07/04/06 - Barbarians at the Gate

Well... I've been asked to blog again. Here goes.

With the passing of the great Arif Martin, I feel compelled to weigh in on behalf of him and people like him.

I rarely write about the music business... mostly because it barely has the right to call itself a business these days. As we get deeper into the Digital Café Tour's 2006 season, my interaction with the artists we have booked and filmed has given me a moment of clarity on why we have seen a global erosion of popular music as an art form.

Once upon a time, titans in the industry like Ahmet Ertegun, George Martin, Herb Alpert, Clive Davis, and a handful of music industry mega-executives got into the business for a very linear reason... THEY LOVED MUSIC.

There are many easier ways to make a living. For example, raising goats in the Himalayas comes to mind.

These guys went out into pre-existing music scenes like miners looking for gold. They found the likes of The Beatles, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, the list goes on. These artists also loved music. It is what they did. They couldn't breath without it.

Here's where it gets tricky. These executives had ears and noses for talent. Through their financing, their expertise in marketing, their producers, their recording studios and engineers, photographers, booking agents, tour managers, etc., THEY HELPED REALIZE THE INNATE PROMISE OF THESE GREAT ARTISTS. They recognized quality and used their resources to portray it accurately. Then, they created a music publishing legacy worth billions and billions of residual dollars for most everyone involved (sometimes not the artist, but a lot of them did pretty well...).

Fast forward to the past ten years. When I started marketing Friday's Child myself, Indie was a dirty word. Indie meant 'low quality, bad production, no hits.' That really wasn't the case all around, but it was difficult early on to get home studio or semi pro computer studio recording to equal or even come close to what a Brian Eno could do at any A-list recording facility in the world... and you could forget about getting decent video. Therefore, the major labels had a strangle hold on what got out there in packaged form.

Then, technology improved and got less expensive to average folks. People like Ani DiFranco, and a legion like her, gradually percolated a latently volcanic underground. Refusing to be categorized or contained, these warriors for independence embraced the Indie monacher and made it, for the first time, sexy, for lack of a better term.

Cut back to the major labels... Guys like Ahmet Ertegun were intent on BUILDING A LEGACY.

That changed too. 80's corporate culture took over.

After that decade, executives in any industry no longer stayed at any company longer than 5 years. Instead, they angled for the next pay raise and title increment at some competing company. They traded on their resumes. They downsized workers and put the money from their victims in their own pockets. The era of no corporate loyalty had emerged.

Cut to today. You're Johnny VP from Major Label, Inc. You live in Nashville, where you get songwriters off your porch by paying for the pizza. Some of these musicians/delivery people are pretty facile songwriters. So, you hire a few really good ones. You pay them salary, benefits, 401K... and their writing is anonymous 'work made for hire.'

That means you own it. Instead of sending your A&R people out to find vibrant music scenes and expose them to the public, you fire your A&R staff by the dozen. You pocket their salaries.

Next step, you create a reality talent show or three, where young hopefuls sing out-of-tune karaoke while dreaming of becoming the next Milli Vanilli. One codicil to that... you've already probably signed the winner a year before in a hush hush deal and are using this vehicle to create interest in their ultimate CD release.

You go back to the ex-pizza delivery guy and you get him to write some journeyman songs. It isn't The Beatles, because the poor guy who wrote it doesn't really care about the girl you just signed that much. After all, she sings through four pitch correctors and just had enough silicon injected into her to keep a cruise ship from springing leaks. However, the song is good enough for the lack of sophistication you have been perpetuating in global audiences. You hire a post-ProTools, cut-and-paste producer to record the one line of the chorus as best he can, pitch correct it out the yin yang, and paste it to the click track every time there is chorus. Why? Because your young diva isn't Aretha and can't get through 3 minutes of music without singing all twelve tones at once.

Then, you compress the living crap out of the vocal so that it's hotter than Starbucks coffee and crackles up against your face like a sparkler. You repeat this process until the public thinks vocals should sound like they are taped to your head with duct tape.

Where does that leave you, Mr. Record Man? For one, you and your company OWN EVERYTHING. All the residuals. All the intellectual property. Your Tin Ear Diva has to sprint to Bally's to get ripped enough to score some endorsement money from L'Oreal or Gap, or she won't make any money at all. Her song dominates the payola-laden radio for six months, until when you hear her song, you want to leap of the roof of the Wal-Mart into the dumpster. You pocket the proceeds. Then, you throw her out like a bag of garbage and replace her with next year's flavor. Rinse and repeat.

Empires fall. Walls crumble. Barbarians can't be contained for ever, though they were once oppressed. Eventually, they get on their ponies, ride to your gates, and sack your city.

In short, WE'RE COMING AND WE CAN'T BE STOPPED. Technology has evolved to where we can make some great recordings and videos. The Internet has evolved to the point where we ARE our own dissemination/distribution vehicles. The atom has split, and it can't be contained.

What's the point? RETURN TO FUNDAMENTALS. USE THE TOOLS YOU'VE BEEN GIVEN TO REALIZE YOUR OWN PROMISE AS AN ARTIST. NO ONE ELSE WILL DO IT FOR YOU.

These computer recording rigs need to serve music again. It is just a substitute medium for capturing music to tape. It is not a way to edit past a lack of fundamentals... musicianship, writing, and arranging.

The reason today's recordings don't equal the great recordings of yore, in most cases, is because THEY'RE JUST NOT REAL. In the old days, you had to play the song all the way through to record it. Not anymore. Just don't suck for 30 seconds, copy, and paste! Stop the madness!

What's lacking is not fidelity. IT'S VIBE! Music that is played live has an indefinable thing called vibe. Take U2, for example. Their recordings almost have WIND COMING OFF THEM. There is so much vibe and belief in what they do that you can breath it in off the recording. Same with The Beatles. Same with Stone Temple Pilots or Rage Against the Machine. Same with hip hop innovators like Outkast.

They have craft. Without craft, there is no art. Art is defined after you die, and then you don't get to enjoy it yourself anymore. The empire doesn't care about craft. It cares about 'product.' The people who are buying into the whole karaoke revolution, as I like to call it, think that just being them makes them an 'artist.' Instant gratification. "I'm going to sing 'Wind Beneath My Wings" slightly off key on national television and become the next Pop Idol!"

What the $#Q@%$$#@%? The arrogance of that mentality is mind-boggling.

I mean, has anyone gone out and bought the Rick Rubin-produced Johnny Cash acoustic albums or Abbey Road? What about Dark Side of the Moon? They'll humble anyone. That's the benchmark. People need to pay closer attention to ALL THE COMPETITION, not just the competition from last week's lip synching contest.

Where does this leave us? Well, turn on NPR (National Public Radio). There is a worldwide movement of artists in all genres who are returning to core fundamentals... songwriting, musicianship, arranging, producing, performing... This underground is growing. The recordings are getting better. The Internet streaming capability for video and audio is off the chart fast.

The barbarians are at the gate. Visit us on www.digitalcafetour.com and join the revolution.

I'm over and out.