THE MONKEY CHORUS
Paul McCartney jammed with a bunch of apes for four hours recently, the
Beatles legend has confirmed.
The bizarre happening took place at the Language Research Facility in
Atlanta, America, after Sir Paul was told about it by Peter Gabriel.
According to a UK tabloid, McCartney played 'Eleanor Rigby' and a new song
with the bonobos.
McCartney explained: The fact they could recognize and understand 800 words
was pretty astounding and we found ourselves actually communicating with them
easily.
We played some music - the male ape and I jammed a little and his sister
joined in with us. He played keyboards and she played drums. It was wild.
The 'session' was apparently filmed for possible inclusion on a DVD of
Macca's current album 'Driving Rain.'
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Muddy Waters Documentary Gives Compelling & Personal Look At The Bluesman
Muddy Waters: Can't Be Satisfied, a documentary movie by Robert
Gordon and Morgan Neville, mixes star testimonials (the Rolling
Stones' Keith Richards, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Public Enemy's Chuck
D); interviews with members of Waters' bands, family members, and his
ex-girlfriends; and rollicking concert footage and archival
interviews.
The result is a compelling personal and professional examination of
Muddy Waters (1913-1983) and the way he transformed the blues with
its first famous electric band, whose sound sired rock and roll.
The film grew out of Gordon's work on his book Can't be Satisfied:
The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (Little, Brown). By offering
contrasting points of view, the film emphasizes both the
larger-than-life, mythical character of Waters and the gritty
realities of his career. For instance, one of Richards' romanticizing
stories, about the Stones recording at Chess Studios and encountering
Waters painting the ceiling, is then contradicted by Marshall Chess,
son of the owners of Chess Records, Waters' label for most of his
career.
Similarly, Chuck D of Public Enemy rhapsodizes about his point of
entry into Waters' music, the notorious psychedelic album Electric
Mud; its critical reputation (bad) and commercial/image-building
effect are then discussed by producer Chess and others. Waters'
womanizing, preference for younger women, and children outside his
marriage are also examined from multiple angles. Gordon and Neville
fit an impressive amount of background and depth into what will air
as a 54-minute PBS show next February.
Gordon and Neville, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Rose Cinema
screening of the rough cut Tuesday (June 18), promised that the
January release on video and DVD will include parts omitted from the
television cut for time reasons. This independent production's warm
but not uncritical look at Waters offers delights for neophytes and
aficionados alike.
-- Steve Holtje
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Facing the Music
Rock stars and music-industry execs once ruled the earth, but now --
in terms of size and profit margins -- the music industry is becoming
the book business (minus the literacy).
BY MICHAEL WOLFF
Hemingway had rock-star status (and even impersonators). Steinbeck
was Springsteen. Salinger was Kurt Cobain. Dorothy Parker was
Courtney Love. James Jones was David Crosby. Mailer was Eminem. This
is to say -- and I understand how hard this is to appreciate -- that
novelists were iconic for much of the first half of the last century.
They set the cultural agenda. They made lots of money. They lived
large (and self-medicated). They were the generational voice. For a
long time, anybody with any creative ambition wanted to write the
Great American Novel.
But starting in the fifties, and then gaining incredible force in the
sixties, rock-and-roll performers eclipsed authors as cultural stars.
Rock and roll took over fiction's job as the chronicler and
romanticizer of American life (that rock and roll became much bigger
than fiction relates, I'd argue, more to scalability and distribution
than to relative influence), and the music business replaced the book
business as the engine of popular culture.
Now, though, another reversal, of similar commercial and metaphysical
magnitude, is taking place. Not, of course, that the book business is
becoming rock and roll, but that the music industry is becoming, in
size and profit margins and stature, the book business.
In other words, there'll still be big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen
King), but even if you're fairly high up on the music-business
ladder, most of your time, which you'd previously spent with
megastars, will be spent with mid-list stuff. Where before you'd be
happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if
you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be
your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other
aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and
largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamor, the
influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone.
Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly
anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much
impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only
incidentally will come from the music industry.
This glum (if also quite funny) fate is surely the result of
compounded management errors -- the know-nothingness and foolishness
and acting-out that, for instance, just recently resulted in what
seems to be the final death of Napster.
But it's way larger, too. Management solutions in the music business
have, rightly, given way to a pure, no-exit kind of fatalism.
It's all pain. It's all breakdown. Music-business people, heretofore
among the most self-satisfied and self-absorbed people of the age,
are suddenly interesting, informed, even ennobled, as they become
fully engaged in the subject of their own demise. Producers,
musicians, marketing people, agents . . . they'll talk you through
what's happened to their business -- it's part B-school case study
and part Pilgrim's Progress.
Start with radio.
Radio and rock and roll have had the most remarkable symbiotic
relationship in media -- the synergy that everybody has tried to
re-create in media conglomerates. Radio got free content; music
labels got free promotion.
Radio's almost effortless cash flow, and mom-and-pop organization
(there were once 5,133 owners of U.S. radio stations), made it ripe
for consolidation, which began in the mid-eighties and was mostly
completed as soon as Congress removed virtually all ownership limits
in 1996. A handful of companies now control nearly the entirety of
U.S. radio, with Clear Channel and its more than 1,200 stations being
the undisputed Death Star. (Clear Channel is also one of the nation's
major live promoters, and uses its airtime leverage to force
performers to use its concert services, as Britney Spears and others
have charged.)
Radio, heretofore ad hoc and eccentric and local, underwent a
transformation in which it became formatted, rational, and
centralized. Its single imperative was to keep people from moving the
dial -- seamlessness became the science of radio.
The music business suddenly had to start producing music according to
very stringent (if unwritten) commercial guidelines (it could have
objected or rebelled -- but it rolled over instead; what's more, in a
complicated middleman strategy of music brokers and independent
promoters, labels have, in effect, been forced to pay to have their
boring music aired). Format became law. Everything had to sound the
way it was supposed to sound. Fungibility was king. Familiarity was
the greatest virtue.
Once Sheryl Crow was an established hit, the music business was
compelled to offer up an endless number of Sheryl Crow imitators.
Then when the Sheryl Crow imitators became a reliable radio genre,
Sheryl Crow was compelled to imitate them. (Entertainment Weekly,
without irony, recently praised the new Moby album for sounding like
his last.)
But then, just as radio playlists become closely regulated, the
Internet appears.
"Suddenly there was another distribution avenue offering far greater
product range," notes my friend Bob Thiele, who's been producing,
writing, performing, and doing A&R work in L.A. for twenty years (and
whose father was Buddy Holly's producer), and who, in my memory,
never before talked about avenues of distribution. "And then, before
anyone was quite aware of what was happening, file-sharing replaced
radio as the engine of music culture."
It wasn't just that it was free music -- radio offered free music.
But whatever you wanted was free (whenever you wanted it). The
Internet is music consumerism run amok, resulting not only in
billions of dollars of lost sales but in an endless bifurcation of
taste. The universe fragmented into sub-universes, and then
sub-sub-universes. The music industry, which depends on large numbers
of people with similar interests for its profit margins, now had to
deal with an ever-growing numbers of fans with increasingly diverse
and eccentric interests.
It is hard to think of a more profound business crisis. You've lost
control of the means of distribution, promotion, and manufacturing.
You've lost quality control -- in some sense, there's been a
quality-control coup. You've lost your basic business model -- what
you sell has become as free as oxygen.
It's a philosophical as well as a business crisis -- which compounds
the problem, because the people who run the music business are not
exactly philosophers.
"They're thugs," says a former high-ranking music exec of my
acquaintance, who is no shrinking violet himself.
Such thuggishness, when the business was about courting difficult
acts, enforcing contracts, procuring drugs, paying off everyone who
needed to be paid off, may once have been a key management advantage.
But it probably isn't the main virtue you're looking for when you're
in a state of existential crisis. Being street-smart is not being
smart.
In a situation of such vast uncertainty, with the breakdown of all
prior business and cultural assumptions, you don't necessarily want
to have to depend upon, say, Tommy Mottola to create a new paradigm.
For a long while, the management response at the major labels had a
weird combination of denial and foot stamping: putting Napster out of
business-then sort-of/sort-of-not buying Napster -- all the while
being told by everybody who knows anything about technology that, no
matter what the music industry does, or who it sues, music will be,
inevitably, free. Duh. There is, too, a management critique --
perhaps most succinctly put by Don Henley in his now-famous
post-Grammy letter wherein he quoted Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles:
"Gentlemen, gentlemen! We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs!"
-- that sees record labels as generally engaged in the usual practice
of ripping off anyone who can be ripped off while remaining oblivious
to the fact that Rome is burning.
But for the most part, denial, and even the reflex to just keep
squeezing the last dollar until there is nothing left to squeeze, is
passing (labels have even recently awoken to the problems of dealing
with the radio behemoths and are frantically, and way too late,
trying to find reasons to sue the radio guys and gain back a little
leverage).
I had a very nice sushi lunch in the Sony dining room the other day
where I heard about the generally gallows mood at Sony Music. The
recent past was very bad; the future was likely to be worse. All
money earned from here on in would be harder to earn. This felt like
acceptance to me: We simply don't know what to do.
The truth is, there might not be anything much to do.
Here are the choices:
If you're providing free entertainment, which is obviously what the
music business is doing, then you have to figure out some way to sell
advertising to the people who are paying attention to your free
music. But nobody seems to have any idea how that might be done. Or
you can provide stuff that's free, and use the free stuff to promote
something else of more value that people, you hope, will buy -- now
called the "legitimate alternative." (Putting video on the CD is one
of those ideas -- though, of course, you can file-share video too.)
Or sell the CD at a level that makes it cheap enough to compete with
free (free, after all, has its own costs for the consumer).
It's a spreadsheet solution. There will continue to be a market for
selling music, however diminished -- but it will have to be cheaper
music. Margins will shrink even more. Accordingly, costs will have to
shrink. Spending a few million to launch an act will shortly be a
thing of the past. (The formal catalyst of the beginning of the end
of big development costs may be the Wall Street Journal's story a few
months ago that precisely accounted for the $2.2 million launch costs
of a singer named Carly Hennessy, who went on to sell 378 CDs.) A&R
guys making half a million are also history (in the future, they'll
start at $40,000 and max out at $150,000). And no more parties.
And then there is the CD theory. This theory is widely accepted --
with great pride, in fact -- in the music industry. It represents the
ultimate music-biz hustle. But its implications are seldom played out.
The CD theory holds that the music business actually died about
twenty years ago. It was revived without anyone knowing it had
actually died because compact-disc technology came along and
everybody had to replace what they'd bought for the twenty years
prior to the advent of the CD.
The music business, this theory acknowledges, is about selling
technology as much as music. From mono to stereo to Walkman. It just
happens that the next stage of technological development in the music
business has largely excluded the music business itself.
The further implication, though, might be the more interesting and
painful one: You can't depend on just the music.
Rock and roll is just an anomaly. While for a generation or two it
created a go-go industry -- the youthquake -- it is unreasonable to
expect that anything so transforming can remain a permanent
condition. To a large degree, the music industry is, then, a fluke. A
bubble. Finally the bubble burst.
But not with a pop. It's an almost imperceptible, but highly
meaningful, alteration in context. Alanis Morissette becomes Grace
Paley. Bono becomes John Hersey. Fiona Apple is Joyce Carol Oates.
Moby is Martin Amis.
This is not so bad.
And best of all, our children -- all right, our grandchildren --
won't want to become rock stars.
From the June 10, 2002 issue of New York Magazine.
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Source: 2002 Punmaster's MusicWire punmaster.com |
