Death of the Rock and Roll Sell-Out

Posted on | February 10, 2009 | No Comments

Since Bruce Springsteen agreed to sell a greatest hits album in Wal-mart, and especially since he said that move was a mistake, the buzz has been negative for Springsteen. The term sell-out has been used. For those so offended, the Super Bowl halftime show only inflamed the wound.

Maybe it was the self-righteous seriousness of the nineties or the punk nostalgic crew I hung out with, but the term sell-out doesn’t seem to carry the same weight as it once did. Admittedly, it was always a half-defined term, most often thrown around by music fans who prided themselves on the obscurity of their tastes, but it often had a kernel of truth. Said enough by the right people, and it could effect a band’s image. But I don’t think it’s just the waning of 90s hipster egos that has taken the sting out of “sell-out.”

Until a few years ago, I think there were certain assumptions made by serious music fans. One was that getting a major label record deal was the only way to fame and therefore a goal for ambitious bands. Given that assumption, there were two ways to achieve this goal: 1.) Give the labels what they already knew they wanted– a popular sound for an established audience. 2.) Be so original and amazing that the labels will come to you, just like they came to Kurt Cobain. If this is your mindset (and to some extent it was true) it’s no surprise that you would only give credibility to the musicians that chose option two. The only debate among people who thought this way was weather certain bands had actually chosen option two.

Another concern of the recent past was the “control” the “media” had over culture and it’s messages. Particularly concerning were companies that owned radio and record labels. I wrote earlier about the decline of music radio. It’s obvious now that no one has control– influence maybe, but not control. If rock is supposed to be “anti-establishment” then who is the establishment now? Every media and distribution company is hard to demonize in an Internet connected world.

With record sales continually declining, record labels are largely becoming marketing and PR services. Bands now make the vast majority of their money touring and selling merchandise. Advances in recording technology means almost anyone can produce themselves. All this is common knowledge. The point is, that if which label you are on is less and less important and the only way to break through is just to get yourself heard, then everything including commercials, video games and ring-tones are just distribution channels to more ears. All these things used to be financial icing on the cake. Now, everyone knows emerging bands don’t sell many records. What they do make off of downloads isn’t much. Their only hope to rise above the din is to tour a lot and sell a lot of tickets and t-shirts. If a new band scores a commercial, they probably aren’t getting paid enough to be selling out, but they might get a little attention.

I used to be kind of sad when I heard a new band I liked on a commercial. Part of my reaction was an anti-corporate mindset, but I was more afraid that the song and the band would be synonymous with the product and the value of the song would be lost–a la Rhapsody in Blue and United. Now, I am usually happy. The commercial probably won’t run for long. I also think people almost look to commercials for music. The jingle is dead. If someone hears a great song on a commercial, they are more likely now to seek out that song.

Having said all this, there is something very different about being an already very famous artist with an already very famous song that has already graced your pockets with a lot of money and selling it to a commercial for millions of dollars. It is something different if you take a strong position, as Springsteen did for unions, and then drop that conviction when it is financially inconvenient. That is selling out. That is cashing in on cultural memory at the expense of that memory.

And having said all THAT, do we expect anything else these days? So many rock icons have cashed in on the cultural memories they created that it ceases to offend. The Sex Pistols reunited to form a zombie version of themselves. Queen tours with a Freddy Mercury replacement. So many iconic songs have been swapped out to sell chewing gum. Tonight Paul McCartney is on the Grammies on yet another rotation of the greatest-hits-on-repeat that he has become. No one can let the dead sleep and few can add something new, so we all watch the divas drag out another Weekend at Bernie’s style performance. But it doesn’t burn anymore.

So Bruce is slightly disappointing, but not surprising. Sell-out? Maybe, but compared to what? We have come to expect our memories and emotions to be commodified as many times as possible, especially by those who created them. Problem is, music is barely a commodity anymore. It’s a show. The people yelling sell-out sound as ridiculous as the record labels screaming that file sharing is theft.

You Aint Supposed to Die on a Saturday Night

Posted on | February 6, 2009 | No Comments

The Gaslight Anthem are the Quentin Tarantino of rock music. It’s obvious they have been locked in a basement with every classic American rock record and film since 1950 and they studied them hard. Maybe too hard. But man are you glad they did.

Rock has been really nostalgic the last few years. Since The Strokes. The Strokes were nostalgic for early sixties rock bands like The Kinks and The Zombies. The White Stripes were nostalgic for the thirties blues. The Arcade Fire and The Killers bent themselves over backward in nostalgia for Springsteen. But as heavy as the americana imagery in The ‘59 sound is, it isn’t nostalgia. What has been nostalgia for other bands, The Gaslight Anthem simply uses as a platform to sing about life–a language of commonly understood icons.

When in “High Lonesome” Brian Fallon sings “Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand/I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” he isn’t being nostalgic for Elvis. Elvis is an icon; we know who he is and what he means. We also know what Nashville means. They both communicate something about the mythos of rock and roll, but they aren’t nostalgic for the 50’s any more than James Joyce was nostalgic for ancient Greece in Ulysses.

Even better, The Gaslight Anthem don’t really sound like any of their obvious heroes. They don’t sound like Elvis or Springsteen particularly. They sound like good, well-structured power rock. They have a lot of hooks and energetic choruses at the end of building verses. If the songs weren’t so perfectly crafted, they would be sonically generic. Instead they are memorable rock and roll.

The one fault of The Gaslight Anthem is overuse. By the time you are done listening to the album, the iconic imagery feels thick, almost rote. Elvis? Check. Marilyn Monroe? Check. Humphrey Bogart? Check. Audrey Hepburn? Check. Springsteen? Check. Paul Simon? Check. Mustang Sally? Really? In individual songs, though, they come off effortless and powerful. (The exception is the unfortunate “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Brian, I’m sorry, but Tom Petty songs don’t drive old men crazy. Old men LOVE Tom Petty.)

Surprisingly, the best imagery on the album comes far away from ’50s America. The rattling chains in the hospital walls of “59 Sound” come from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Brilliant. Totally unexpected, but a grabbing metaphor for guilt, sin, regret. Dickens makes another appearance in the first track “Great Expectations.” You have to love a rock band that can take equal inspiration from Miles Davis and Victorian literature.

But this is almost academic analysis. The Gaslight Anthem are great song writers, but they are better rock and rollers. They are earnest, proud, yearning, desperate, romantic, sexy and so are their songs which is all that has ever mattered in rock and roll.

Obama and the Absense of Apathy

Posted on | January 21, 2009 | No Comments

There’s a line in the Radiohead song “The Bends” that goes “I wish it was the sixties/I wish I could be happy/I wish, I wish, I wish something would happen.” Until recently that line summed up my political feelings since I began having political feelings. Not my political thoughts, mind you, but political feelings.

Whenever I would listen to my parents, or anyone who participated in the movements of the sixties, talk about that era they would describe a hope, a drive, a unity, an optimism that was obviously palpable. I always envied them for that feeling. I longed to feel that somehow it wasn’t all just politics as usual, that you were a part of something big and uniting in your culture. For all the philosophical and fashion mistakes of the sixties–people changed their society, which is a rare achievement. Since I came of age in the 90s, I have been surrounded by angst, fear and flaccid apathy– until Obama earned the democratic nomination for president.

I’m not naive enough to believe that Obama’s election or inauguration are culturally equivalent to the civil rights movement, but something palpable happened in the hearts and minds of a lot of people because of Obama. People got happier, more hopeful, more engaged. And this engagement crossed age, race, sex and class barriers. In the simplest of terms, just about everyone with a liberal bone in their body wanted to be excited about this guy. Suddenly, almost no one was talking about “the lesser of two evils” or “holding your nose and voting” the way they had in every previous presidential election I had witnessed.  People wanted to vote for Obama; they were excited about it.

I read this article in the New York Times about Obama’s astonishing political capital: Poll Finds Faith in Obama, Mixed with Patience 79% of Americans are optimistic about the next four years under Obama, including 58% of people who voted for McCain. Furthermore, most are not expecting much in the way of change for the next two years. Honestly, when was the last time 79% of Americans were optimistic about anything. It can’t last forever, but nor is it likely to evaporate any time soon. The thing about hope is that you don’t need much improvement to keep hoping. Only in the wake of total failure do people regret previous hopes.

From Anonymity to Instant Accountability

Posted on | January 20, 2009 | No Comments

In the beginning of the web, it was a wild frontier where assholes could roam free and then return to their real (and usually quite polite) lives. People could post douchey comments in forums and write rude and incorrect blog posts with no consequence. But recently the internet has made enormous steps to actually become the opposite– a place of instant accountability.

The consequences of this are becoming evident, but what I believe is the logical conclusion is not obvious. Yet.

The biggest reason for the death of the web as wild frontier is that it became a market place, not just of goods, but of ideas. If you want someone to invest even their attention on you in today’s internet, you’ve got to be a trustworthy source or…. very entertaining. If you actually want them to buy something from you, you’ve got to have a good reputation. And when I say good, I mean nearly spotless. One bad review on Yelp or unhappy ebay costumer can hurt you. All your mistakes are now archived and instantly accessible to anyone.

But even more motivating than a sale is establishing a reputation you can leverage. Modern urban life is an anonymous place. Setting yourself apart from the crowd is difficult, but an internet presence can help a lot if done correctly. Any savvy jobseeker knows that social networking profiles are now often viewed by potential employers. Equally important is what a Google search can reveal. For competitive positions, it’s not enough that your online persona is clean and professional, it must “add value” to your resume. Realestate agents, other contract professionals and small businesses were likewise quick to set themselves apart from their peers through compelling online personas. Now even big companies like Comcast and Jetblue meticulously monitor twitter for mentions of their brand.

This is all social media 101, but the effect is expanding. If you want to promote yourself as a professional for anything you have to have a blog, a twitter account, and at least two social networking site profiles. Your online social networking is likely to be as important as networking you do in real life–and the two will almost certainly augment each other. All this means that there is a less of a distinction between the personal and the professional, the online and the offline the private and the public. In fact people are eager to publicize many aspects of their private life if it makes their online personas more relevant. Twitter streams and blogs are full of lifestyle activities and private moments of frustration.

Online identities are also becoming more mobile. The  popular blog comment platform DISQUS now makes it easy to  automatically add a picture and other information to your comments. I expect this trend will continue. In the near future, it will be easy to link anything you say online to everything else you have said online, and to your profiles and blogs. This interconnectivity will be desirable for reputation and persona building. Anonymous statements won’t garner much attention or respect.

If respect is the goal, then authors will keep in mind that anything they say can be quickly cross referenced and checked. Instant accountability means that now corporate blogs and personal comments are now subject to standards once reserved for journalists. Integrity is key.

I Bet That You Sound Good on the Dancefloor

Posted on | January 10, 2009 | No Comments

The Dancy Future of Pop

The nineties was the era of grunge. That angst filled, distorted-guitar rock produced some great songs and regrettable fashion, but was by-in-large death to a dancefloor. Since the late nineties, rock bands that have intentionally set themselves apart from grunge, have largely fallen into two camps– dance bands and folk-influenced.

The popular folk-influenced bands, a la Bright Eyes, rose to fame relatively slowly. The word of mouth murmurs grew into rumbles. Their songs were used in movie soundtracks and TV shows. Pitchfork lauded them. Playlists were passed among friends. These bands did find success and fame but, not mega fame and usually not any radio hits. But that was ok. They were “indie” bands, they didn’t want mega fame anyway.

Of course many of the dance bands were “indie” too. Indie in their case meant influenced by 90’s British guitar rock styles and ethics. The Killers are the prime example.

But, I’ve noticed as time has gone on, that the distinction has gotten stronger. Dancy music has gotten dancier. Folky music has gotten folkier. Songs seemed to be designed either for the dance floor or for music conesuiers looking for unique sounds. With the importance of radio fading, so to is radio-friendlyness. The dance hit, which has always been important, is now the best way of reaching a large audience quickly. So it makes sense, that an emerging band would seek out a dance hit.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to me. As a long-time critic of mainstream radio, I assumed that if it were to lose it’s strangle hold, that a better, wider selection of music would receive attention and the best songs would naturally become (at least minor) hits. My model for these ideas, naturally enough, was non-mainstream radio–John Peel, PBS, College DJ’s.

I didn’t forsee that the breakdown of traditional distribution would change the very character of music, but it has. The radio, for all it’s faults, was a the primary place everyone interested in music would turn to see what was happening in music. Even if you hated most of what was played, you would listen because there still might be something good. Now there are a million places and myspaces to find something good, or terrible.

While it is easy to blame the internet for the eroding relevance of mainstream radio, it’s not the only culprit. In the mid 1990s the Telecom Act allowed radio ownership to be consolidated on an unprecidented level. Many regional stations were bought up by bigger national companies quite quickly. I remember this as the time Alice radio swept the nation. This consolidation had the effect of eliminating the regional hit. Regional hits were often watched by DJs and music industry execs and often were the assurance big companies needed to gamble on new bands or musical styles. The death of regional hits along with ultra cautious “proven hit safe” playlists of the conglomerate stations essentially froze radio in time. Or at least severly slowed its ability to keep pace with new music trends. Essentially, mainstream radio was culturally irrelevant before the internet could deliver its punch.

So now that radio has faded largely to the background, pop music as a unifying force must find us on the dancefloor. It was easy to forget in the days of big radio that pop music is, by definition, a unifying force. It was easy to forget that we seek out music that we have in common with as many others as possible and that music becomes our pop music. We want pop music to unify us. In the days of big radio we thought it was forced upon us, and that was half true, but the other half is that we picked our monster hits, we just didn’t have as wide a selection to pick from as perhaps we would’ve liked. Now we have so much choice that we will fall into our sub-sub culture niches everywhere but the dancefloor. The dancefloor will musically unite us. Other music will scarecly be considered pop music, if it still is anymore.

There is a precedent for this paradigm. Looking back to when radio was still emerging the 20’s and 30’s, the predominate music was dancy, big band music. It wasn’t until the 1940’s that radios became affordable enough for most individual households to own them.

The somewhat obvious conclusion is that unless another technology comes along that can provide large, captive audiences in another venue besides the dance floor, pop music will remain dancy. We are unlikely to see ballad style mega hits anymore. Even pop classics songs like “Hit Me Baby, One More Time” aren’t as dancable as songs like “West End Girls”. Conclusion: future pop stars will be like The Pet Shop Boys–stripped down, talented song writing groups that can score dance hits in many countries without huge promotion budgets or help from the radio.