it never ceases to amaze me (idiot! idiot!) how far into the territories of
judgement people will venture on topics they appear to know little about.
indeed, it would seem a good 60-80 percent of the posts on this list which
deal in some way with the interaction between economics, the music
industry, and popular culture usually involve buckets of naive assumptions
about the Way Things Are, why Things Are The Way They Are, how They got
That Way, and whose interests are being served in the offing...
i won't go into my evolving analysis on the historicity of capitalism, the
last three hundred years of the western world's relationship with
avant-garde and/or subcultural artistic movements, and its ceaseless and
hyperrational dialectic of absorption, exhaustion, and revitalization
because i fear it would either fall on deaf ears or offend too many with
its pretentiousness...i will however say that, as someone who has worked on
both sides of the commercial fence in the american music industry, what
gman speaks rings sharply of truth. make no mistake, it is very, very
difficult to try and cover, promote, support, etc. the types of artists
that excite the passions of the members of this list within the context of
the music industry in its conventional form (including retail stores,
distribution companies, print and broadcast media, etc.) because they evade
and transgress the commercial logic of the american music industry, a logic
which continues to (by and large...minus your orbs, chemical brothers', and
future sound of londons, etc.) serve the interests of just about everyone
except the musicians; a logic whose shape, rhythm, and consistency continue
to be set by very large, very powerful (read: rich) corporations for whom
music and the cultures that produce them are merely varying means to a very
specific, very static end: money. this is not paranoia or conspiracy, this
is simply (and regrettably) fact. i've worked with major record labels,
i've worked with large distributors, i've worked with radio people, i've
worked with rolling stone...these people and the agendas they bring to bear
on the cultural forms from which they profit have very little (if anything
at all) to do with music or the love thereof--their business models demand
it. while they pay lip service to it on the occasions of their
self-congratulatory anniversary issues, the obituaries of the icons that
have served them so well, and the inserts and special issues on "grunge,"
"women in rock" and (most recently) "electronica," the fact is their
economic health and ongoing profitability absolutely rely on the degree to
which they can maintain a wholly plastic and affected parallelism between
"what people listen to" and "what they [stores, magazines, mtv, etc.]
cover/carry/promote," a parallelism whose hidden, mediating term is none
other than the decisions, marketing budgets, and short-term cost/benefit
analyses (surprise!) planted there by the industry's profit-driven engines
in the first place. this is a very efficient, handy set-up, not least
because it absolves everyone involved of the responsibility of being
critical, simultaneously providing consumers for retail outlets and giving
media outlets explanatory power and critical legitimacy (geffen's 1996
marketing plan: "...we're going to sign and promote more female artists
because there seems to be a market forming around this category of cultural
production"; rolling stone's 1996 special issue: "1996: Year Of The Woman,"
etc). the results of this arrangement--a vast network of equivalences
taking such forms as ["this is what we think will sell" = "this is what
people are buying" = "this is what people like" = "this is what we should
sign/promote/review more of"]--easily explains any number of phenomena in
the recent history of the popular cultural industry's various offshoots
(from television and film right down to the sneaker pimps and
hooverphonic).
unfortunately, that absolution of criticality also has the potentially
upsetting effect of implicating one in the entire disgusting parade. (for
example, ever wonder why the ironically self-depricating mythos of "selling
out," "corporate rock," etc. began showing up in major media outlets
simultaneous with the latter stages of advancement of indie-appropriation
[sonic youth, nirvana, sub pop, matador, interscope, etc.], precisely at
the moment when the industry had already deconstructed the binary that gave
rise to those concepts in the first place?). at the risk of psychologizing,
the music industry works from the same principle of cognitive dissonance as
the rest of us, and this in mind, the mappings of its various stages of
evolution become transparent to those willing to study the threads which
constitute the complex weave of its history. but what is the alternative?
how can one build an opposing paradigm on an economic landscape one of the
most advanced and developed attributes of which is the absorption and
reinscription of its own contradictions, its own "others" (blues, punk,
hip-hop, women, techno, etc.)? this is a very, very hard question to
answer, and one which contines to inspire new, exciting forms of cultural
resistence (jungle, post-rave electronica, etc.). but the jury is very far
from in on how to resist its logic without merely opposing it. and
personally, i applaud those who incessantly bloody their foreheads against
the walls of the establishment music industry, from plus 8, skam, and
silent, to under one sky, retina, and immerse, if for no other reason than
the provide the fertile soil through which the mythic "underground" carries
the music forward. and neither do i subscribe to any simplistic binary of
indie = good, major = bad. each have their strengths (and therefore
weeknesses) and each contain their exemplaries (and, as well, their
devils). but i urge others to recognize the stakes involved in these
interrelationships and the conflicting, competing values they bring into
play, and to not simply cast off the criticism of those in a position to
relay valuable, important experiences as so much bias and self-interest.
the world's a big place, people, and its nowhere near as simple as you
think.
sc
onnow: the orb : orbscure trax (a 70+-minute promo cd offered this week by
island records simultaneously to spur waning sales of _orblivion_ and
thereby promote the group's upcoming us tour, with the predictable effect
of urging existing fans of the group who already bought the record when it
came out over two months ago to buy yet another copy of it)