"The Monkees were, in effect, the converse of the Brittany Spears situation"
Hit a nerve, did I? Must have been a fan.
Yeah, they were so talented, you still hear their music on the radio all the time, just like many of their contemporaries.
Oh, wait, that isn't true.
"Today, many "artists" are chosen based not on their musicianship but on their value as a promotable asset"
Gee, i-node. That has only been true for, I dunno, decades.
"Payola never implied poor musicianship. "
It never implied good, either. It was always predicated on whether or not they could make them into stars.
"40 years ago, musicianship was everything and a producer would simply mold it."
That really depended. There are always those with talent, who may or may not have made it, and those with little or no talent who got promoted to fame. A good, but not perfect measure, is how their music has survived. You will find plenty of stuff that made it to the top of the charts that no one even remembers. And then there is stuff that never made the top 100 who you can still hear now. |
