Icky Thumping

Some radio station leaked Icky Thump, the new White Stripes album, and drew the ire of Jack White. He called the radio station and berated the host for leaking his album. The host had this to say:

At 4pm today, Jack White called Q101’s main offices from Spain, where they’re touring, looking specifically for me, to yell at ME for leaking the album and, in part, being “messed up for the entire (music) business.” (Edit - I listened to the call again today, and I apologize for initially misquoting Jack.) I felt like I was going to throw up. Weirdest, most surreal conversation of my life.?? So Sherman and Tingle were on the air when Jack called. They took the call with me in the studio, off the air. Jack asked me to take responsibility for leaking the record, and asked if I was sorry for what I’d done. S&T both jumped into the call—I was clearly flustered—and backed me 100%. We tried to explain where we were coming from - someone gave us a copy of a record that we were really excited to play, and the whole experience was an hour-long lovefest for him and his band - but he wasn’t having it. He hung up, very, very angry, and I thought I was going to cry. Instead, I drank some beers that the Fix had left in the studio. Room temperature Bud Light. Delicious.¹

Should musicians be upset when their albums leak on the internet and on radio stations? Well it depends. First of all there’s the income issue. Publishing rights from record sales represent a very small portion of a musician’s income. The majority of their income comes from touring.

[I]t is clear that concerts provide a larger source of income for performers than record sales or publishing royalties. Only four of the top 35 income-earners made more money from recordings than from live concerts, and much of the record revenue for these artists probably represented an advance on a new album, not on-going royalties from CD sales. For the top 35 artists as a whole, income from touring exceeded income from record sales by a ratio of 7.5 to 1 in 2002. Royalties from publishing music was slightly less than income from recordings.²

However, the record company who promoted them and put out the CD stands to lose cash, and that’s probably why Jack White is upset, as Third Man Records is his label.

But, what is the real goal of a musician when he or she wants to put out a song? I think most musicians would agree that they’re not just making music to sell as a product–-the point is creative expression, not capital gain. Wouldn’t musicians be better served if as many people as possible heard their work? Surely this would be a better way to generate concert revenue and it would keep the fans happy… if your goal isn’t capital gain. Then again if you’re running a record company, this is bad news bears. Then again, I’m still determined to buy the new White Stripes record, even if I do get a pirated copy.

1. DJ Electra, So Does This Make Me A Pimp And A Prostitute Too?, 30 May 2007 ↩
2. Connolly, Marie, Alan B. Krueger. “Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music.” National Bureau of Economics Research, April 2005 ↩

Mark Elliot Cullen 2 Comments

The Search for Music Snobs

Most music snobs would agree that If you want to hear great music you have to seek it out. Instead of idly sitting by the radio or watching MTV, the music snob of the past would go through old record stores, get recommendations from other music snobs or try to make connections from whatever information is available about the artists in liner notes and the music press. Thanks to the magic of the internet, radio is quickly becoming a dead form, and thanks to poor marketing decisions MTV has stopped playing music.

It has become more and more difficult to mass market music–the top selling albums of today don’t ship nearly the same number of units that were shipped just a few years ago. This phenomena, along with an overall drop in sales, has record companies in a panic. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but one possible explanation could be that the musical taste of the public is diversifying. As everyone moves into their own little niche with the help of genre specific blogs, music magazines, iTunes and organizations like Wikipedia and the Music Genome Project, we are generating more music snobs than ever.

What does it mean to be a music snob? There are lots of great colloquial definitions, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to define a music snob as someone who actively seeks out new music that isn’t always presented on the radio. They also tend to seek out particular niches and genres. The search for this has become easier and easier thanks to the internet.

For example, if I enjoyed the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and I wanted to hear something like it, I could look it up on Wikipedia and read that it’s Glam Rock, British Rock and Bowie. From there I can explore each of these using similar searches and then find similar artists, movements, and albums. Google and Pandora work in similar ways, making niche exploration relatively simple. Plus, the widespread availability of resources like OiNK, Demonoid, ThePirateBay, and iTunes makes acquiring music a breeze. It is easier than every before to become well versed in music of a particular time, place, genre or artist, and so it should come as no surprise that tastes are diversifying.

While this might be interpreted to mean more music snobs are on their way, it also dilutes the elitist pool of music snobbery. It’s difficult to claim elitism when information and product are so easily accessible and because research has become so simple, the value placed on the music recommendations from snobs of similar tastes becomes valueless.

Of course an egalitarian music community of snobs has some serious downsides. Most people, in whatever situation, usually drift towards their comfort zones. In music this could lead to isolation. For example, as a Bowie fan I’d be more likely to pursue Electric Warrior by T. Rex than The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky or Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Since radio is virtually dead and I just read niche blogs, I would miss out on Miles and Igor. As niches grow, exposure to music outside of our comfort zones shrinks and we lose the potential to hear the radically different.

It seems idealistic to believe that people ever really strayed from their niches even on the open dial of the American radio, but as we gain specificity we lose the general picture. Instead of a general listener we have specialists, but a new general listener may already be on the way.

The new beast of snobbery will start to emerge in the place of the old snob. In this week’s Rolling Stone there’s an article about Atlantic executive Ahmet Ertegün who found Ray Charles, Led Zepplin, Bette Midler and Frank Zappa. He was described as a modern day renaissance man who could talk the latest Magic Numbers song or the geopolitical situation in China as fluently as experts. Politics aside, this is the new direction of snobbery–an ear that takes in everything it can hear and seeks out differences rather than similarities. As Jason Hartley (a guy who we constantly reference and steal from) pointed out, Bob Dylan said in Chronicles that there are “no bad songs” and kept his ear open to everything from Roy Orbison to Blind Lemon Jefferson to Blur, all of which he plays on his Radio Show. This approach of liking everything will become the next step for left of center listeners seeking new possibilities. Those who seek a broad spectrum will in turn see all the colors out of focus instead of three hundred and sixty seven different shades of dark forrest green. The challenge for new snobs will be filling in the spectrum and focusing their direction.

Mark Elliot Cullen

Putin’s House of Mirrors

In Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, Ash (Bruce Campbell), while hiding in a cabin to escape the onslaught of undead demons, consoles himself in front of a mirror, repeating the words, “I’m fine… I’m fine.” Shockingly, Ash’s reflection literally jumps out of the mirror and grabs the “real” Ash, shouting, “I don’t think so! We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw. Does that sound ‘fine’?”

I recently read another article in The New York Times about Vladimir Putin’s (alleged—but practically assured) nefarious scheming with regard to the Litivenko case, an absolutely ridiculous web of intrigue that could only have been pulled from the best things Ian Flemming ever wrote (seemingly evoking the old Hollywood catchphrase, “so real it must be fiction.”). Numerous other newspapers such as The Economist and The Guardian have also done an acceptable job of covering the ominous and foreboding direction Russian democracy has been headed recently, but there is something almost banal about their analyses, a key piece of the puzzle missing, relying instead on tired Cold War clichés (like the worst of what Ian Flemming wrote) (such as The Economist’s Pining for the cold war or The New York Times’ From Moscow, a New Chill) and pseudo-Leftist humanitarian pleas to emphasize the significance of the authoritarian turn, i.e., the arrest of Garry Kasparov, censorship of major media networks, and now the poisoning of an ex-KGB dissident.

What these articles have done is treated Putin’s political scheming as if they’re somehow wholly separate from the international political sphere, part of some other bizarre dimension that only Russians can understand. To borrow terminology from modal logic, a subject lacking any predicate. Thus, causation seems to be swept under the rug of Cold War dreams, a sort of secret longing, a nostalgia, for simpler times. Times when our enemies not only had names and faces, but were easily identifiable and had ambassadors to call, politicians to speak to, a designated country to bomb—the good old days. Now our enemies live in caves on the outskirts of Afghanistan-Pakistan and use our very own instruments of modernity as weapons against us, perhaps the ultimate absurdly ascerbic twist of irony.

The abandonment of the predicate seems to tacitly place the blame of Russia’s democratic failure on its people, perhaps for a loss of vigilance or just pure laziness (we’re never explicitly told), which is an analysis rife with smug Western decadence that is ostensibly at the root of Putin’s angst (or Angst?). We should venture a far simpler and less ridiculous hypothesis, which is that Russia’s turn from democracy to authoritarianism, marked by Putin’s consolidation of power, can and must be read through the lense of the failure of U.S. hegemony.

Rather than being some independent phenomenon, Russia’s turn is not a step backwards in time, a revival of the Cold War corpse from beyond the grave akin to a Stephen King novel or George Romero film, but part of a new phenomenon following in the wake of the woefully misguided Second Gulf War. Putin’s stance is thus: “If the U.S. has the power to act without recourse (his exact words were, ‘almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations’) and chooses to do so, I must therefore consolidate power as a counterbalance to U.S. hegemony.” Putin’s New Russia is therefore an alternative to the modernity offered by the U.S.’s current Straussian-based neo-conservatism, which has failed to an astounding degree.

Thus, in Russia, we as Americans see something highly disturbing, something that we know we see, but are afraid to speak of. It’s the thing that The Economist and The New York Times are not able to explicate from themselves, which is why all articles on Russia and Putin have this bizarre dissonance—the missing piece, so to speak. The missing piece is that Russia itself is a mirror through which we see ourselves. It is the mirror in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II. We sit in front of a mirror, spouting things we don’t know we know are lies (or, as Vonnegut might have said, foma), when a seemingly distorted version of ourself actualizes from the ethereal interspace. This is our Real self—our democracy and society in all its twisted, unspeakable horror. It is the NSA wiretappings, Guantanamo torture camps, John Edwards’ haircut and Alberto Gonzalez’ left hand of darkness revealed from behind the wall of perception that we as Americans can, but choose not, to penetrate. In that regard, isn’t it interesting that Democracy carries the same potential as Communism to be gutted like a fish and then danced around like a soulless marionette? Is what is happening in Russia just a slightly more distorted alternative to what is already happening here in front of us? If so, and if we still feel comfortable blaming the Russian people for their support of Putin (he has, since the Iraq War, maintained a practically steady 80% approval rating¹), is this not an indirect condemnation of ourselves? (And though Bush is not faring well in the polls lately, it is, tragically, not for the reasons it should be.)

Therefore, Putin’s house of mirrors is unlike that of those found in Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai or Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon, an obfuscated battle in a hellish netherworld pined for by Cold Warriors (though Putin is, to be fair, a sixth dan black belt in Judo), but instead a very obvious reflection of what America’s identity Really is (or translates into). It is reminescent of something Slavoj Zizek wrote about right after 9/11, but I think it can be applied to Putin just as easily: “Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to remember the Hegelian lesson: In this evil Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence.”²

1. The Age, Tide of anti-US sentiment rises in Russia, 8 Apr 2003 ↩
2. Slavoj Zizek, The Desert of the Real, 29 Oct 2001 ↩

Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment