare in the face of &#8211; a lot of the classics. Cheating, distance seperating, being accused of killing your lover ;-)..<\/p>\n<p>Actually, I&#8217;ve noticed that musicians as a class seem to have more problems in their love and lust lives than most. I wonder why this is &#8211; and which is teh chicken and which is the egg. Is it that pain produces art, or art produces pain? Or somewhere in between? I don&#8217;t know &#8211; I find life entirely too complex, especially at the moment. I am, however, going to cite a Richard Marx song, just to illustrate my point.<\/p>\n<p>[This is just another example of my 80s tastes gone rampant &#8211; I imagihne pretty much all my friends &#8211; and perhaps everyone in the world &#8211; thinks of RM as utter schlock]<\/p>\n<p>Anyway &#8211; &#8216;Hold On To The Night&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>Just when I beleived I couldn&#8217;t ever want for more<br \/>\nThis ever changing world pushes me through another door<br \/>\nI saw you smile &#8211; and my mind could not erase the beauty of your face<br \/>\nJust for a while, won&#8217;t you let me shelter you<\/p>\n<p>Hold on to the night<br \/>\nHold on to the memory<br \/>\nI wish that I could give you something more<br \/>\nthat I could be yours<\/p>\n<p>How do we explain something that took us by suprise<br \/>\nPromises in vain, love that is real but in disguise<br \/>\nWhat happens now &#8211; do we break another rule,<br \/>\nlet our lovers play the fool<br \/>\nI don&#8217;t know how to stop feeling this way<\/p>\n<p>[chorus repeats]<\/p>\n<p>[into bridge:]<\/p>\n<p>Well I think that I&#8217;ve been true to everybody else but me<br \/>\nAnd the way I feel about you makes my heart long to be free<br \/>\nEvery time I look into your eyes I&#8217;m helplessly aware<br \/>\nThat the someone I&#8217;ve been searching for is right there<\/p>\n<p><i>Okay, this is pushing the shlock-o-meter even for my notouriously shlocky tastes<\/i><\/p>\n<p>[into chorus]<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, see my point? Happy people in well ajusted relationships do not generally write music like this. Or do they? Or does RM even write his own songs? Increasingly, I&#8217;ve noticed that people don&#8217;t &#8211; write their own songs, that is &#8211; and it seems like you seldom get the attributtes of a good songwriter and a good singer in the same person. I think that&#8217;s cool &#8211; teamwork and all &#8211; but occasionally I&#8217;m tempted to psychoanalyze performers by the work they do, and that makes it a bit more difficult. Still, one presumes that they at least choose which songs to do, and what inflection to put into them.<\/p>\n<p>Again, maybe not. The corperate label machine probebly just chooses which songs they think will appeal to a band&#8217;s demographic and then forces that band to perform those songs.<\/p>\n<p>In a way, this is what I find so ironic about Metallica&#8217;s suing of napster &#8211; here is a band that actually complained that the label was stifling them, and then when they saw a oppertunity for not only them but every single musician in america to get free, they sued it. Yes, that makes a whole lot of sense, now doesn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know, Richard Marx must have a LOT of interesting relationship problems. I&#8217;ve been listening to his music lately, and he seems to face &#8211; and stare in the face of &#8211; a lot of the classics. Cheating, distance seperating, being accused of killing your lover ;-).. Actually, I&#8217;ve noticed that musicians as a class [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}