Reason To Rock-It's All About The Music
who go out of their way to avoid appealing to the masses. This is the stuff that is most often labeled "art", just because it couldn't possibly be mistaken for anything else.
No matter what the form, my favorite artists tend to be those who are still trying to appeal to the masses, but who are also trying to say something unique. This is the phase, for me, when you get art that is firing on all cylinders. The artist is still using all the conventional mechanisms to make their work appealing, but they are also adding in something extra, something that you can't get anywhere else, something that could only have come from that source.
William Shakespeare, Raymond Chandler, George and Ira Gershwin, Miles Davis, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock -- these are all examples of the types of artists I am talking about. Many times, even though these people have enjoyed great popularity and commercial success, they are disappointed when their audiences turn away from something new they are trying, or when the work they feel to be their greatest goes unappreciated. "It's A Wonderful Life" is a good example. It's now on most film critics' top ten lists, right up there with "Citizen Kane". It's a perennial favorite on television, especially during the holidays. Both Capra and Jimmy Stewart felt that it was their best work. But it was a commercial flop when first released.
I think all of the music I talk about in "Reason to Rock" comes from this phase of rock, which started sometime in the fifties and wound down in the late seventies. It was during this period, for example, that The Beatles were still the most popular musical group in the world, still sold millions of records and had top ten hits, even when they were consciously doing very inventive things with their music.
What happened afterwards, I think, which happens to all art forms at a certain point, is that we lost that convergence. The market began to fragment. Certain groups decided to stay somewhat conventional in order to remain popular, while other artists decided to be pointedly unconventional in order to remain "pure". I would kind of put punk into this latter category.
Some of the songs I talk about in "Reason to Rock" are well known and achieved commercial success. Many are less well known and were commercial flops. But all of them were products of artists
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