“Hold the line” is what you tell someone on the phone if you want to put them on hold while you’re taking another call.
Hold the Line is Toto’s best song. Have you not heard of Africa? Duh. Weezer ruined Africa in my mind (they also made a much inferior Everybody Wants to Rule the World). It goes down the toilet with every song by Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift whose songs play on the radio so often that I’m going the route of Gov’t conspiracy to mind control the herd.
Hold the line starts with that one kid in elementary school who was taking piano lessons. His sense of pizzazz is unmistakable. The lead singer’s style is radical as well with the Pinocchio vest and Oates mustache (Oates may have copied him). The amount of people in this band is astonishing. 2 keyboard players and a dude with a double bass? The drummer hardly gets shown until the very end. Finally, the level of production for this video was a video camera and a tripod. Totally bitchin’ video.
What struck me as I drove my 5 minute commute today while this song was playing was the attention to detail. I know nothing about music, but this group makes a lot of sound and when I was hearing the drum beat, I started thinking, “if that drum beat were a different sound, would the song still be as popular? I imagine it would, but who is in charge of the final compistion? Do the producers say, “this is what we want” or is the band saying, “this sounds the best.” How important are those small details?
I’d argue very. The older I get, the more I care about small, minor details. I reiterated this after spending some time in a video studio where we shot 6 videos that ranged from 1-2 minutes. It took 8 hours to produce. Every scene and every detail were exactly the way the producer wanted to shoot. A scene that would be on screen for 2 seconds could take 5 minutes. I’m sure the Toto guys would agree.
This is why I brought the point about the manager. Today I read that Ed Sheeran was going to break U2’s all time tour revenue. He did it by charging cheaper ticket prices and playing more often. His manager said that business consultants are saying that they could get 10% more from customers and he sincerely believed that would effect the tour negatively. Refreshing. Still a doofus though.
The devil is in the details. Bedazzled wasn’t that great of a movie but that Elizabeth Hurley scene was iconic.
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