How Barry Manilow caused the music industry to try and ban synths
Is there a single bloody controversy in the music industry that Barry Manilow isn’t at the centre of? I’m sick to death of writing about this song-bird-faced man and his bedevilling ways. When he sang ‘I Can’t Smile Without You’, it would seem that the silken iconoclast was actually talking about aggro.
Perhaps the most meaningful and prescient controversy that Manilow has courted comes down to synthesisers. You see, music has always had a troubled relationship with technology. Hell, in the 1940s, musicians even went on strike against it, and one of the central antagonists they were battling was the jukebox.
Now, these retro repositories might be seen as the most harmless and acceptable device you can ever find in a boozer, but back in the 1940s, it was putting musicians out of nightly work. These days, we barely think about the fact that until very recently, in relative terms, the only way to hear music at all was in a live capacity. Thus, if a bar wanted music, it had to pay someone to play it.
Likewise, if Manilow wanted a string arrangement to elevate his dulcet vocal chords, warmed by a wooled turtle neck that even the sheep itself would be proud to have been part of, then he would have to hire an orchestra to come on tour with him. Naturally, that dips into the profits as there are a slew of extra mouths to feed on the roster.
So, in 1982, Manilow opted to go with an economised solution. Rather than take a whole orchestra, he’d simply condense them down to the sound of two synthesisers and reduce his outgoings dramatically. But a saving for Manilow meant many hardships ahead for musicians he had previously employed. Moreover, he set a dangerous precedence that had been lingering in the offing for years. Synths essentially automated live music, replacing humans with increasingly cheap machines. If this sweet man was capable of such evil, then who wouldn’t follow?
So, prompted by Manilow’s well-documented streamlining, the Musician’s Union decided to take a stance. On the birthday of that dastardly synth pioneer Robert Moog, they decided to push towards outlawing this new musical contraption. All synth players were banned from the union, and they hoped to lobby against the instrument.
Obviously, they failed in this motion, and the 1980s became the most synth-heavy decade in history. While synth players were banned from the Union until 1997, this did little to curtail the rise. In fact, in a sort of anti-Luddite futurist storm, the facsimile of synthesised sounds became an artistic tenet of the era—musicians used the technology not to mimic a handful of violins with just a few keys but rather to enact some ‘Computer Love’, so to speak. At the heart of this radical revolution stood one gorgeous man, Mr Manilow, forever the winking eye of culture’s storm.
