Tom Ardolino Presents: The Makers of Smooth Music

Various Artists (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD
• ASIN: B000Q44V8M
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #505,474 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I've been thinking about the way smooth music goes., June 26, 2007

By 

Johnny Heering "trivia buff" (Bethel, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tom Ardolino Presents: The Makers of Smooth Music (Audio CD)

The full title of this CD is "Tom Ardolino Presents: The Makers of Smooth Music (MSR Madness Vol. 2)". MSR Madness Vol. 1 was titled "The Beat of the Traps" and was released on vinyl only. But fear not, 12 of the 16 tracks from The Beat of the Traps are included here, with the remaining 4 tracks included on the MSR Madness Vol. 3 CD. So, what the heck does MSR Madness mean anyway? Well, MSR Records was the leading producer of song-poem records. Okay, so what are song-poems? They are lyrics which have been set to music for a fee. Typically, the service was promoted through small display ads in popular magazines, comic books, tabloids, men's adventure journals and similar publications with a headline reading (essentially) Send in Your Poems - Songwriters Make Thousands of Dollars - Free Evaluation. The term lyrics was avoided because it was assumed potential customers would not understand what the term meant. People who sent their poetry usually received notice by mail that their work was worthy of recording by professional musicians, along with a proposal to do so in exchange for a fee. The melodies were either improvised or recycled and musicians often recorded dozens of songs per recording session using minimal resources, often in one take. The recordings were then duplicated on 45 RPM vinyl singles or compilation LPs with dozens of other songs by amateur lyric writers. Copies were sent to the customer. Promises that they would also be sent to radio stations or music industry executives were rarely if ever kept -- partly because the recordings would not have been taken seriously by professionals. The practice played off the intense desire of unsophisticated people to realize their ambitions of making money from writing popular songs. In the 1990s, some record collectors "rediscovered" these recordings. The main attraction of them is how kooky some of them are. Some these songs have really bizarre lyrics and off-kilter performances. If you enjoy hearing oddball music, you'll probably get a kick out of this CD.