“There’s an element about ‘the context of pop’ that is incredibly fickle. For everyone who has succeeded in attaining longevity there have been periods of great acclaim tempered by periods when they’ve seemed incomprehensibly old hat, almost obsolete for a time. Then it snaps back and they become utterly contemporary again…”
The above quote is an observation by noted music journalist Nick Kent from an interview he conducted with Roy Orbison shortly before the singer’s death in 1988. In Kent’s book of journalism entitled The Dark Stuff, he complies a series of profiles on certain artists that have been chewed up and spit out by the music industry, with many coming back for another turn with the same result. Kent seemed obsessed with catching artists like The Rolling Stones, Syd Barrett, Miles Davis, and The Beach Boys, all of which enjoy legendary status these days, right at the point when the shine had well and truly worn off.
The achievement longevity in the music business is not for the faint of heart. Many artists that last longer than the decade that they started have to go through a few years in the proverbial wilderness before reclaiming centre stage. Artists that are still around today, and those that have only recently passed away, are still completely defined by a certain decade. David Bowie, for example was the pinnacle artist of the seventies, a period of classic album after classic album, as well as nurturing artists like the down and out Iggy Pop. The Beatles seemed to know that they couldn’t survive past the sixties so decided to officially own the decade by disbanding as it ended. The Rolling Stones faired a little better, they didn’t run out of steam until the mid-seventies post Exile on Main Street, mainly because all of their main rivals had broken up or bottomed out in the sixties.
The eighties belonged to new wave bands like New Order, Souixsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and Echo and the Bunnymen, all of which have either broken up or left most of their quality in the decade style forgot. The nineties had Oasis burning bright then burning out, Blur and Pulp imploding so their frontmen could reinvent themselves in the new millennium. So how do modern bands hope to last longer than ten years before creative differences, audience apathy, or massive success leading to all its pitfalls, eventually catches up to them?
Let’s look first at some examples of bands and artists that have been popular for at least more than one decade. Recent examples include Arcade Fire, and Arctic Monkeys, both of which haven’t released new music for a few years, but still maintain worldwide appeal. Both bands seem to have the same basic career formula as Talking Heads. Talking Heads were one of the biggest bands of the seventies and eighties, mainly because, apart from make two masterpiece albums in a row either side of each decade, the band took a break at the start of the eighties to pursue other projects, eventually reforming in 1983 to become one of the biggest bands on the planet. Arcade Fire, and Arctic Monkeys are similar in that they are both hugely popular in the last two decades, and have taken a long break in the same way as Talking Heads.
Another way is to constantly reinvent yourself. This is how David Bowie, and Madonna stayed popular for years, and the same goes for Radiohead, and PJ Harvey, who both change their musical identity wit every album. For each of these examples it’s not a case of changing the trends of any given era, apart from Madonna but that is because, as a pop star, she can’t really escape that fate, but the others have earned the kind of artistic freedom to work outside of these trends making them consistently unique. Of course, not every band can be Radiohead, hell, not even The Beatles can be Radiohead these days, yet there are other ways.
Take U2 and R.E.M, while one band has broken up, and the other hated as much as loved, both wrote the book on rocketing career paths in the last thirty years. Both bands spent the eighties quietly boosting their reputations with excellent indie rock indebted to their roots. It wasn’t till each bands fifth album, R.E.M’s Document, and U2’s The Joshua Tree that both hit the mainstream and spawned limitless imitation bands. R.E.M admittedly peaked with the career-defining Automatic for the People, but U” used their new-found freedom, much as Radiohead would do after them, to experiment with their sound to both great effect (Achtung Baby), and not so great (Pop). U2 can still do whatever they want, whether we like it or not, and if R.E.M announced a tour in the next minute it would be sold out in the next five.
Longevity is a fleeting dream for many artists, for all those that achieve it hundreds are lost in time. The key isn’t to copy the artists that have attained it, it’s to engage with your audience, to engage with the times that you’re in, but not to surrender to it.
