Two million songs. Zero ads. Whoo-hoo! Thus was I — a streaming neophyte who still listens to cassettes on a Sony Sports Walkman — seduced by the power of Amazon Prime Music and the promise of MP3s by the multi-millions. But here’s the rub (one of them). While I’ve accumulated 800-plus of my favorite tunes to date, I’m missing three to four hundred I’d awfully like to have thanks to Prime’s yawning catalogue gaps. No Led Zeppelin! About one-tenth of Elton John’s and Michael Jackson’s prodigious outputs. Stingy portions of Motown, ’70s pop-soul and the best work by influential singer-songwriters such as Nanci Griffith, Bruce Cockburn, Alison Krauss and Billy Bragg. One freakin’ song by George Harrison!
These are a few examples relevant to my listening life. You have your own, and odds are many of your faves aren’t there, either.
In essence, Prime Music comes off as a what-the-heck afterthought to Amazon Prime’s core shipping and streaming-video services. The whole package costs $99 plus tax per year, and the music portion is actually pretty perfect for a streaming newbie who hates ads. (To be fair, Amazon does offer Music Unlimited, which covers most of Prime Music’s gaps, for more moolah. However, factored per annum, the additional monthly fee just about doubles the cost of Prime.)
Amid Prime Music’s exclusionist horrors, there is also humor. To wit, the Vitamin String Quartet, which pops up on just about any search for a specific artist or song. The VSQ is one of scores of Prime “tribute” acts that cover songs by legitimate artists. Other such “bands” include (I chuckle as I type) the Yoga Pop Ups, the Best Saxophone Tribute Orchestra, the Relaxing Instrumental Jazz Ensemble, the Avenged Sevenfold Piano Tribute Performers (all Avenged Sevenfold, all the time) and – my personal fave – the Love Songs & Romantic Standards Ensemble.
Together, these bozos probably make up 1.5 million of Prime Music’s two-million song collection, and I’m not even sure I’m exaggerating. Who are these “musicians,” when do they sleep and, most critical, have they no shame? I originally assumed they were not people at all, but robots churning out synthetic versions of Green Day and gangsta rap, but this is not so – at least not in the case of the Vitamin String Quartet.
Founded in 1999, the VSQ is a living, breathing cooperative of rotating L.A. studio musicians who have released more than 50 (!) albums full of classical-muzak renditions of popular songs. They have their own Web site. Their “interpretations” have been featured on TV shows such as Modern Family, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries and So You Think You Can Dance. They’ve made the Billboard charts. They’ve performed at South by Southwest! What the hell?!?
VSQ’s one-note gimmick might have been clever for, oh, about five minutes in 1999, but they’re now pushing two decades of completely missing the point. The group’s take on, say, Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg’s “F*** With Dre Day (and Everybody’s Celebratin’)” lacks what made this particular track singular in the first place — namely, Dre’s perilous worldview. It’s a little difficult for a violin or cello to capture the menace behind lines such as “Used to be my homie, used to be my ace/Now I wanna slap the taste out ya mouth.” In the end, VSQ’s oeuvre is just edgy elevator music.
The group’s more prosaic but no less aggravating crime is clogging up searches on Amazon and Spotify. I curse them and their future progeny daily. However, I do give them props for cojones of steel and eclectic musical tastes. A recent search using the phrase “tribute to” (I’m a sucker for cover songs, at least those that aim for something beyond aesthetic artifice) turned up equally unlikely stabs at Nirvana’s “Rape Me,” Linkin Park’s “Numb,” Paramore’s “crushcrushcrush,” Lamb of God’s “Laid to Rest,” Young the Giant’s “Cough Syrup,” Radiohead’s “Airbag,” Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” (okay, maybe), Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” The Pixies’ “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” The Smiths’ “This Charming Man,” CeeLo Green’s ”F*** You” and (I’m chuckling again) the title theme from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
On the upside, my search also turned up actual tributes to reggae/rocksteady, glam rock, Alejandro Escoveda, Nirvana, Edith Piaf, Love and Rockets, Bessie Smith, James Brown, and Doc Watson, as well as terrific tips of the hat to The Ramones (by Shonen Knife), Nina Simone (Lauryn Hill), the Stones (a galaxy of alt-country stars) and Son House (Rory Block).
But the real payoff for my $99 plus tax and the time-suck of slogging through musical riffraff has been entree to new-to-me acts including Reckless Kelly, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Rosie Thomas, Máiréad Carlin, The Civil Wars, Josh Ritter, Samantha Fish, Hawthorne Heights, Balsam Range, Will Hoge, Wade Bowen, Caitlyn Smith, and 5 Chinese Brothers.
LINKEDIN JANUARY 25, 2018