Lounge music
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lounge music refers to music played in the lounges and bars of hotels and casinos, or at standalone piano bars. Generally, the performers include a singer and one or two other musicians. The performers play or cover songs composed by others, especially pop standards, many deriving from the days of Tin Pan Alley.
The term can also refer to laid-back electronic music, also named downtempo, because of the reputation of lounge music as low-key background music.
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[edit] Overview
While the performers are often minimally paid, many people who have attempted a musical career start as lounge musicians. For example, the Beatles performed first as a lounge act at a bar in Hamburg, Germany. Although he claims not to have worked for very long, Billy Joel worked as a lounge musician and penned the song "Piano Man" about his experience.
Lounge music has enjoyed brief resurgences in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, led by deliberately ironic figures such as Buster Poindexter and Jaymz Bee. Richard Cheese's Lounge Against The Machine have added to this resurgence by covering metal music, punk rock, and other alternative rock hits in the style of lounge music. Other artists have taken lounge music to new heights by recombining rock with pop, such as Jon Brion and the surrounding regulars of Café Largo.
[edit] Golden Age of Lounge Music / Retrospective use of Lounge conception
Lounge music can also specifically refer to a form of "hip" (not "hip-hop") generally easy listening music that was popular during the 50's and 60's, yet distinct from what was "pop rock" of that era. This is considered to be the golden age of lounge music. At this time, while pop rock music was more popular with younger folks, lounge music was more popular with older folks. Typically, teenagers of the time would listen to pop rock, while their older siblings or parents would listen to lounge. However, the phrase lounge does not appear in textual documentation of the period, such as Billboard magazine or long playing album covers.
While some of the lounge music during this period was truly slow, easy listening, a lot of the music was uptempo, with the distinction being sometimes blurred. While pop music was generally country, blues, or rock and roll, lounge music was anything that wasn't strictly of thoses genre (or a mix of them), but which still was meant for popular consumption (and indeed, was popular with most folks who weren't interested in pop music.)
One interesting subgenre of lounge music was swinging music, which was nothing more than a schmaltzy continuation of the swing jazz era of the 1930's and 40's, but with more of an emphasis on the vocalist. The legendary Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., along with similar artists such as Jackie Gleason, Wayne Newton, Louis Prima and Sam Butera, are a prime example of this subgenre. Such artists performed mainly at featured lounges in Las Vegas casinos.
A good deal of lounge music was pure instrumental (i.e., no main vocal part, although there could be minor vocal parts.) Sometimes, this music would be theme music from movies or TV shows, although such music could be produced independently from other entertainment productions. These instrumentals could be produced with an orchestral arrangement, or from an arrangement of instruments very similar to that found in jazz, or even rock and roll such as the Hammond Organ or Electric Guitar.
Another subset of lounge music was exotica, showcasing music that was popular outside the USA, such as various Latin genres (e.g., Bossa Nova, Cha-Cha-Cha, Mambo), Polynesian, French, etc. Such music could have some instruments exaggerated (e.g., a Polynesian song might have an exotic percussion arrangement using bongos, and vocalists imitating wild animals.) Many of these recordings were portrayed as originating in exotic foreign lands, but in truth were recorded in Hollywood recording studios by veteran session musicians. One of the exotica subgenres could be called space age pop music, which attempted to give the feeling of zooming into outer space, which is an activity that had high public interest at the time (see space exploration.) (Here, consult the oeuvre of Esquivel.)
[edit] Retrospective use of Lounge conception
When much of this music was originally made, particularly the instrumental music of Les Baxter or Arthur Lyman, the word lounge was not used. (These performers specialized in the exotic theme, as mentioned in the previous paragraph.) "Lounge" emerged in the late 1980s as a label of endearment by young adults whose parents had played such music in the 1960s. A label used for the instrumental music of this genre in the 1950s or 1960s was exotica. Vocal music was simply labeled pop, which of course included artists ranging from Pat Boone to the Everly Brothers.
In the early 1990s a lounge revival lead by groups like Love Jones, The Coctails and Combustible Edison was a direct contradiction to the Grunge music that dominated the period. These groups wore suits and played music inspired by earlier works by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Louis Prima, and many others.
[edit] Popular culture
Lounge music and musicians are a popular theme in popular culture, as already mentioned in the overview. One famous such depiction is in the film The Fabulous Baker Boys, which portrays a lounge act. The film Swingers was set in the "Lounge Nation" scene in Los Angeles and the Soundtrack to Swingers featured some newer acts like Love Jones, Joey Altruda and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy as well as legendary performers like Dean Martin, Louis Jordan and Tony Bennett.
In the movie The Blues Brothers, most of the members of the band performed as members of the lounge group "Murph and the Magictones" while Jake Blues was in prison.
Comedians have long lampooned lounge acts or lounge singers. The "Vegas Lounge Singer" was lampooned famously by Andy Kaufman as Tony Clifton. Bill Murray portrayed a particularly bad 1970s lounge singer on Saturday Night Live, best known for providing his own lyrics to the John Williams theme from Star Wars, and an over-the-top version of the Morris Albert hit "Feelings". Later, Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer portrayed a goofy married duo of lounge-style musicians, but in incongruous venues such as high school dances. British comedians Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones appeared as a cheesy keyboard and bass duo during the end credits of one series of their long-running sketch show.
The Circle Jerks perform as a very poor lounge act in the 1984 cult film, Repo Man directed by Alex Cox.
Rapper Eminem's album, The Slim Shady LP, featured a track called 'Lounge', in which a group of people sing a Lounge version of the next song, 'My Fault'.
Musician Richard Cheese and his band Lounge Against the Machine have achieved a cult following by playing comedic lounge covers of popular Rock, Metal, and Rap songs, particularly ones with lyrics containing great amounts of profanity. He is most famous for his lounge cover of Disturbed's Down With The Sickness.
