From left: Kacey Musgraves, George Michael, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Pink Floyd's"Wish You Were Here" album cover and P!nk.
For as long as the music industry has existed, artists have been writing, recording and performing songs about the business that birthed them. Some of them are explicitly biographical, some of them written more in abstract. Some of them offer direct commentary, some of them just present the facts and lets the listener come to their own conclusions.
And as a staff of writers and editors who spend our lives covering all the happenings of the music industry, we have to admit that these songs hold a somewhat special place in our hearts . We might not share the exact experiences of the artists themselves — sometimes we may even come from the exact other side of their experience — but we’ve seen enough of the business to at least know and understand what they’re talking about, and often to be able to lend a sympathetic ear to their plight.
Most Telling Lyric: “Hell’s gonna freeze over/ Hotel California/ Don’t say I didn’t warn ya/ Even Don Henley’s got to bend over” —Chappell Roan’s explosive popularity didn’t occur overnight; it was a decade in the making – and not one without adversity. Her talent was indisputable, but as a teen starting out in the music business, she wasn’t receiving immediate pop star-level success, which ultimately led to her first major label, Atlantic Records, dropping her.
If you followed Chance the Rapper’s monumental rise in the mid-2010s in any capacity, it would have been hard to miss his proud status as an independent artist — something he wastes little time touting in what was thento date as a lead artist, also enlisting 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne for some extra muscle against those persistent, pesky major labels.