Velvet Revolver’s Contraband is the new #1 album in America. This has social significance.
It’s not just that Contraband dethroned Usher, who spent nine of the last eleven weeks pulling in the most album sales. Anyone perusing recent Billboard charts can see that rock has taken a back seat to other musical genres. Despite a weak single (“Slither”) and an album with only one truly great song (“Loving the Alien”), Velvet Revolver's Contraband flew off store shelves last week. Listeners are starved for rock music.
Velvet Revolver’s sales success sends a message to the market to correct itself. Demand for rock music exceeds supply.
There is historical precedent for this, and it’s not grunge or punk (which actually ushered in new variations of rock rather than reasserting an existing type). Twenty-five years ago, another seemingly run-of-the-mill band playing rock music served as the catalyst for a huge change in the music industry.
When The Knack’s “My Sharona” hit number one on the singles chart on August 25, 1979, there had not been a non-disco, non-ballad song to hit the top spot in over a year. Get the Knack eventually sold six million copies and “My Sharona” claimed the top spot on the singles chart for six weeks. Like Velvet Revolver, there was nothing revolutionary about The Knack’s music. Sure, “My Sharona” is a catchy song, but its success was due more to the timeliness of its release than its quality. The same goes for Velvet Revolver’s Contraband. More so than the band’s famous line-up or the substance of the album, Velvet Revolver’s success lies in arriving just when we needed them. They represent rock music at its most embattled moment.
Check out the top ten U.S. singles for 1979, and see if you can spot the parallels with today:
10. Sad Eyes, Robert John
9. Too Much Heaven, The Bee Gees
8. YMCA, The Village People
7. Hot Stuff, Donna Summer
6. I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor
5. Reunited, Peaches & Herb
4. Do Ya Think I’m Sexy, Rod Stewart
3. Bad Girls, Donna Summer
2. Le Freak, Chic
1. My Sharona, The Knack
The labels may have changed, but the largely soulless music that plagued 1979 also plagues 2004. Back then they called it disco. Today, the enemy has many names: slut-pop (Britney, Xtina), second-grade rhyming (Ludacris, Nelly), Clear-Channel rock (Nickelback, Evanescence), and lobotomy music (Train, Five for Fighting). Okay, I made up some of those labels, but you get the point. A large portion of the CD-buying public are sick of music played by computers, sick of the visual trumping the audio, and sick of songs churned out by Diane Warren or some Scandinavian songwriting factory.
Twenty five years ago, “Disco Sucks” and “Death to Disco” were ubiquitous catchphrases. In July of ’79, the Chicago White Sox actually had to forfeit a game after fans jubilantly destroyed disco records during a Comiskey Park promotion. In 1979, music listeners had had enough. Here’s hoping history repeats itself in 2004.
No kidding about music. I have been lamenting the garbage the labels have been putting out. If the RIAA wants teens to stop downloading music, perhaps they should put out quality CDs with more than one song on it. Remember concept albums? Now the concept of most CDs is just to package one song they think will be a hit.
I hope that the music industry takes notice of this, but they won't. I used to subscribe to Rolling Stone, until I read the crap they put on their OP-ED sections.
Speaking of music in the 70s, remember how scattered it all was? What sums up the 70s for me the most is the fact that "Cat's In The Cradle" was knocked out of the number one spot by "Kung Fu Fighting." What a concept.
Be well,
Sponge
My teenaged son started listening to the flash bands of his time (gone in a flash). Don't know how much money he urinated away on very expensive CDs in the days before he learned about music sharing. Now he's older and wiser and even though still a teen, he listens to what I listen to as a late boomer. Weird.
