What I'm trying to say is, I was spoiled for choice on Monday. Literally. There were at least three good TV shows worth watching. All pretty much around the same time - which sucked. Because I couldn't watch all at the same time.
It's no secret that I prefer documentaries over anything else on TV. If it's a music related documentary; even better!
So on Vuzu, there was a "documentary" on R. Kelly's Love Letter album. Basically it was him explaining the ideas behind the song titles, the album conceptualisation, the track selection, the writing process behind every song on the album. Pretty riveting stuff by all accounts. Good stuff.
While on MTVBase, they had a "day-in-the-life" type of thing on Trey Songz. Where they followed him around for some reason.
Needless to say, I chose to watch the R. Kelly special over the Trey Songz one. Simply because I saw that the Trey Songz one had multiple repeats coming up some time during this week. Today at 16:50, to be specific.And on National Geographic, they had a behind-the-scenes look at the manufacturing of the latest Porsche. That I didn't watch. Though I really wanted to, just out of curiosity. I'm not much of a Porsche fan. Yeah. So... back to the music.
While switching between the two music specials (in-between ad-breaks obviously) I started thinking about something. About how little we know about our own local music artists. No one really knows the struggles they've gone through. What they're working on now. What actually goes into creating an album, or preparing for a performance, or running from pillar-to-post for interviews or anything along those lines.
Why is that? Who's to blame. Do we blame the artist managers and the artists themselves for not giving their fans a sneak peek behind the music?
I don't think such investments are made into our music industry. The only time you see the artist promote an album is months after it's been created and they're all cleaned up and smiling on TV behind dark shades talking about how their album caters for everyone. And how it's featured so-and-so from where and where. Talking about who they worked with and all that!
Imagine if the artists put out a video, even if it's on YouTube or Vimeo, of themselves actually working with so-and-so and making the music. Imagine the anticipation from the fans. Imagine the hype the video will create around the release of the album. Even if it's a staged "leak" of the footage, pictures, audio, or whatever.
I have R. Kelly's Love Letter album, and I can tell you one thing for sure, after watching those 30 minutes of TV, I felt I had a better understanding of the direction he was aiming for in that album. The "back to the old-school" element behind it. Only afterwards did I understand why there was a Michael Jackson-like song on the album - he wrote the song for MJ before his passing. That explains why I always skip that song.
Anyway. Why is it that all we get from local artists is a two minute interview about an up-coming album?
The two examples mentioned above aren't the only ones I've seen. There's a Nicki Minaj documentary that's always playing on MTV, there's a Drake one as well. Not to mention the famous "The Diary of..." series by MTV.
Why is MTV Base, which claims to be interested in promoting Africa to the world, not investing their resources into our own artists?
Why is it that so few of our local artists have websites or even bother interacting beyond the "I'll be performing at...." updates on Facebook and Twitter? Why not embrace the internet and completely abuse it as a communication tool to the fans?
I stumbled on behind the scenes pics of Kanye and Jay-Z's collaboration album pics the other day. Why aren't South Africans doing this?
Wake up! Give us a peek of what you get up to when there's no make-up artists involved. When there's no limited time to plug your album!Shout-out to http://www.themakingof.co.za/ for being the local version of True Hollywood Story.
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