
SouthSIDE Glen
independentrecording.net
As usual, zzed, that was a excellent post making some excellent points to which I cannot disagree, really.This, I fear, is what is happeinng here with 'producer'. On one level, I don't really care what people call themselves, but on the other, I am concerned that a long-held and stable concept of 'producer' is being denatured.
Maybe it's just me, maybe I have a bias here that I haven't pinned down yet, but it still seems to me that this producer thing is different. Yeah, it's language evolution in progress; I'm all over that idea. But there is a direct conflict here. It's not as though "producer" is being co-opted by another unrelated field - say sewing or cricket playing - but rather an arbitrary adoption of a second and unrelated definition of the same word being used in the same manner in the same field.
Both definitions are job titles within the field of music production, but they define entirely different jobs. (Sure, one can rationalize how piecing together parts of ther songs into the quiltwork of a new song is "producing", but come on, Mike, in your heart of hearts you have a deep understanding that knows that is not really what being a producer is all about, and that it's an entirely different thing altogether.) If this were politics, it would be like waking up one morning to find out that the title "state senator" now also applies to congressional aids. It just doesn't work.
Also, linguistic evolution also implies that the "old" definition of producer is dying out or becoming invalid. This is not the case; the real title of "producer" is still as current, valid and viable as it was 20 years or 50 years ago. Actual producers are not a dying breed, and in fact in today's world of manufactured Top40 performance acts can be called as important as ever.
Let's face facts, here. The new definition of producer is a similar type of animal as the new definition of mastering. It's a result of ignorance on the part of a large wave of laypeople entering the field without doing their proper homework first. It's an instance of a misunderstanding on their part of just what the word meant and they adopted their own meaning to suit their erroneous beliefs. So now, all of a sudden, "mastering" allegedly means fixing bad mixes and then ruining them again, and "producing" is supposed to mean creating new music from pieces of old music.
Besides the problem of confusion of job titles already discussed, we now have a problem where the language starts changing the reality in a derogatory way. Most of us know the dangers of the change in view of the mastering process, and the producer thing now means that real, honest to goodness music producers have to explain and defend themselves in order to explain that they are legitimate producers and not a joke.
G.