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| You Tube has a growing viewing platform of millions |
You tube is a huge market, its free, has a global
audience, it’s a great way to advertise and sell a product – it is a
multi-layered facility to reach a large population and can make an artist, or anyone
with a little nous, make a lot of money. See Psy – Gangnam Style!
I am particularly interested in where this will go and
how big it will get? I use You Tube mostly to watch music video's and I also use it as
an educational tool to research certain pieces, styles and techniques in
drumming. I am fascinated with it but I also can’t escape the dark nature
rearing up.
I am, depending where your disposition lies;
unfortunately under the category that see’s You Tube as a negative quality. I
come across a lot of video’s that are more in the low budget concept of trying
to adulate and comply with more feeling about the original artist rather than
their own ability.
I am not pointing out that making your own video’s and
posting them on You Tube is necessarily a bad thing, except for all the
negative “traffic” and haters you can appeal to, its more the agony of people
seeming to use it as an way to under perform.
There is a lot of good that can be done, for an unknown
and un-signed artist using You Tube with a quality, well thought out and
focused video it can transform the identity of the everyday struggler to a
welcome city of blinding lights. Is this all gold or a hidden Midas touch?
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| John Bonham. The Greatest? |
History lesson:
Many drummers out there of an older generation will cite
that they grew up on artists they could only hear and read about. Many video’s
if they had any before the 1980’s, were poor in production and certainly not
the calibre you would use to study a style or trick of your favourite drummers!
Not to mention the availability of these video’s, many were recorded from the
audience perspective and the drum solo was usually obscured by the very
instrument you wanted to see being played!
Many consider and I certainly agree that Bonham and Moon are two of the best drummers of their generations and still regarded
the same today.
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| Keith Moon. Drumming Icon. |
When you look at drummers like Stewart Copeland and Neil Peart,
it is a lot easier to gain footage of them playing as the video market was and
is growing. Their performances can be easily sourced, they are recent enough in
their careers and are still playing to have a lot of material available but who
did Messrs Peart and Copeland study in Video’s? What of Buddy Rich, Ginger Baker
and Gene Kruper? There was no
internet, no You Tube and no real platform to access these performers except in
person perhaps?
It was always the humble recordings for such legends.
What though turned them into drummers and what or who
were their inspirations?
My early fascination was with Nicko Mcbrain and his predecessor Clive Burr of Iron Maiden. I felt a certain amount of affinity with
both as they were both English, like me, but it was because I caught,
ironically, the video for Can I Play with Madness? when I was
11. I didn’t know it when I was younger but I was aware of Iron Maiden because
of the artwork and had an older brother who, at the time of 1984 had all four
first albums on display to give me nightmares!
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| Nicko Mcbrain - In flight! |
I was transfixed with them, once I moved on from the
horror of Eddie I quickly gained and listened through all their back catalogues;
studying particularly songs like the Ides of March, Killers, Run to the Hills,
The Prisoner, Where Eagles Dare, Powerslave, Wasted Years and Caught Somewhere in Time.
I spent thousands of hours pouring myself over vinyl and
cassette tape listening over and over how to play them, what made the sounds
and how they might have played them. I couldn’t easily access the actual
performance unless I bought a VHS video or bought a ticket and saw them in
concert. I was only 11!
As I grew older I found out that Mr Mcbrain was inspired
by the great Joe Morello and was taking a lead from Jazz like a lot of the
afore mentioned.
Contemporary music has a much shorter memory but I can
see how a lot of the older generation grew from swing and Jazz, Big Bands - where
the drumming usually wasn’t the centre piece but more a control of the beat and
was merely a part of the rhythm ensemble. Of course that has evolved, any music
from the 1940’s to today would not be very comparable.
The more there is this nature to identify with a brand or
style, particularly within today’s social media and fast celebrity status, the
more I begin to fear for the credibility of originality. Being schooled slowly
was painful, bringing together only the basic of equipment armed only with a
record player or tape player was my only resource. Though it’s questionable as
to whether we would have as many successful artist’s and great drummers today
without a bigger media influence, the temptation is too often to emulate faster
and gain rapid fame without the need to perfect the art.
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| The Jazz man. Joe Morello |
Drumming today is a modern and vibrant art from, it has a
lot of household names, many colourful and successful brands competing with popular/contemporary
music in general generating to a massive leisure industry.
My views are more from personal backgrounds of course but
a relationship between the identity of a style rather than the desire to
express more openly and develop over time; hopefully rewarded with longevity,
has worryingly disappeared.
Hopefully I am proved wrong. My cynical nature is debated
to the contrary. I hope too that new drummers will endeavour to research and
take the time to listen to their own “voice” and become a drummer that is an
individual, playing what feels natural no matter what the genre.
I love most music that has drums involved. My first love
however, is rock and metal and as the genre stretches with the desire to
saturate this already water shed scene I am all too often disappointed with
what I hear. I don’t need You Tube to tell me how to play like Joey Jordison no matter how good or how
much a slipknot fan you or I may be. I would much prefer it to not exist and
have people taking more time to listening and playing in a band or with real
people.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more
efficient means for going backwards. - Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)
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