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Should Singers Write Their Own Material?
Published by L. Michael Gipson on Monday, December 14, 2009 at 11:55 am.
The Jury Finds You...Guilty!
As a critic, I often hear a complaint that there aren’t enough good new R&B songs. We recently discussed that the covers craze is partially to blame. Old head songwriters not turning over the reins are another issue. But, if singers have anyone to blame for not being able to find a great song it may be themselves.
Sometime in the 90s, back when CDs still made money, artists figured out that the real money was in publishing, not in performing, at least not in a recording studio. Next thing you know every singer is a hyphenated songwriter and suddenly Holland Dozier Holland, Whitfield and Strong, Gambel and Huff, Creed and Bell, and Porter and Hayes, only not so much.
Not that a pesky little thing like songwriting talent mattered. Write a sophomore love poem, a rant against love, or describe a sweaty body part grinding on the dance floor or in the bedroom and wallah, a hit!
The label wasn’t complaining and the newly hyphened snger-songwriter wasn’t complaining as long as that extra publishing check was coming in, it didn’t matter that the music was trendy but not timeless, and that too many self-penned artists could only take their own careers so far by their own limited pens (fill in the blank here).
Imagine if Aretha or Whitney only wrote their own material? Everyone isn’t Stevie Wonder or Earth Wind and Fire. Even Marvin’s most classic 70s moments have Leon Ware’s fingerprints all over them. Even the greats needed great songs to sing, and usually they’re not their own. The Tempts were consistent flops before Smokie Robinson penned “The Way You Do The Thing You Do” and it wasn’t because the brothers couldn’t sing.
All of this is not to say that the bevy of R&B artists in the ‘90s (and since) have not been able to write. They have written hits, but so far it doesn’t seem that they’ve written classics. Maybe it’s too soon to truly say. But, one tell tale sign is how very little of the material from this era has been covered by today’s new breed artists. The recent Mary covers album is a rare exception. Some cuts like “Crazy” from Gnarls Barkley has managed to be exceptions to this rule. But by and large believing you can do everything well, just because doing everything pays, may have been the undoing of those artists whose careers are stuck in arrested development, just one great song away from becoming a soul legend.
