HOT: Death of the Country Guitar Solo?
It’s getting harder and harder to hear a guitar on Pop radio these days as Top 40 music continues to shift away from Rock. Now it appears that Country radio is following suit and losing some guitar solos in the interest of time. Billboard reports that due to our increasingly shrinking attention spans, guitar solos are being cut from singles (or artists are making “creative choices” to leave them out) in order to make them more appealing to radio stations and their listeners. The article cites a few recent examples of the editing, including Thompson Square’s “Trans Am” (cut to under three minutes after the solo removal) and Brothers Osborne’s “Stay a Little Longer,” which slices a one-minute, 47-second solo down to 55 seconds.
WARM: Jimi Biopic: Take 2
A new film about the life of Rock guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is in the works. If that sounds familiar, you’re probably remembering the recent flop, Jimi: All Is by My Side, starring Outkast’s Andre 3000 as Jimi and reportedly only making $323,000 at the box office. It also didn’t contain any Hendrix music because the late guitarist’s family did not cooperate with the production. But the new film, to be written by the guy who penned the Eminem movie 8 Mile and helmed by Academy Award-nominated director Paul Greengrass, has the Hendrix estate’s blessing and will contain some of Jimi’s best-known songs. No word on casting yet — maybe Andre 3000 would be up for another shot.
COLD: Word/Music Association
Spotify data analyst Glenn McDonald has compiled a massive list of words most distinctive to song titles from nearly 1,400 genres of music. Many genres don’t offer too many surprise “distinct words.” The list of words most associated with Black Metal song titles, for example, reads almost like a lyrics sheet: “satan death black damnation funeral blood serpent darkness ritual void dark eternal flames chaos flesh winds kingdom hell dead ancient.” Elsewhere, “Brooklyn Indie”-associated words keep it simple (“side time down don’t your feat love,” while Classic Chinese Pop keeps it even simpler (“live love song”). You can view the full list (and discover genres you probably never knew existed, like Drumfunk and Etherpop) here. It’s both mind-numbing and kind of fascinating.
