BY MIKE BELL, CALGARY HERALD AUGUST 7, 2014 7:50 PM
While not a physician, I’m pretty sure that what Jann Arden suggests is a physical impossibility — perhaps even illegal in some provinces.
But it speaks to the level of anger she’s feeling that all understandings of the anatomical workings of man should be thrown out the window when it comes to the powers that be at Calgary Top 40 station AMP Radio.
After reading news on calgaryherald.com of the station’s weekend switch to a new format called QuickHitz, which features abbreviated versions of popular songs done by Vancouver company SparkNet Communications, Arden went on a Twitter tirade that lasted most of Thursday.
When reached at her home just outside the city’s limits in the late afternoon, she was still angered enough to recommend that those at AMP, er, insert things in places where no orifice normally exist.
“It’s maddening, it really is,” Arden says of the new format, calling it the “massacring of an artist’s work.”
“It happens all the time, but this is extreme.”
As explained to the Herald by Steve Jones, VP of Programming for Newcap Radio — the company that owns almost 100 stations across Canada, including AMP — the QuickHitz format cuts a song in half in order for the station to play more songs, by more artists. The rough estimate is that the new format allows for 24 songs in one hour, compared with an average of 12.
Jones argued that the four-minute song is an archaic practice originally dictated by radio and the 45 RPM, and that the idea of radio edits to get down to that magic three- or four-minutes was used on such epics as Don McLean’s American Pie to current hits such as John Legend’s All of Me.
Arden acknowledges the idea of radio edits and admits she’s heard her own songs faded out early or had intros cut short, and says she’s fine with it. But the QuickHitz approach, she says, goes too far, calling it “blasphemy” to both the artist and the listener.
“They’re saying that you’re so stupid that you’re not even going to notice,” she says. “And maybe some people don’t. If that’s what they want to listen to, I mean, it’s a free world. But for me as an artist, please don’t play my music, AMP. I don’t give a s---. Please don’t ever play it.”
She quickly adds. “Not that they ever do. They’d never play me in a million years. But I’ve never been so glad to be on the outside looking in at what’s considered to be pop music.”
That, actually, was another point that Jones made, was that the Top 40 or pop music format was perfect for the QuickHitz treatment in that it’s “music of the moment” and that these days moments are even more fleeting. The idea that it’s seen as more disposable and therefore subject to being made more easily consumed by cleaving it into smaller, digestible bits, is one that Arden sees as a dangerous thing, calling it an “offensive, ignorant statement.”
“And it’s belittling art of any kind,” she says. “There are all kinds of different music . . . There’s Leonard Cohen and there’s pop music that’s completely perceived as if it’s going to come and go in 10 minutes. That’s not the point. It really is not the point at all. If you start there, I liken it to, ‘Let’s just go and do an abridged version of every book that’s out there. It’s way more cost-effective for the publisher. There’s a lot of stuff in here that’s just describing things, and we’re going to take that out. At least they’re still kind of getting the story, they know what happens in the end, the Titanic sinks. But we don’t have to have the part in there where the band is playing.’
“It’s an impossibility in art. You can’t start doing that because it just turns into something really sinister.”
She’s hoping that other musicians in this country and around the world stand up and stop the QuickHitz movement before it takes hold — AMP is the first to commit to it full time but other stations have experimented with it.
And despite Jones telling the Herald that “artists are generally quite receptive to having their songs heard more often by more people,” Arden hopes that there will be a huge backlash by the real artists out there.
“That’s why my claws went up because it’s just insulting,” she says. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, artists are receptive to it.’ Well, you know what? If an artist is receptive to it then they’ve completely sold out. And they’re not my brothers and sisters in this kind of work. They’re people that will do anything to get on radio and I’m not interested in those people.”
As for the music industry, which Jones thinks will embrace and, possibly, be saved by the format, that’s where Arden has a little less faith. Noting that there is a certain amount of desperation to get songs and artists more exposure, she’s not entirely convinced that some day her record company might not come to her asking for a two-minute song.
Still, she holds out hope that radio will reject the idea, noting there are a great many people in the medium who have an authentic love and respect for music, many of whom reached out to her off the record to support her Twitter-vent.
As for AMP, she says they’re merely “grasping at straws” and that the format switch is less, as Jones says, about testing a “revolutionary” idea in a “forward-looking city” than doing anything it can to bail out the boat after it’s already hit the iceberg.
“I mean, this is brought to you by the morons that burned money instead of helping a hungry child,” she says, referring to a recent, controversial promotion that saw the station incinerate $5,000 rather than give it to charity.
“They’re going to sink. They’re not going to make it . . . it’s just not going to fly.”
mbell@calgaryherald.com
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calga ... story.html
