Looking back at the easy listening revival.

For me, the easy listening tag was only useful for a short time. It gave me some good laughs and introduced me to some music I wouldn't have listened to otherwise. I bought records by John Barry, Francoise Hardy, Sinatra, Bacharach, Astrud Gilberto and the Mamas and the Papas. All of these artists are too expressive to be confined to the easy listening category. Their music is enjoyable even when you're not being ironic.

if anyone is simply putting ALL this music back in the lame cupboard becuz they can't see past the "irony" they are beyond help

yes of course *some* of it is lame: some punk rock is lame i believe...

(good perspective on this dynamic in b.watson's RUBBISH THEORY chapter in "art, class and cleav*ge", tho i don't doubt bw HATES lougecore...)

I was just wondering how useful the marketing term "easy listening" was. A lot of diverse music was placed together under the same banner. Now that the fad is over, I hope a lot of this music isn't forgotten about again.

Oh, really! This morning I just happened to read an article on the sunday times abt 'chill-out' albums that seem to be selling well. I suppose this is the same as easy listening (if not, then what's the difference?).

It really is music for people who don't like music. I suspect hitler had more redeemable qualities than this stuff (and I just don't listen to rock since most of it (beatles, dylan, clash, etc.) is shit anyway).

Throbbing Gristle and Genesis P were of course bigging up Martin Denny and pals back in the early eighties, and NWW's Steve Stapleton is known to be a big Prez Prado fan. I don't think irony or mockery are at work here - 'easy' and 'industrial' both seem to be concerned with creating a mood, an ambience, another world/place/time.

Mark, I posted my response while you were posting your "new answers" so I wasn't getting at you. Obviously "irony" can often work as a defence mechanism against the tyrannies of taste: ie i find i like something which is considered really really uncool by those whose respect i crave, so i place my apparent tastes in deniable "quotes". Perhaps I cannot defend it rationally or ideologically. This doesn't mean a. i don't actually genuinely like it, and b. that not being in kneejerk lockstep with the horrible-noise vanguardistas makes me a subhuman philistine moron blah blah; oddly enuff lots of ppl like to listen to music because they like when it sounds nice...

Please pass the bucket now. So what were these 'experiments'? Did these guys mess around with sound itself, or perharps they changed our notions of rhythm, harmony. Don't give a statement here without explaining yourself. And list some actual records while you are at it.

Mr negative? Not at all, I'm positive abt many things. But this is not one of them.

Finally, I asked for the difference because to me (from what i've heard) there isn't much of a difference.

if you listen to the ppl who like it instead of just sneering at them, you might hear what it is they like - yes prolly it is NOTHING to do with innovation or other ad-industry staples

I was on my own similar taste-questioning mission at the time, listening to a lot of Arabic music, including some that had elements that seemed a bit cheesey. Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Oum Kalthoum are both mentioned at some point in those RE/Search book (though that's not how I got into them). I remember recoling a bit from the idea of labeling this as "exotica" after a certain point, however. It had simply become one type of music I listen to, and over time my taste in Arabic music became more canonical, more rockist if you will. I like things that sound interesting or odd or trippy, but I tend to put more value on music which not only appeals to my ear, but expresses emotion in a way that I recognize, or puts me into a better mood (two different things). If a certain recording appeals to my ear without particularly moving me, it better be really out of the ordinary.

Incidentally, I once saw an Arabic compilation of, not East Listening but, "Listening Music" in a catalog. I wish I had picked that up.

I like the idea of other kinds of music you don't listen to.

And yes, it is a surface evaluation based on listening to a few tracks rather than buying the records. perharps I should do that and maybe I'll shut up.

(ps you should also post more — poss.,not on this thread — abt what you DO like and why)

Actually, now I'm thinking abt it, one of the reasons I live 'I Love music' is that it gives me the opportunity to think abt things I would otherwise dismiss easily and wouldn't give much thought abt it again.

I haven't yet overdosed on the irony though I can see why a lot of people would. Some of it is just dull, boring dreck. Of course, that's why the bulk of my easy listening is on vinyls I got from the local thrift shops for pennies, so there's never any regret that "oh, I spent way too much time and money on this crap". Besides, I find a lot of it is really good late-night cool-down music.

Mike Alway's el Label was touting 'neo-exotica' ten years before the Mike Flowers Pops and The Gentle People. But the 80s were not quite ready for the subtle mindfuck of this deceptively subversive music. When I wrote an article for the NME about Serge Gainsbourg in 1987, it was run on the World Music page. (France is twenty miles from Dover. But that's how far away all this stuff felt at the time.)

Like DeRayMi I would stress the continuity of this stuff with the Incredibly Strange scene. If mid-20th century Easy Listening was 'music for people who don't like music' (and I don't even accept that), it had a weirdo fringe of super-gifted experimentalists who could transition (sometimes on the same record) from novelty organ to musique concrete. Dick Hyman, Pierre Henry, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Bruce Haack with his deranged children's records or Hugh Le Caine with his synthesiser sackbutt and 'electronic larynx'. Novelty is just another word for innovation.

I don't listen much to Towa Tei or The Merricks these days, but I am still avidly listening to the whacky innovators, so for me personally these interests have evolved in the direction marked 'incredibly strange'. Kitsch and irony are snakes which eat their own tails, but 'strange' is an eternal siren.

I'm not sure about the connection with TGs interest in Martin Denny or the Re/Search books though. This was definately a diferent aesthetic the strangeness of the music these people were picking up on (and also the strangeness of mainstream music from different eras, Potter's use of Music in Singing Detective / Pennies from Heaven and Lynch in Blue Velvet). The mid 90s easy boom and clubs like the Double six weren't.

Oh and please to god can we have a ban on the meaningless phrase 'rockist' I thought the word was exhausted by 1985. I suggest decrying its use by calling the people who use the phrase the equally pejorative 'reynoldsist'.

Lounge was the culmination of all that ransacking of "uncool" styles. While there’s a lot of genuine (sic) beauty underneath all the kitsch, I am more fascinated by the feelings of shock and hysterical laughter something like, say, bad samba can produce. In music, as in fashion, graphics and film, bad taste from an earlier era makes my pulse race like great pornography. It's too visceral and complex for me to analyze the shit out of it and justify the aesthetics.

(also anyone calling me a "reynoldsist" is DEFINITELY not paying attention: much as i love him, simon = MEGArockist for as long as he's been writing, which = abt 3-5 yrs less than me)

I think my big problem with the 'boom years' for this stuff and specifically the new bands working in said field was that so many of the acts I encountered/read about in the States had a barely hidden attitude of 'oh, that rock stuff is *all* trash and this is pure and wonderful.' Well, fuck you. I don't like absolutist exclusion, and considering a band like, say, Combustible Edison was actually the very crap Christmas a few years previous, their attitude felt less like useful reinvention a la Mr. Bolan and Mr. Bowie and more like Damon A. and company's clodhopping "We're THIS! No wait, we're this. No, WAIT WAIT, please pay attention, we're THIS!" Just say you found something new to explore!

I've got some Esquivel, a couple of comps, things like that, and oddly enough I just read the first Incredibly Strange Music book two days ago. What's interesting about the book is that so many of the people interviewed clearly don't *just* listen to lounge/exotica -- hell, the first people they interview are the Cramps, and they talk about damn well everything! The Perrey and Kingsley interviews were also worthy, as was the Eartha Kitt chat. And yeah, first time I heard of Martin Denny was that thank you on Throbbing Gristle's best-of...

Don't forget The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band! From their 1967 album "Gorilla", "The Intro and the Outro" and "Death Cab for Cutie" are both ironic lounge/jazz parodies. The rest of the album teeters a bit too much between Kinks-ish vaudvillian music hall and proto-Monty Python social satire but those are definitely cornerstones of the 67' ironic revival.

This still grated, for this stance came across as earnest as what it was critiquing -- certainly not in all cases, but in more than some. In which case why bother? I am not interested in scenes and poses in this fashion, because I am not interested in substituting canons one for another.

And, since no-one else has, I would just like to say: 'Stereolab, Best Brutish Groop.'

If they're the best around these days, then things are in fairly sad shape.

Unless I was playing kerplunk or the Johnny Seven were playing, I don't think I felt any sense of joy because there never felt like any quality aesthetic going on. Having no po-mo irony hangups I have no problems with dividing easy into 'good easy' and 'bad easy'... bad easy just leaves me with a feeling of, well, unease... and a desire to look at a selection of pages from CEEFAX.

Ned, It was a GPO interview in (I think) ZigZag magazine where I first encountered Denny. Also became a Barry obsessive because of a mention in a Magazine (the band) article... (they covered Goldfinger early on). Still think the Mike Pops phenomenon was something else though.

ps. Sorry for muddying the waters of this fine & interesting thread with my opinion on the usage of the word 'rockist'. It would be better in its own thread, one I don't feel like starting at the moment.

Exotica I can take or leave. I still listen to the likes of Martin Denny and Yma Sumac occasionally, but then irony and love of music are antithetical as far as I'm concerned. (I was never that fond of the really gimmicky stuff tho', like "Zounds! What Sounds" or those William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy albums.)

it had a much bigger impact on current than most people will be aware

So with trip-hop and, um, sampling acts played out, where are we at six years later? Are there acts/albums since 2002 that evince an easy listening influence? I don't mean a Combustible Edison-style retread. But easy listening as a jump off point. Perhaps a 2007 album that plays as if stereo was invented in 2005 or so.

Easy Listening was never just a fad for me. it fits into a continuum with soundtracks and black music. there's obvious crossover points with jazz singers (Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Nancy Wilson etc), but less obvious ones where it in the instrumentation (orchestras with pop or jazz rhythm sections, moogs, etc), the stripped down arranging, the heavy reliance on standards and pop cover versions, the session players.

i got into it originally from charity shop LPs, but the fact that it seems so opposed to rock (with it's emphasis on basic guitar bands, songwriting, 'realness' etc) appealed to me. the sweeter sounds remind my ears of soul records, small-group jazz, etc and the musical adventuring of the more exotic releases is always appealing.

it had a much bigger impact on current than most people will be aware - you see it's influence in sleeve design, and you can tell most of the better trip hop/sampling acts have a fair few charity shop LPs in their collection

-- michael, Saturday, February 2, 2002 8:00 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Link

great post

"I love the stuff, but I don't buy as much of it - not because it's not fashionable anymore, but because I have as much as I possibly could have."

That's pretty much where I stand.

When the RE/Search "Incredibly Strange Music" books came out in '93-'94, I bought them and enjoyed them, but even though the collectors interviewed obviously listened to other types of music, it was the lounge music that stood out. Up to then, I don't think anybody took this stuff that seriously.

I was working in a used record store at the time. Somebody brought in a bunch of albums we didn't buy, so rather than take them back, he just left them there. Fortuitously, they were all lounge records, just in time for the trend. Buddy Merrill, Tony Mottola, and a few others I can't recall.

I took these home, wondering what people heard in these records, and to my surprise, most of them were actually good, in a semi-jazz kind of way. I kept most of those LP's. Then, one night I was hanging out at ILX poster Stormy Davis' house, and he played some Martin Denny for me. Up till then, "Quiet Village" was a guilty pleasure of mine but I wasn't about to buy a whole Denny elpee. That was about to change. Denny (and Arthur Lyman) are cool with me.

However, I haven't bought any lounge records in the last eight-nine years or so. Just like the person said up above, I've gotten as much as I can out of it, I don't need any more of that genre. The records I did get still sound good to me, though.

One thing I did notice: if the artist plays guitar, it'll be a lot more accessible to people coming from jazz or rock. Tony Mottola may as well be jazz without the improv, and Al Caiola is like a middle-of-the-road Duane Eddy. (Caiola even made a few Ventures-styled albums of rock instrumentals, like TUFF GUITAR - he sounds good, but the band behind him isn't gritty enough.)

"Are there acts/albums since 2002 that evince an easy listening influence? I don't mean a Combustible Edison-style retread."

That's how far back in the past the whole Incredibly Strange trend is. The name "Combustible Edison" hasn't crossed my mind in YEARS.

Wow. For a few years there, we had a lounge revival, a surf revival, and the swing resurgence going on simultaneously, and more than once they crossed over. The 1990's was a hell of a time, wasn't it?

I got into the easy listening stuff when I got into early electronic music like Bruce Haak and perry kingsley, and a lot of this stuff crossed over. stereolab is still going but I dont know ho3 many other remnants of this scene exist

Easy listening's biggest impact is that it

1. made "Wonderwall" a much bigger hit than it already was and turned it into sort of the ultimate Britpop anthem
2. brought the world Neil Hannon.

(and Air, I guess)