ANY time i hear the word fame i think of this.

You know....that actually was a good film and series....at least for the first season.




Fame
I'm gonna live forever
I'm gonna learn how to fly
High

I don't see how you're gonna be a famous musician and still be non-commercial. As soon as you offer your product for sale, you're commercial. You might not have commercial success as primary objective, but that's not the point. Unless you offer your product for free, you're commercial.

From an economical viewpoint, you're absolutely correct. However, and I can't speak for everyone, I'm referring to the commercial sound and the commercial creation of music and/or artists when I say 'commercial'.

The term commercial always includes an economical viewpoint.
One could label the idea or intention behind a certain artist, sound or genre commercial. But at a certain point, any musician has commercial intentions. After all, they need to make a living. Very few can actually afford to care less about commercial success. And even out of those few who could care less, hardly anyone does.

i can't believe i'm going to side with TR on this one.

i know more than a few local acts who 'have no intentions' of being commercial. yet they still hole up in their rehearsal spots, write their songs that don't deviate more from their influences than what their influences deviate from the perceived mainstream, practice their sets, then play their little shows around town, so they can in turn record an ep or demo.

in essence they just want to say they have all the same stuff as a commercial star on a much smaller scale while pretending they didn't just pay for the whole thing out of their pocket. all the while complaining about the sad state of
mainstream music.

ANYONE who is composing music to be reproduced is making an attempt to generate some level of commercial success, whether or not it's just impressing the genero-punks who just finished high school at their local dives, the 'intellectual' drunks from their local campus, or if it's an attempt to garner a little national recognition, it all boils down to the same - look i made an aural connect the dot picture now jerk off my fucking ego.

if you want to make a living GET A FUCKING JOB. if you're going to try to make a living playing music then GET A FUCKING SONG ON THE RADIO AND SHUT YOUR FUCKING FACE ABOUT YOUR GODDAMNED IDEALS.

No doubt any professional musician wants success, especially if it's his only means of work. Therefore, yes, that's economical. However, the term has also come to emcompass a specific kind of music, and a specific sound. This is well evidenced in the idea of selling out. Being commercial refers to making accessible music, easy on the ears, common, and ultimately Top 40/radio-friendly material to satisfy a market and to make money while at it.

I would say that although Led Zeppelin was highly successful in its day and continues to be well received and credited, it was not a commercial band.

Another example would be J.B. Lenoir. He was playing his style of music in an era when that style was in no way extremely popular. He was a professional though and he made his living from playing music. That was his economical connection to music - his job. His music though was by no means commercial.

Howlin' Wolf made perhaps my favourite album of the electric era in 1962 (the "Rocking Chair Album"), and it did nothing on any chart. The music is outstanding, the album endures, and there's nothing commercial about it in any way whatsoever.

If J.B. Lenoir and Howlin' Wolf wanted to be commercial, Lenoir would've dropped his horn section and zebra suits and The Wolf wouldn't have sung "we gonna pitch a wang dang doodle."

I went to the HOF once sometime around 2002, and the first thing I saw once in the main exhibit???

A section of on stage costumes wore by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Backstreet boys, n sync, etc

Enough Said

As I said before when he stops with the T-R bit every 300 posts....he will drop a post which shows there is a whole lot going on in that Gray Matter. Since his most recent return....he's just doing it a lot more often and finding it harder to stay in full T-R mode for long stretches.

@Satchmo: It's GREY not GRAY, just as it is T/R not T-R.

@Zolaman: How would you define or describe that specific sound? That sound/style/image constantly changes. For instance in 1987 Hysteria was the most anticipated and also best selling rock album, ten years later nobody would've cared for nor bought the same release. We really needn't discuss Britney, X-Tina nor Madonna (who is GREAT btw). These are acts who barely write anything themselves, who were for the most part created by certain major labels with the sole idea behind it being a financial profit or commercial success. And even they will have to change should the mainstream require it.
It gets difficult with a band like Kiss. They always wanted to make money off their music, the more the better. But they still did all their stuff by themselves, and you can't argue that they've always loved recording and performing their music. I'm not sure if commercial success was their main objective, at least after Alive I.
And as far as Led Zeppelin goes, Jimmy Page somewhere said that he seriously anticipated his band's commercial success, even at that level.

To me you can isolate and label a certain style of music commercial only in a musical era in which that particular style is popular.