Jonny Lang - from Wunderkind to What The F**K?
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I am what the music industry might term a "loyal consumer" - when I fixate on an artist, I start buying up their back catalogue and tend to keep buying their latest unless they take a sudden swoon for the worse. Jonny Lang is such an artist. I would hesitate to say his career has an arc, as that would imply that it started low, peaked, then declined again. No, his career trajectory can more aptly be described as going from the high-dive board to the bottom of the toilet bowl. He burst on the scene at the tender age of, what, 14?, playing astonishing blues with his band, the Big Bang. The track attached here (NOT the Carl Perkins ??Matchbox??) comes from his first solo CD ??Lie To Me?? (age 15), which I pretty much love. Ok, the baby duck (me) has imprinted and continues to waddle after him through subsequent releases. But what I am following seems to get smaller and smaller and more unfocused, veering into faux-soul, faux-gospel, anthing-but-blues. And the label seems to try to be selling him as a teeny-bop idol. Each album is worse than the last, and I am going to stop buying them. Oh, I might scan the tracks on iTunes and cherry pick good ones (if there are any) but my loyalty, so poorly rewarded, is dead in the water. A poor parallel would be the career of Moby Grape, who started out fabulous, then quickly declined, but at least they had drugs, insanity and missing members to blame. Jonny has only himself.
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