It’s time to say NO to YES: The allure of a hit song is too tempting with technology
When ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ was released by Yes in 1983, it was the band’s one and only ticket to the top of the charts. Sounds great, right?
Well, ironically not so, as despite a number one hit being painted as the key to unlocking a land of sunshine and roses in the eyes of most musicians, it was the one thing that ultimately led to the final downfall of Yes. All the metaphors in the world can be used about the champagne being too sweet or flying too close to the sun, but it was simply the fact that the band weren’t formed to be hit-makers.
It was telling that, in all the tales recounting the process that went into ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’, it seemed to be the record label pushing and pushing the band to the extremest possible level once they realised they had the makings of a top tune on their hands. Unfortunately, once that happens for the first time, the blinkers go on until it happens again.
This had a particularly draining effect on Yes frontman Jon Anderson, who recalled becoming creatively null and void when the band were eventually moving on to new projects. “By the time we got to Big Generator, I was ready to leave because nobody was happy,” he explained, referring to the follow-up album Yes released in 1987.
Anderson added, “We were scrambling to make a hit record, and the record company and management were all they talked about. They’d play records and say, ‘This is a hit record, make something like this.’”
But that was never going to work out well for a group like Yes, formed on the principles of prog rock and all of its weird and wild eccentricities. A chart-topper was a one-off, not the norm.
There was no surprise, in the sense of his complete disdain for the whole commercial process, that the singer soon began to distance himself from the band thereafter.
He hated the whole mainstream machine that he envisioned Yes becoming – a far cry from the mission statement they started out with, as they seemed set to fade into the trenches of the sound of every other rock song out there.
It goes without saying that this was a tragedy for true sonic creativity in all its forms, but the more damning thing is that this isn’t a fateful tale unique to Yes. These events may have unfolded in the early 1980s, but some four decades down the line, it seems less a story of caution than it is the complete convention.
Add the untamable beast of social media to the side of the record label, to use the same setting as Yes’s turn of events, and it’s easy to see how identical situations to these unfold and translate time and time again down the scores of the music industry. Now, TikTok is undeniably the madman behind the wheel – and frankly, it might just be steering music off a cliff.
As much as Yes’s tales of woe were a blight on the band without question, at the very least, they could say they got to number one off the back of a whole song. God, that’s a depressing statement to make, isn’t it? These days, artists are lucky if they get their 15 seconds of fame.
Take any artist from Alex Warren to Lola Young, and by and large, have any of their hit songs become successful on the merit of the songs themselves? Probably not. What’s more likely to have got them there is the soundbite that’s gone viral on TikTok, and although no one will want to admit it, you can bet your bottom dollar that behind closed doors in label offices all over the world, that’s the only thing they’re chasing.
To be clear, this is not an attempt to intentionally bash or degrade either of these artists nor any of the peers in the industry, because at the end of the day, they are simply the unfortunate scapegoats. No one seeks out the life of being a musician purely for their songs to be heard for a maximum of 15 seconds, but this sad state of affairs is purely symptomatic of the world we live in.
There’s also no denying that the audience doesn’t hold some level of culpability within this. As a society, we’ve become so reliant on social media to feed our everyday lives that goldfish snippets of music are the only way to capture the zeitgeist, in the same way that replicating a top-selling number one was worth the same value all those years ago.
Times have annoyingly not changed so much in this sense, whether that’s a comfort that the same issues still exist but packaged differently, or a total indictment. It’s yours to decide. You might think that a TikTok star and a band like Yes hail from completely different worlds, and you would be right, but in seeing how their trajectories lay out, really, everything is much the same as it always will be.
