Who Fights for the Music? Who Speaks for the Songs?

At an insurance conference last week, I saw a 10-foot video screen in one of the exhibitors' booths. It showed one of those video games where you can pretend to be a musician even if you can't play.
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A famous legal brief in the 1970s called "Should Trees Have Standing?" argued that living things should have legal representation. It pointed out that other nonhuman entities, especially corporations, already had that right, and suggested it be extended to the voiceless creations of the environment.

Why shouldn't songs have "standing," too? Why shouldn't we be able to fight for great records -- especially the records of the future -- because they have a right to exist? There are groups to represent record companies, artists, and composers -- but who speaks for the music?

We need to rebuild a conducive environment for creating great pop music, if we can. That means doing all sorts of things: Lobbying, researching, promoting, dreaming, envisioning, wishing, hoping, praying ... Great records don't necessarily have the same needs as record companies or even recording artists. Who'll speak for them?
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I know, I know. This is a watershed election, a turning point in political history. The fate of nations and of the planet itself is at stake. But I can't stop myself from worrying about ... pop music. It's not looking good out there, people.

Great pop records don't just happen. They're the products of outside conditions: society, history, culture, and an economic structure that provides the right incentives. Those conditions are disappearing.
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Three young broker or consultant types -- two guys and a woman -- were gyrating with toy guitars and hammering at drum kits as "rock god" versions of themselves danced on the big screen.
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Now people can act like "rock stars" without even learning an instrument. I'm a pretty high-tech cat, if I say so myself -- but virtual reality doesn't lead to real virtue, and Second Life doesn't beat Get a Life.

We were all just morons trying to look cool back then, but we had to pick up instruments to do it. A talented few broke away from the rest of us and made great music. That Pop Darwinism may die out in the ecology of video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero.
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The RIAA speaks for record companies. This isn't an anti-RIAA rant, although I think they should've been more than a lobbying group. They should've pioneered online distribution and prevented this catastrophe -- but what's done is done.

That said, they didn't show much foresight by hiring GOP operative Mitch Bainwol to run the place after Hillary Rosen left in '03. When you need vision, you don't necessarily hire Bill Frist's former chief of staff. I'm sure Mitch is a nice guy. But his Republican connections are decreasing in value, and he won't help the industry unless he retools his organization into a think tank.

I hope he does. That would be good for the music, too.
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My fiftysomething suit-and-tie self concealed a past life gigging in rock and roll clubs and country/western dives. People couldn't always play well back then, but the songs were everything.
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Then there's the Recording Artists' Coalition led by Don Henley. It's a good idea. Artists haven't had a seat at the table. I hope they bring in some new thinking.

The fans, especially free file-sharing advocates, are highly active and very vocal. They're well-represented on the Internet. And BMI and ASCAP work for composers, but they haven't taken a leadership role in music's future. They collect royalties as sales shrink.

In other words: They're chasing "mechanicals" in a digital universe.

But who'll build the next Brill Building? Who'll create the next Atlantic Records? Who'll make the great two minute pop records of tomorrow?
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Sure, there have been a few great pop songs in recent years, the kind that bring groups of people together in a sort of "cultural commons": "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. "Hey Ya!" by Outkast. "Alcohol" by Brad Paisley. But they used to be common, and now they're getting more and more rare. That's not an accident.
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Hey, pop music helped bring down Communism! I know... I was there. Pop music is a national security issue!

Gary Hart writes about America's now-battered "Fourth Power" - the international power of our principles. Let's make pop music the "Fifth Power." Then we can divert some of that Halliburton loot toward making great records again.
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I couldn't resist saying - with a smile - "Thanks for providing irrefutable evidence that rock and roll is dead."

The woman at the "drums" tugged at her navy blazer and laughed. But the clean-cut guy with the plastic guitar - it had buttons instead of strings - said, "No way, dude! We're bringing it back!"
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Somebody's going to tell me how many new acts are out there on MySpace writing and recording great tunes. Could be, although I've missed most of them. But great tunes don't become great pop records unless they occupy that cultural commons. And Auto-Tune? Don't ask.

Am I missing something? Probably. That's the great thing about the Internet, though. Somebody will tell me what it is, and we'll all hopefully be smarter as a result.

Of myself, I am nothing. The Hive Mind doeth the works.
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We're bringing it back ... What can you say?

"Good luck with that."
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Why did I divide these paragraphs up with lines? So that it wouldn't take more than 2 minutes and fifty seconds to read each one, even for slower readers.

2:50 is the optimum length for a great pop record.

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RJ Eskow blogs:

A Night Light
More music writing
The Sentinel Effect: Healthcare Blog
Future-While-U-Wait
RJ Eskow at the Huffington Post

Comments

[saltpeter]

pt 3--From New York to Philly, New Orleans to Chicago and the West Coast and beyond, the abilitiy of America to tap into it's unique cultural fabric in all the diverse corners that it existed in, was what really made American music the best in the world. But now the world has learn to take that which is unique about itself and place those gypsy tones and traditional sounds into a popular format and show us what made pop and rock so revolutionary to begin with. All is not lost, and there's more to come. It just might not all be sung in English. I'm sure right now in Bagdad they can really use rock 'n' roll more than some spoiled kid in Peoria who doesn't realise how good he's got it.

[saltpeter]

PT 2: Either way both of these phenomenon (grown man-boys and girly-women and 30-year-olds who opt out and sit around waiting to die) are not helping to contribute to the intellectual progression of our popular entertainment.

But , still, there's hope (in spite of all the RIAA and the major labels have tried to do to crush that hope). Kids today are actually listening to more music than before (by whatever means) and many of them are listening to a great deal of diverse music (thanks, in part to easy access by the internet). But what we are missing, in part are the respected cultural curators (like John Peel was in the UK and many a DJ and promoter like Alan Freed in the US) and we're missing the great link that once connected local
studio owner (ala Sam Philips) with juke joint proprietor (ala Hilly Kristol) with local DJ (too many to mention). When you've reduced most musical output to 5 (or is it 4) major labels, and when Clear Channel owns the majority of the radio stations and LiveNation (ie Clear Channel) owns a number of venues you lose a lot of the regional kinship that once drove much of America's greatest musical output. In the end, when it comes to great American music; it was our regionalism that made us great.

[saltpeter]

Everytime someone writes a piece on the supposed decline of culture (music, art, films, books--does anyone even read 'em) they fail to illuminate one fact, the market is getting younger. That is a consequence of consumerism. The example I always use has to do with film. In the 40's and 50's, the average film-goer was a 30-year-old housewife and the films made reflected that fact. They were filled with actresses this women wanted to be and actors they wanted to do. Weekday matinees were packed. But eventually those women entered the work force and, by the late sixties, their babyboomer children (and all their disposable income) took over the reins of the culture. Ever since then the average music buyer and film goer has gotten younger and younger and art forms that often require some level of sophistication to comprehend like literature, theatre, painting, and jazz have all but disappeared or been water-down to the point of being unrecognizable.

The ad folks call this "branding". Get 'em young and deluge 'em with stuff they don't need so that you make a lifelong loyal consumer. This wouldn't be so bad if, at some point, these kids grew out of that phase when they become adults. But typically, one of two things happen: adults get stuck at the mental age of 15 and continue to play video games and listen to Britney Spears well into their 30's or they stop participating in the greater pop culture altogether.

[recless]

I guess in a way it is partly what you are looking for. When I was a teen, we did not get into "pop" music because we liked being different, and did not try to dress/act like everyone else. That meant Sabbath, on through NWOBHM, speed metal, thrash metal, deathcore, etc, etc. Not everyone looks for what everyone else is listening to. People are looking for what sounds good to their ear, instead of what everyone else says is good. Not everyone wants pop music, because pop music these days is canned, corporate cookie-cutter acts. Actually, it has been like that for a very long time. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the big music corporations (and corporate radio) are dinosaurs that need to get on with their extinction. Good riddance to them.

[saltpeter]

I think you're speaking for yourself, recless. If, when you were a kid no one "got int pop music" then why, when you were a kid was there pop music. If everyone back in old timey times listened only to Black Sabbath, then Black Sabbath would have been pop music (ie. the most popular form of music). The difference is that music is no longer made to be simply music, it's made to be attached to a "lifestyle". And yes, even "heavy metal" is considered a niche "lifestyle" and people, including Ozzy or, more likely Sharon, with OzzFest, has figured out a way to make money from it. One major difference between now and then is then there were, at least, locally owned radio stations, who had DJs who did not always have to submit to some corporate master dead set on only allowing 30 different songs to be broadcast each week. Many DJs were free to play what they wanted (within reason) but then they all started locking themselves in their booths and playing "Stairway to Heaven" non-stop for 8 hours and then the corporate masters had to step in and put an end to that.

But you are right about one thing, corporate radio and the major labels have become dinosaurs and, as my friend who runs a small record label says, "I'm a little rat mammal waiting for them to die off so that I and my ilk can take over."

[kmsbt]

Thanks on two levels, R.J. I may have unsophisticated taste and I'm, as 3fingerbrown mentioned, "not a terribly adventurous consumer," especially for music recorded after 1991. But there's been a lot of great pop music recorded over the years that gets overlooked by music services or trivialized by critics or forgotten in clubs after hearing "Mustang Sally" for the umpteenth time. Thanks to internet radio, I've only recently discovered Carolina Beach Music that was not only great and continues to be but may have even been a social force against Jim Crow along the Atlantic coast in the sixties.

And thanks for the plug for the real thing versus virtual reality. I'm 50 and started guitar lessons five years ago for the first time in my life, to fulfill a long-standing dream. Suffice to say I'm not giving up the day job and if I succeed it will not be due to talent but to sheer force of will and determination. And by "succeed" I only mean playing with other musicians in public. The way things are going that may be in the nursing home when I'm a resident, but it will still be success. Like philistine, I relentlessly avoid Guitar Hero because I still appreciate the real thing, even if it takes me five minutes to switch chords.

But phil, if GH leads your son to the real guitar, is it that bad?

[3fingerbrown]

But there is no more "cultural commons." We're living in an every-man-for-himself culture, where serious music fans are expected to spend hours plowing through acres of amateurish crap online in search of a single diamond. Some people, I guess with lots of free time on their hands, find the exile of the gatekeepers liberating, and there's a lot to be said for the convenience of the new way of acquiring music, especially if you know exactly what you're looking for, or you're not a terribly adventurous consumer.

But it occurs to me that exciting mass phenomena like Sinatra, early rock, Elvis, the Beatles, and early hip-hop are no longer possible. There's just no way for the next big thing to achieve the critical mass needed to become the next big thing. The musical culture is just too fragmented. They paved the cultural commons and put up a parking lot.

[RobinSeattle]

Yeah, democratizing the dissemination of art and information is evil. We need a class of condescending, pretentious tastemakers to tell us, the great unwashed, what we should like and read. And we need corporate salesmen telling us how much it's worth to us. Wonderful. Of course, just who gets to select that coterie of self-appointed experts is kinda niggling, no?

Listen, and get this through your heads you cultural elitists: with the exception of the era of pre-cable netowrk tv, America has always been culturally fractured along ethnic, regional, religious and economic lines. The nostalgia for a non-existent "cultural commons" is misguided. It hasn't really existed for most of American history. This yearning for a standardized intellectual cant in society is just another what Erich Fromme termed "escape from freedom." Plus it is just don right un-American. We are supposed to celebrate the fulfillment of the individual, not put him into a predetermined intellectual box. The communists tried that. Hasn't worked too well, thankfully.

[RobinSeattle]

This article was insipid.

I'm not sure why Hilary Rosen is any different from the RIAA's current lobbyist. Hillary was as anti-consumer and anti-internet as any Republican and her presence in the Democratic Party makes everybody's stomach churn, especially those under 25. That the undercurrent of this article was that, well, "go with our RIAA whore rather than the GOP's" is slimy. It's call edthat extortion. There is something "Sopranos" about it.

The point is that the RIAA has not only been historically technophobic (they originally didn't want songs being played on the radio when that was invented, reasoning that people wouldn't buy records or sheet music as a result. Of course, the actual impact was the opposite, an explosion in demand for recorded music. That is only one example of the industry's first reaction to a new technology being to run lawyers at it), but due to being allowed to get away with cross collateralization, they have screwed artists collectively out of billions. And Hillary helped.

If record company executives don't wait until the firm turns a profit that year to get paid, artists shouldn't either. But that is what happens.

On great pop records, you have Motown, the Brill Building, Phil Spector, Shadow Stevens, Phil and Leonard Chess and whoever produced the Grass Roots as basically production projects, but the rest were created by bands or singer-songwriters with their own sensibilities. And the record industry continues to leech off of them.

[tiger313]

Please, everyone check out the "before the music dies" website.

[philistine]

RJ, I appreciate your post. My son loves Guitar Hero (my ex was the enabler, not me), but he wants to learn how to play the guitar, because he hears me play. I won't play Guitar Hero; I love being able to play without plugging into anything. I have hopes for him as well; maybe he'll pick up an instrument and play it badly - at first.

Cheers!