REVOLVER:NOT CONTENT with taking up permanent residence in both the album and singles charts worldwide, female artists are now taking all the best-ever sales records away from the boys. No long-standing sales award is out of a woman's reach as we are witnessing not just a reversal in the usual fortunes of female musicians but, these days, a complete domination of the entire popular music genre.
Just last year we had Taylor Swift (all of 20 at the time) rewriting the history books when she shifted one million copies in the US alone of her new album within the first week of release. She didn't just break the record, she smashed it to pieces and danced on it. In that same week at the end of October, Swift outsold the whole US album top 62 put together. And all this at a time when the whole world is telling us that music sales are in terminal decline and no one really buys albums anymore. One can only imagine how many copies of Swift's Speak Nowwere illegally downloaded in the same week she sold a million.
A few months later, Adele matched The Beatles’ old 1964 record of having two singles and two albums in the top five at the same time. Except Adele has managed to keep the singles and albums in the top five for months, whereas even The Beatles had to bow out after a week or two.
This week, another record – one which it was generally presumed would never be matched or broken – fell to, you've guessed it, a female artist. When Michael Jackson released Badin 1987 he became the first artist to get a remarkable five singles from one album to the US number one slot.
Nobody thought there would be another album capable of such of a feat but Katy Perry has just matched Jackson's record by having five singles from her current Teenage Dreamgo to number one in the US. Furthermore, Perry and her label have advanced plans for two more singles off Teenage Dreamwhich, if both go to number one, would put her into an untouchable category.
All of this – in the current, sluggish record-buying market – is quite insane and flies in the face of the received wisdom that the glory days of record sales are gone forever. Judging by what Taylor Swift, Adele and Katy Perry are currently doing to the record books these are the glory days of record sales. The spend, though, is far more concentrated than it was in the pre-Napster days and is congregating around just a handful of acts – all of them female. Where’s David Icke when you need him?
But – there’s always a but – when The Beatles or Michael Jackson broke a global sales record it was really not that surprising. Both acts were truly exceptional – imbued with once-in-a-generation genius and as feted today (if not more so) as they were when they were active.
Leaving Adele aside (because she doesn't really suit my argument), you cannot by any stretch of a fevered imagination make the case that Taylor Swift and Katy Perry are recording artists who will still be bought and talked about decades after they cease releasing. You could go even further and say that their record-breaking albums Speak Nowand Teenage Dreamdon't possess any real artistic merit.
That doesn’t detract from what Swift and Perry have achieved (and it’s truly remarkable) but one would have hoped that when records set by The Beatles and Michael Jackson did fall, they’d be broken by people other than a sugary country-pop artist and a slightly-grown-up-girl-band-sounding singer.
What is going on at the moment makes every single music panel discussion, seminar, talk, essay, and piece of analysis of last few years redundant, irrelevant, wrong and stupid. I’m with William Goldman: nobody knows anything.
Mixedbag
* The ‘Best Irish Song Title of All Time’ gong belongs to Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly for his The Craic We Had The Day We Died For Ireland. Ding Dong is live and dangerous tonight (August 26th) at KCR House, Kimmage, Dublin.
* Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s dad, can’t register the Amy Winehouse Foundation (a charity to help people with addiction problems) because a cyber squatter is sitting on the name.
