Last week I asked if you would want to read about Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ The Heist, and since a few of you said you would that is what I am writing about this week. My last post focused on albums recorded in home/project studios and how those reflect the culture of our generation. I mentioned in that post that The Heist was both self-produced and self-released. What this means is that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis worked out of their own studio, and occasionally in professional studios that they paid for themselves, to create the album and then distributed it without the backing of a label.

They wrote a song about being independent artists and, rather than try to explain their experience myself, I want to give a few quotes from this song and explain them. This song, called “Can’t Hold Us”, was a Billboard number one hit here in the United States during the summer of 2014; but it seems to be telling their story as if they were looking down from the top of the charts, not on their way there. In the first verse, Macklemore explains that “we did it our way / growin music / I shed my skin and put my bones into everything I record to it.” Here he is explaining that, because they were independent, he and Lewis were free to make their music the way that they wanted to. He also says “Trust me / on my I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T shit / hustler / chasing dreams since I was fourteen / with the four track / bussing.” Here he is telling audiences that they can trust that his music is authentic because he is independent. He then goes on to describe the recording process, saying that he started out working on a four-track (entry level recording system that only stores four tracks) and continued “hustling” to develop his skills as a producer to get to his current level. As a side note, the process of “bussing” in this context is sending the output of three of his four tracks into the fourth to save them as one track and allow him to record more than four tracks. To those who understand the reference, this demonstrates his familiarity with the struggles of entry level audio gear and helps to establish the authenticity of his story. Finally, looking at the success of his music, he says, “labels out here / now they can’t tell me nothing/ we give that to the people / spread it across the country”. This is him saying that, even though labels now want to sign him, he would rather continue to make his own music and “spread it across the country” because he knows, from his success, that his tracks are what people want to hear.

This rejection of the conventional model of music distribution is not, however, the only way in which The Heist reflects our contemporary culture. The album is littered with references to trends and issues that resonate with millennial audiences. The most thorough example of this is the song “Same Love”, which he wrote to promote LGBTQ+ rights. This song includes references to stereotypes of gay men, the political and religious considerations at play in the debate about LGBTQ+ rights, the casual use of the word “gay”, the frequent suicides of gay and transgender teens, and the inherent injustice or prohibiting same-sex marriage. This song also contains two of my favorite lines in all of rap music: “America the brave still fears what we don’t know” and “whatever God you believe in / we come from the same one.” It is worth noting that several of the anti-religious lines in this long would likely have been censored if this album were released by a major label, so the content of the record is a direct result of the process that created it.

I am going to avoid talking about the fact that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are both white and from Seattle for this week because I plan on doing a post about the appropriation of hip-hop culture another week and somebody requested one about the geographic expansion of rap. These are both important, so don’t think that I have forgotten about them, but I will need to revisit them when I have a chance to talk about them in the detail they deserve.

If you have walked through the HUB in the last few days, you may have noticed signs for an acoustic performance by Iron and Wine that will be happening here at Penn State. To be honest, I was not familiar with his music prior to beginning this blog post, but his name sounded vaguely familiar. Before we delve into the main piece of this post, I want to give you a little background about me. Bear with me, I promise it is relevant.

Over the past five years, I have taken an interest in audio engineering and music production. I have worked in a few studios, built a home studio of my own, and recently began producing for clients. As a home studio enthusiast and aspiring music producer, I frequent a number of forums and blogs that deal with audio engineering. It was on one of these sites that I read about Iron and Wine, which is why his name sounded familiar when I saw it in the HUB.

When Iron and Wine recorded his first album, he did not go through the conventional path of recording in a studio and releasing through a record label. Instead, he recorded this album in his bedroom. You may be thinking, “How can someone produce a commercially successful album in their bedroom?” This is a good question. A few decades ago, this would have been far more expensive than renting studio time the old-fashioned way and it would have required a level of technical expertise that few people had. Today, however, self-producing a record has been made affordable and technically feasible by the rapid increase in computing power and the evolving nature of music.

When I said in the first post that music reflects the culture that creates it, I did not want to limit that to the music itself. We live in a culture in which the Internet and computing technology have opened up new ways of doing a wide range of things. Technology has changed the way we interact with our friends, the way we do business and the way we learn, why should it not change the way we express ourselves? Whether it’s computer-enabled EDM music or a classical quartet recording into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), computers have changed the way we write, perform, produce and enjoy music.

This “democratization of music” has also impacted the musical mainstream. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ The Heist (which contained Billboard Number 1 hits “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us” as well as #11 “Same Love”) was self-produced and self-released. Also, Bon Iver won the 2012 Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Album for Bon Iver, which was also self-produced. These are just two examples, but there are dozens more. Any artist who launched their career on YouTube or Soundcloud leveraged these technological improvements not only to record their music but to distribute it as well. The Internet has changed music in innumerable ways, and I can’t wait to see how it continues to allow musicians and producers to continue to push their limits and create new sounds, forms and styles of music.

(Sidenote: I reserve the right to analyze The Heist in a later post. There is a lot going on in this album in terms of cultural reflection and it could be really interesting. Is that something you guys would want to read? Let me know in the comments.)

Brian Wilson was sick and tired of having to defend his latest creation. After confronting the skepticism of his band mates, still frustrated by the fact that their latest album had been produced with almost no input from them, Wilson was once again answering for Pet Sounds; this time to executives at Capital Records. The label was considering not releasing the album at all, and Wilson was so fed-up that he attended the last meeting with “a tape player and eight prerecorded, looped responses, including ‘No comment,’ ‘Can you repeat that?’ ‘No’ and ‘Yes.’ Refusing to utter a word, I played the various tapes when appropriate.” Ultimately, Capital reluctantly allowed him to release the album.

If you’re wondering whether or not they made the right decision, this story came from the article in which Rolling Stone declares Pet Sounds the second greatest record of all time. Their greatest record of all time is The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; which even Paul McCartney admits was heavily influenced by Pet Sounds (McCartney).

Rarely has a record had such a profound impact on the trajectory of music as Pet Sounds. At a time when most of the major innovations in music production and audio engineering were coming from Britain, Wilson’s pioneering use of non-pop instruments and convention-defying harmony helped to redefine pop music. Tony Asher, a cowriter and pianist who worked with Wilson on the album, remembers that he “plucked the (piano) strings with paper clips, bobbi pins and several other things until Brian got the sound that he wanted.”(Abbott 51) On several occasions, Wilson even rerecorded the same tracks, with the same musicians, over and over in different rooms and at different studios until he recreated the sounds he heard in his head (Abbott 53). As Kingsley Abbott puts it in his book, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century, “What made Brian so extraordinary is that he… had the abilities of a singer, player, arranger, and producer combined; none of his competitors on either side of the Atlantic could come close.” (Abbott 55) In fact, Pet Sounds was such an individual effort that the other Beach Boys had almost no involvement with the project until Wilson had already finished recording all of the songs and called them in to record their vocals and harmonies, which he had already written and arranged (Abbott 67).

To the dismay of the Capital Records executives, who had doubted the commercial potential of Pet Sounds from their first listen, the album was a comparative flop. The album was so innovative and subtle that its genius was lost on much of the music buying public, who preferred the Beach Boys’ younger and more danceable surf rock hits. This commercial blow, however, did not diminish the respect and admiration of Wilson’s competitors. The Beatles’ Paul McCartney said that, while he had heard some of the Beach Boys’ earlier albums, “it was Pet Sounds that blew me out of the water… I’ve just bought my kids each a copy of it for their education in life. I figure no one is educated musically ’til they’ve heard that album,” and “I think was probably the big influence that set me thinking when we recorded Pepper.”(McCartney)

Today, most publications place Pet Sounds first or second on any list of the greatest albums of all time. It has also influenced some of the 21^st centuries biggest producers. One of these producers, Ryan Tedder (One Republic, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Adele, Backstreet Boys, Maroon 5, One Direction, etc.), notes that Pet Sounds was one of the earliest influences in his development (“Artist Interview”). As a producer myself, I still employ many of the techniques Wilson pioneered on Pet Sounds in my own work. It is very unusual for any work to have such an enduring impact on its field as Pet Sounds had on music production. If you have never heard it, head over to YouTube and give it a listen: It may still sound familiar.

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