never heard of "Listen without prejudice"?

just because Mr Smug may make a few more quid, it doesn't invalidate the artiist.

I was around in the hey-day of punk - one of my first gigs was UK Decay, so I know about iconiclastic idol-smashing BUT look at the Pistols, look at MacCLaren, look at Westwood and the rest. John Lydon on "I'm a sell-out celebrity - help my career"

the music industry has done protest - it now makles a nice profit for multi-millionaire Richard Branson

Stiff Little Fingers = EMI

Souxie & The Banshees = Polydor

etc etc etc

double standards aplenty.

a least Leona recognised that she wanted to be famous and did what it took without posturing about being out to smash the system.

I do listen without prejudice, and as far as Leona goes, I find her music terribly bland and soulless. The Cowell factor just adds to it all really.

In fact, I never mentioned Cowell until you did. He's just one of the many reasons to dislike her output.

If a song is good, I'll listen. I don't care where it came from. I just credit myself with having a little more intelligence than people who believe that fame is a measure of an artist's ability.

Reverend and the Makers may not be at #1, but they have a far higher credibility rating than Leona Lewis ever will.

I could write and sing my own songs - only the deaf and demented would buy them.

There's no reason at all why professionals shouldn't write songs for or with songwriters - amateurs with very few exceptions write amateur songs with the same emotional content that the professionals can write about more effectively and zillions of amaturs have already written about before. The idea that people need to experience deep trauma to write about anything interesting just doesn't hold up and in some current cases they can't even stand up. The idea of the working class, self taught, thoughtful, inspirational, selfmade, genius was never true when the Beatles were put together and invented the stereotype and it couldn't be found today and probably wouldn't sell if it could.

Practically all bands and singers are built by someone - few are home made and fewer still of those can write a good tune. Credible as used by many just means marketed as credible and in reality it often means amateurish or strange. Meanwhile some of the factory produced bands of the last decade have had more of an original sound and been far more involved in writing their songs and producing interesting lyrics than their so called "credible" alternatives.

Leona can sing and obviously more people like what she does than this McClure character. Its true she isn't a great interpreter but she can sing a great song if someone gives her one to sing. She's not Celine Dion or Sinead O'Connor and I don't see her doing that brilliantly but she can sing things that no one else in the British market can. Expecting her to strum a guitar badly and write her own lyrics is about as logical as expecting Keira Kneightley to write her own filmscript and bang her own drum in the sound track.

She IS about as bad as Celine Dion, to be fair.

In YOUR opinion, ofcourse.

last time i listened, his band were getting pretty endlessy repeated on commercial radio. the term manufactured isnt getting used properly anymore, and while not a fan i do know that she has been doing this a while, this has just given her break and she's got the talent to carry it off.

[claps politely]

congratulations on a well-reasoned post.

[BTW I'm not a professional song-writer and yet some of my songs have demo'd well - on the other hand, I have written as a professional writer, so perhaps that should be expected.]

So, lets say that a particular artist sang in a way that you liked and had a song that you liked but was written by a professional song writer, would you prefer to listen to someone performing their own work badly or to the song you actually liked?

I find that some people are so wrapped up in their desperate search to appear "credible" that they would actually not admit to liking, or just not listen at all to, a song which wasn't written by the performer.

The stupid thing is that Leona can actually play the guitar and the piano and is actually a fairly talented songwriter. Of course Cowell only let her have one co-write on the album.

I hate all the X-factor/pop idol snobbery that you get. Most of the people who appear on those shows are professional musicians, they have spent time working hard and trying to break into the industry.

I am not even a Leona fan either, but I find making baseless assumptions is never good.

Jason

That is so true, by the way she co-write 3

Oh okay, well thanks for clearing that up. Which ones were they by the way?

Jason

Well let's hear it then.

Otherwise it's irrelevant to keep hearing the media drum banging on that she's a talented artist.

What's the point of becoming famous and being a talented songwriter who can write their own music if the only music we get to hear them perform is bland formulaic music created by somebody else?

That's a bit of a loaded question. I don't think that anybody minds at all if a performer does a cover (or collaborates)....now and again.

But if somebody becomes famous by JUST doing covers, and JUST performing other people's material, then there's nothing there. They aren't an 'artist' and their only talent on display is to sing to somebody else's tune. Simon Cowell's tune in this instance.
It's just formula stuff, boring, no innovation, just tried and tested, heavily promoted marketing, and safe techniques. That to me isn't what music should be about.

I personally won't admit to liking Leona Lewis songs, not because I'm 'desperate' (Why would I be desperate?) to search to be credible,...but simply because I don't like them.

To try to answer a part of your question directly, I would actually prefer to listen to somebody else performing their own material badly.
I bet you simply can't get your head around that concept can you?
Not compared to a song that I like, which was a loaded question, but in comparison to formula driven music.
Some people don't rate talent based on the perfection and precision of the notes that are played, or whether a song is sung pitch perfectly without mistakes, but based on creativity, innovation and genuine feeling.

Some people, myself included, are quite happy to accept some work performed badly if it's good enough. As long as people are inspired to create their own stuff I'm also even quite happy to take the crap that comes along with that, as it inevitably would now and again. Rough production values, raw sound, dodgy vocals. To some people that's not necessarily a problem in itself, and hardly the be all and end all.
In this current decade it appears that too much emphasis is placed on perfection. Where blandness and soul deprived music is automatically celebrated as 'Amazing' or 'Genius' above music which may be rougher but have something about it.

I'm not saying that high production values are a bad thing, far from it. I like some music which has high production values but isn't necessarily the media's flavour of the month.
But it's just that there appears to be a current snobbery towards music that doesn't have the highest production values.

Pre-the year 2000 there was a lot of music which may have been performed with a looser style where the singing couldn't possibly have been described as being sung well going by today's lofty standards.
There was rawness and roughness to a lot of great music before the year 2000.
Hip Hop (Not now,...but a long time ago), Punk, Oldskool Hardcore(Rave), Indie, Electro, Trip Hop, early 90s guitar bands.
Can you imagine Ian Brown from 'The Stone Roses' getting anywhere today according to current music industry standards dictated to us by the likes of Simon Cowell and the like?
Rough scratchy drums, very analogue sounds, accidental feedback, fingers heard sliding over guitar frets, were seen as an asset, not as a detriment.

You make it sound as though it's a good thing to have a song written for you by a 'professional' song writer. As though that word 'professional' has some sort of bench-mark of quality or kudos attached to it. Like you've got a head start in the race for quality because you've got a 'professional' person helping you.

Leona Lewis/Simon Cowell music has nothing to it. I don't care how many 'professional' songwriters or 'professional' producers are involved. A clinically perfect hummable tune does nothing for me in itself. It's probably that same professionalism and perfection you use as a means to celebrate that music which is probably the very reason why it kills it for me.
It's ironic that Leona Lewis's album was titled 'Spirit' because to me that music has none.

She Co-write

Whatever It Takes
Here I Am
Forgivness (B-side to Bleeding Love)
You Bring Me Down (B-side to her next single Better In Time, Footprints)

Yup, and she wrote by herself an 11-track demo album prior to X-Factor. It's a shame she wasn't allowed more of the songs she wrote on 'Spirit'.

I think what Alex91 was trying to say (I apologise for putting words into his/her mouth!) was that there is a far greater focus on what Alex91 termed "real music" - bands playing live music than there was 10 years ago (1998 - scary how it seems like yesterday to me!)

I agree with that argument. The focus on british bands during the britpop era was huge - I remember turning most radio stations or MTV on around 1994/5 and hearing/seeing something by a band like Blur, Oasis, Suede, Supergrass, Elastica etc. etc.

However, by 1998, the focus was on some of the awful manufactured bands of that time (in this category, I include S Club 7, Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, Westlife, Steps, B*Witched, Another Level, Five, Cleopatra - sorry if I offend fans of any of those but there was way too much focus on them in the late 90s and a lot of artists/bands producing quality music went unnoticed); artists who could sing but had teams of lyricists around them doing all of the work; dance music (may sound good in a club but when watching these dance acts perform live, most of them have no charisma whatsoever, don't attempt to build a rapport with the crowd like a lot of bands do) and of course rap/ R&B.

A lot of this continued throughout the early 2000s - ok, we had different faces but look at all the hype around Hear'Say, Gareth Gates, Steve Brookstein, etc. and then other acts like Atomic Kitten. Admittedly some bands/artists did become prominent in the early 2000s - David Gray, Dido, Travis, Coldplay etc. However, when I was still in school during the early 2000s, I was laughed at for liking band music at the time - it wasn't vogue enough!

However, the seachange and focus on band music didn't properly set in until around 2004 when all these bands like the kaiser chiefs, franz ferdinand, the libertines, the killers suddenly became prominent and were heavily played on the radio, promoted on TV etc.

Thankfully this has continued, although there is still a lot of focus on R&B/rap but I think a lot of people have moved away from the appalling manufactured acts that were so popular 10 years ago.

As for Leona, she has indeed got a good voice but because of her management, the record company and the "team" around her, everything she releases will be formulaic (has been to date) and it's far too samey samey for me. As alrightmate says, everyone around her will be playing it safe and saying things like "oh yeah, let's release another power ballad - what's that Leona? You've written an introspective song? Nah, don't think that'll sell - but XYZ has written a great track - sounds like "all the man that I need" or something else that Whitney would have done, have a go at that."

Leona has got a good voice and she may co-write songs but unfortunately, it seems she's on a path to releasing stuff that has no orginality at all. "Bleeding Love" was a hummable track granted but did it really bring anything new to pop music? No - it sounded like one of the many power ballads out in 1990. These big shots in the music business are stuck in the 90s and stick to what worked then but just change the faces. Ok, there will always be a market for that type of music BUT DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!


I don't think Leona has any charisma onstage or offstage either, which doesn't endear her to me at all.

She might have been if they were good enough.

Maybe so.

The Artic Monkeys are the most formularic band around, poor mans oasis who were themselves a poor mans beatles.

No originality whatsoever and no vocal talent as a compensator.

I Like Leona Lewis, I think that her record has done some great things for the music industry over the last year and she will continue to be successful which is a good thing for British music. However I also agree that she doesn't really have a great stage presence or charisma but she's still finding her feet in this industry so give her time and I'm sure she'll improve.

LOL! For a Leona fan to say something like that does you no favours at all. Love him or loathe him, Alex Turner, based on purely musical talent, is in an entirely different stratosphere compared to Ms Lewis.

PS It's Arctic Monkeys as well. Add a c and deduct a THE And formulaic if we are getting really picky.

Talent is something that ordinary people don't have and want to experience from those that do.

Leona is one of the worlds best female voices and people want to listen to it. That's why she went global almost instantly.

That's talent, something that this Jealous non-entity will never have.

Yes the charts are saturated with pop music following the Arctic Monkeys musical template aren't they?
All those acts who won Brit awards all following a formula used by the Arctic Monkeys.
Take That and Arctic Monkeys, I couldn't tell the difference.

The Arctic Monkeys are nothing like Oasis whatsoever, and how many bands were doing similar music to Oasis anyway?

Alex Turner jealous of Leona Lewis? I very much doubt it. What does he have to be jealous about?

And yet again it comes down to a musical act who is perceived to have not sold as many records as Leona Lewis being undermined as simply a 'nobody'.
Are record sales and popularity polls all that matter to people here?

What is this on these Leona Lewis threads? It always ends up with people resorting to accusing people of being jealous, or it's 'Look, she's got high record sales and tops popularity polls', or somebody is a 'nobody' if they haven't sold as many records as Miss Lewis, whenever the subject of her actual music is being discussed.

EVERY TIME, EVERY THREAD.....'Look at the record sales, it means that she must be talented or nobody would buy the records'. It's as though people have that as a cut and paste ready answer to use. It's every time I read these threads, and I'm not exaggerating.
Usually when I see threads with people liking other music, they usually spend the time discussing the actual merits of their favourite act's music. Even Kate Nash fans are capable of doing that.

The Reverend is right