Crap's Last Tape: Review of Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music

Halfway through Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, Jack Rabid, editor of the fanzine The Big Takeover, blurts out author Greg Kot's thesis: "What's dying is the idea of only the crappiest crap, made with the crappiest intentions, with the crappiest production, to entice the most airtime on the crappiest giant chains of radio stations, bought and paid for by crappy labels, and dictated by some crappy, contemptuous, lowest-common-denominator-projecting programming exec from his crappy polling printouts in some crappy office somewhere, to ensure we all swallow the same crap all over the country at the same crappy time, and then placing that one slice of crap on a longer disc with a bunch of even crappier crap. That is the concept that is dying. Amen."

The music critic of The Chicago Tribune, Kot agrees. In Ripped, an informative and entertaining state-of-play piece on contemporary music, he suggests that technology may well be making it possible for a new generation of artists and fans to mess with the mean, money-grubbing, mediocrities in the record business and usher in a revolution of sound and fury.

In over a dozen deliciously detailed profiles, ranging from Prince to Pitchfork, from Bright Eyes to Danger Mouse, from Radiohead to Reznor, Kot cites -- and celebrates -- musicians and entrepreneurs who refuse to bow to tradition. File-sharing, sampling, downloading, blogs, ezines, and the iPod, he claims, are beginning to allow artists to break down the unholy hegemony between the majors and corporate radio, take control of the "products" they have created and get a fairer share of the profits.

Kot knows his stuff. His book is never better than when it is in the music. But Ripped is about what is happening to music, and Kot stands with the T shirts and not the suits. Sometimes he is ready to declare victory: right now, he writes, musicians are connecting with fans through social network websites, alerting them to concerts and TV and radio appearances, selling merchandising and CD's , and booking tour dates. Sometimes he declares that the promised land is in sight: reminding readers that there will be 750 million new wireless broadband subscribers in the next decade in the U.S. and Western Europe alone. And sometimes he isn't sure: worrying, along with one veteran music observer, that "once the paradise of infinite storage is entered it will represent the end of all intellectual property rights."

In many ways, Ripped is a wish that wants to give birth to a fact. Some artists, of course, do have a knack for entrepreneurship. They're taking the initiative -- taking up the pitchforks, if you will -- while many others are hoping for a utopia where no middlemen take more than they deserve, the artists reach the audiences directly, and fans buy the best stuff available.

Unfortunately, the truth may well be that it is (the aptly named) Jack Rabid who is full of crap. Even if radio, the dinosaur, is dying, there is substantial evidence that mass sales in music -- like any other business -- will continue to depend upon someone with lots of money to drive audiences to artists.

Part of the problem is that finding a commentator with something good to say about the music industry is about as easy as finding a politician who'll admit she's an atheist. If you start with fifty dollars and subtract a buck for every partisan of the record business, you'll have enough left to download the $47.95 Danger Mouse Essentials from iTunes.

Nonetheless, even for those who say they want a revolution, after the Thermidor, summer gives way to fall, all the leaves are brown, and the realities of show business set in. While Kot's artists may be exceptions that prove the rule, the case Ripped makes that the business has -- or will -- change permanently, is not compelling. The truth is, artists need infrastructure. Sure, bands like Death Cab for Cutie will utilize the tools of the Digital Age differently, and younger artists are taking advantage of ever-newer technologies. But even the Grateful Dead had fifty employees.

Most artists, as Kot acknowledges, don't want to be businessmen. As John Mellencamp said of Prince, "I think it's more work than he wants it to be. It has to be. You gotta do it yourself. Who wants that?"

Finally, Kot doesn't always make clear where "acceptable" commercialism starts, subverts, or stops. Death Cab for Cutie, it's important to remember, took off when one of the characters on The O.C said he loved the band. But it's hard to imagine John Lennon agreeing to launch his career on Fox. Lauded by Kot as allowing the customer to be a "coconspirator" and "creative partner," moreover, Trent Reznor's five-tiered pricing system got traction after the Reznor-produced Saul Williams' song "List of Demands" appeared in a Nike commercial. And, in perhaps the greatest misdirection in music history, U2's flogging of the iPod was disguised by Bono as support for the "most beautiful art object in musical culture since the electric guitar..."

Bono understands the game better than anyone and nails the point that Kot pokes at. The world's biggest rock star was associating his band with a product (the iPod), but he might as well have been talking about the perpetual relationship between artists and commerce. In the fast-moving technological age, he declared, "you've got to deal with the devil."

Comments

[werbenjagermanjensen]

American popular music has so many problems. One is the average American's shrinking amount of disposable income. Another is the increasing lack of live venues where up and coming musicians can learn to be artists and entertainers and radio stations that will play new music. (You can't have a career exclusively online if you want to make a living.) Another is that rock and roll, rap and other pop forms have arguably become played out, and pop has become an archival art form like jazz or musical theater with nothing really innovative to offer anymore. Another factor is the increasingly thuggish, antisocial nature of pop music culture today, where fights, random injuries and sexual assaults are a common occurrence at live music events. It's not just the recording industry that's marginalizing pop; to a significant degree it's doing it to itself.

[Progrocker]

One technological hurdle remains, the best quality MP3's and other lossy compressions still supply poor fidelity, relatively speaking. There was a very good article in Rolling Stone a couple of years back that touched on this in depth which was called, "The Death Of Hi Fidelity". If you search for it you can likely still find it out there. Once the technology level achieves 100% lossless compression while still achieving small MP3 file sizes, I think much of what, at least this musician, has been waiting for will happen and this will hasten the break away from the old business models. As both a musician and a recording engineer it has been and continues to be my experience that lossy compressions, though they have improved greatly over the last decade or so, still sacrifice far too much audio quality to achieve small file size. The technological revolution that came to us with the internet, file sharing, and MP3 type music players, while having brought with it much that is very good, has also at the same time had a measurable negative effect on the quality of the audio most people listen to today as compared to 15 or 25 years ago. It also has had the effect on many audio engineers changing their approach to music production to try to adjust for the fact that many if not most listeners will be listening to the music utilizing some kind of compressed lossy format, which can be a sum negative thing.

[RobinSeattle]

The point of this article is well taken. For all the incredible tools available to artists now that make it more facile to be a productive entity, the internet is too diffused to drive the cattle cohesively to market, as it were. So that requires a new kind of consensus among consumers, who once rallied around FM radio in the 1960's and 1970's as the common marketplace by which to judge what music they liked or didn't, they now need to do the same online (like with something such as Live365.com, etc). Right now, that marketplace of consensus doesn't exist and so the tired, crappy, co-opted and corrupt terrestrial radio is still the marketplace by default.

[Moonlighter]

Yes, doing your own songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering, gigging, and promoting (traditional and internet) is time-out-of-mind-consuming. CDs are now a loss leader. You may make more money selling tee-shirts. But, great music has great power of its own, and if you're good you can make your way.

If you have some good song material and want to support New Orleans, enter The Human Levee Music Project at http://www.humanlevee.com

[Catchingthewaves]

Equally as important as established musicians becoming independent from record labels is the new opportunity given to all amateur and professional musicians via the use of Creative Commons licences. Because software has slashed production costs and the internet has almost abolished distribution fees, it is now possible for anyone to release their own music as and how they like. The major record labels used to siphon nearly all music; it was impossible for artists to be heard unless they signed a deal. Now the playing field is much more level and just about anyone can cut and release an album - they can also choose whether to charge for it or, acknowledging that rampant filesharing will occur whatever they do to deter it, give it away for free under a Creative Commons licence and hope to enjoy publicity by distributing their product freely, thus garnering a fan base. Some artists are managing to make sense of the paradox that legal, properly licensed free music can make money.

The Wired Generation has changed the music business; the Creative Commons movement is reinventing it. Please have a look at http://creativecommons.org/ to investigate further. If you'd rather just explore the world of completely free netlabel and CC music, you could always visit Catching The Waves. :)

http://soundthefreetrumpet.typepad.com/

[Paul]

I use CC and it is just the thing to put your music out there and yet keep control of your art.