The Greatest Hit (Death Of Canon cont.)
On Best Ofs, canon induction, and music's hope.
Note: Herb Sundays, Season 7, will begin shortly. Excited to share some of these playlists.
This past week, I posted a piece on the Why Is This Interesting Substack, which offers daily inquiries into culture and more, and you can it read here:
I've been clocking how culture continues to re-make/re-model the accepted critical canon with each successive technology and business move and have been sitting on a kernel of a draft for ages. Right as it was posted, the canon came under further fire with continued pressure on music journalism, which remains the "fourth estate" or canon development and recognition. I even asked for your fave Best Ofs a year ago, which made a great list of albums to check (see below). Time flies.
The idea for the original post came when the great producer Patrick Adams passed away in June of 2022. Adams was the writer and/or producer on some of my favorite songs of all time, including string-heavy disco and dance cuts like "Lady Bug""My Baby's Got ESP", and "I'm Caught Up (In a One Night Love Affair)" all under various project names. Cina and I swiftly made a playlist to cement our faves (Apple Music, Spotify).
Despite his apparent 32 gold and platinum records, if you Google his name, you’ll get a famous actor from the USA network, and if you search DSPs, it's almost as challenging. You could argue that since he's a writer/producer, it would make sense that search engines and the like do not explain this well, and you'd be right. This is not a common procedure for those behind the scenes, but to whom does this editorial service fall? It had mainly been the work of branded culture hubs like Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA), which was run/edited by some of the world’s best music curators like Adam Shore and edited/presented by music journalism’s brightest minds to carry out this archival and curatorial work. Because of them, we got some great articles, and I was able to catch a brilliant Adams tribute with him present and performing in May 2017. The muddling/ending of this expansive leg of music support was recently covered by First Floor’s
.The Canon Machine
The idea of canon implies that each generation should pass down the awareness and appreciation of certain art, yet there’s been a shift in the ‘20s in that we now mainly hope that these important artifacts bubble up from youth culture (TikTok hits, syncs in youth-oriented shows, etc.), a wild inversion from the top-down days of yore.
We talk about certain bodies of works of art as rites of passage. Recently, the addition of limitless cable and then streaming services has bifurcated our attention, and obviously, film and TV studios need to replenish the collective heart with new variants, sequels, and prequels, catching young viewers at their level.
I'd argue that Canon induction was pretty automatic (if studios would spend) up until around the ‘00s. As a kid, I had the 1989 Tim Burton-helmed Batman movie to get me deeper into the character from the comics I already loved (of course, the artistic genus point of that was 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns comic series, which, alongside Watchmen debuted the same year, is the beginning of the superhero movement we live in now), and spent lots of time at comics shops with my dad at that time, but I also was also being pushed re-runs of the 1960s series via a confusing outlet called The Family Channel concurrently, which tripled my enthusiasm. Options were fairly limited, and mindshare was rentable for modest sums.
In 2024, I currently watch, amidst hundreds of new title options, an appealing digital Spider-Man cartoon with my son, which Frankensteins the multiverse brilliance of the "Spider-Verse" films, conveniently allowing us to have multiple Spideys and adds Baby Yoda cuteness into something loosely accurate to the original character but not much. I’m not complaining as I am heartened to at least see my childhood fave villains show back up in original garb like Doctor Octopus (she now has a sick "undercut" hairdo, though, which works). At least now I have an onramp to share my knowledge of this IP with him, and then the kind people at Lego step into their part. It takes this amount of convergence and new material to create and hold a contemporary fan, a literal barrage. I couldn’t have gotten him into Todd McFarlane illustrated Spider-Man comics of my youth; probably too arcane/too slow, and too violent. This approach to radical youth induction is critical to modern canon-making.
So, how do we extend the musical canon to a new generation? Well-meaning parents like me and
We can buy the gear and do our best but need more support. For the biggest names, Broadway and biopics are a safe strategy for many artists. Holograms and headsets will be coming fast and furious, which I mused about a bit last year here:
AI will probably be the biggest boon to canon-remaking in music. Now labels can easily add a contemporary rap or pop verse (if they need to launch a new act) to aged hits easily, and more importantly, we can allow, say, Frank Sinatra to sing a commissioned Casamigos ditty, and in the TV ad, he can sidle up to the bar (George Clooney cast as bartender, natch) and share a knowing smile. Boom, we’re back in biz.
Long-dead artists are about to be all over your timeline and will help line ad executive shelves with industry awards for days. Maybe this will help retain some of the canon of yore, but your kids will think Sinatra was a Tequila guy and that his biggest song was "Mexican Romance" or something he never sang, so I'm not optimistic.
If that bit of false history sounds like an AI hallucination, it tracks correctly, and most brands and artist estates will likely not mind historical confusion as long as their act or product remain viable. It’s possible that in this din, we will never find actual truth again. If search engine riptides wade through industry news as important artistic fact, the accepted future canon could have the purity of that rainbow runoff at the car wash, an illusion of history.
Most popular musicians now fight for mindshare alongside prestige television and games and win market share in what they can get into the culture with memes or moments. The artist is a bigger enterprise than any of their new catalog, and their biography is more crucial in creating context than often unremarkable songs.
In reading Island Records founder Chris Blackwell’s book The Islander, I was reminded that Bob Marley’s Legend (his posthumous Greatest Hits), one of the greatest canon-makers ever, was actually a constructed reality. It’s a finessed view of a deceased genius, made with new, white audiences in mind. The fiery radical who risked death to perform was sanded down, and even the cover photo was chosen to be more immediate: Turn down the Che, turn up the vibes. Marley was already a legend musically, but Legend put him in the pop firmament. I suspect future Legend-ing for stars of all stripes and sizes via documentary, hologram performance, or both. I look forward to the new Marley biopic and hope it helps show his more potent political legacy to the next generation. My only hope is that artists are able to make some of this stuff themselves while still standing.
Nice piece, thank you. Reading The Islander I couldn't help but think how hard it might be to even cultivate to-be-canonical artists such as Bob Marley or Grace Jones in the current cultural climate
Thought provoking, thank you for this one today 🙏🏻