Let's Duet

For the last couple of weeks I have repeatedly seen a commercial for a new album by Lionel Richie which was released on Monday. Actually, "new" is probably the wrong term for this situation. You see, while the album has never been released before, it doesn't actually consist of any new songs. Instead this record is made up of Richie singing all his old songs as duets with country stars. This is obviously not a new trick, as crooners as far back as Frank Sinatra have been pulling a similar stunt for a years now. For the time being we will ignore the question of whether or not Lionel Richie has strong enough credentials to try and pull of a move out of Frank Sinatra's playbook (short answer: nope). No, what kind of bothers me with this situation is how Richie is attempting to cram his way in to an entirely new music market with a minimal amount of effort put out. I'm sure that there will be plenty of country fans who will give the music a try, but for the rest of us it is kind of an insult. Country fans don't live in a vacuum - they will have heard these songs before and to assume they will buy the album just because you sang along with some big country stars is making a rather large presumption.

Of course, Lionel Richie is hardly the first person to try and resurrect a fading music career by adding a slide guitar to the background and calling it country music. Actually, this is a tried and true move for the music industry, which is why every one from Jessica Simpson to Jewel and Darius Rucker have tried to elbow their way back onto the radio by releasing a pop/country album which are always a lot more pop than anything else. It is also why most actors and actresses who are trying their hand at music for the first time often start out by putting out a country album - they assume a country album is a very simple formula: you find a few songs about  breaking up, another about drinking 'til dawn, add in a few lines about Jesus and you've got yourself a country album. (I'm not saying these people are right, but I'm also not saying they're wrong.) The point is to a lot of people, country music is just a music career set to the 'easy' setting. Plus, it probably doesn't help that most country artists don't write their own material, so if you have enough money banked away you can just pay someone else to write the music for you, making country the musical equivalent of a hack comedian who has other people write their jokes for them.

There is also a lot less pressure when you release a country album. You see, unless you are talking about the biggest artists, country albums don't usually sell as many units as the straight-up pop or rock stuff. By categorizing the music as country these one-famous artists can more easily explain lower sales figures. If they released a pop album that only sold 500,000 copies it would be seen as a flop. But if you move 500,000 country albums it is a moderate success. It is the same way cable TV programs get away with numbers which would get them cancelled on a major network and say it is for the art. I'll give you a recent example: "Mad Men", which normally averages about 2 million viewers, just debuted their 5th season with 3.5 million viewers. While that is great for AMC, on a major network where shows which get 3.5 million viewers every week are seen as a failure, it would get you cancelled. [Sidebar: what this means, Internet, is shut the hell up with the "Mad Men" frenzy. In a country of 300 million people, your show is watched by a little over 1% of the people. (Occupy "Mad Men"?) Stop making me feel like I'm the weird one for not watching this damn show already.]

In some respect I should give Lionel Richie credit, because at least he attempted for freshen up his personal catalog. Say what you want about a duets album, but at least he didn't pump out a boring "Greatest Hits" album, which is just all the songs you already own in one place. Sure, that may be more convenient, but you still don't feel like you have gotten your money's worth. On top of that, Richie did get some big names from country music to help him out (probably because they are the only country artists he has ever heard of, but still...). So, yes, he did more than the minimum, which is frankly more than I expect from musicians these days. Also, it should be noted that this was not his first foray into country music, as he wrote the song "Lady" for Kenny Rogers, which ended up being a huge hit. But, even with that slight amount of history in the genre, I still think the better idea would have been to get artists from a wide range of musical genres, because it doesn't give off the same appearance of trying to pull one over on the fans of just one kind of music. He had just better make sure the album doesn't suck, or else he will have no question who those people asking for a refund are looking for.