"featuring"

heya pop pickers


there was a time, look you see, when collaborations between pop stars and other, associated musicians was quite rare. it just so happened that it used to be a matter of excitement and merriment, often as a consequence of the scarce ways in which it happened.

examples of this? the classic would be when David Bowie and Queen delivered Under Pressure, i suppose. other than that, you have that time when Prince and Madonna did a song together, and of course Kylie & Jason too. for a case where it showed just how magical a collaboration could be, it was to be that even when the two most boring musicians on the planet - Sting and Dire Straits - got together for Money For Nothing, it was all awesome, man. and, as a final example, you could say that the coming together of stars for Band Aid in 1984 took the excitement level to the extreme.

today, not so much. i rather foolishly decided to have a look at the top forty for the last week. as i flicked through dull, drab and meaningless song after song, i noticed quite a trend. the overwhelming majority of tracks in the top forty this week have the word "featuring" or "feat." between two, for so desperately the want of a better term, artists credited to the track.

this is snow to the max in the top ten itself......

yep, as you can semi-see above, apparently seven, or if you like 70%, of the current top ten are in fact collaborations between the (ahem) best of what the music world has to offer right now.

the quite depressing thing is that few, if any, of these collaborations feature any great coming together of talent. seriously. most would seem to be using "feat" to represent the fact that they have sampled a song off of one of the others, or more like that they have used a sample which that artist sampled themselves.

this is just as bad as the fact that today the term "r n b" gets used to describe virtually any form of music but the rhythm & blues the term is supposed to reflect.

hey ho, let me go dig out my vinyl and stick with it........



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!