Mile Zero
No matter where you go, there you are
May 23, 2006
"Bigger than my body"?
The Internet preserves many embarrassing things. For example, this review of my old band in GMU's school newspaper.
Although I am a fan of covers, this was an example of how to do them badly. John Mayer? All I can say is, blame the drummer.
April 11, 2006
Nerd Cred
Pardon me, I'm just being self-congratulatory. A CDM forum reader and blogger likes the Innsmouth Blues:
The phrase "nerd cred in bags" may have to go on my theoretical business cards. Also, note the amusing Photoshop work he crafted for it.
January 4, 2006
Fifteen Minutes
For a short time, Four String Riot was the top result for "solo bassist" on Google, thanks to all those Music Thing links. I'm still no. 2 or 3, depending on how you look at it.
For the record, however, most of the other results are much better musicians than I am, and some of them even beat me at my own game (Steve Lawson, you rock). The Internet has never been much of a filter for quality, obviously.
September 1, 2005
Soul'd Out
David Byrne, frontman for the conflicted and influential Talking Heads, keeps a journal which is much more thoughtful than you might expect from him. My primary experience with Byrne had been through Stop Making Sense, one of the greatest rock movies of all time, and a book about the band called This Must Be The Place. Both of those paint the man as a few mole rats short of a colony, but he sounds quite sane now.
In response to Elliot Spitzer's recent attack on payola, Byrne has this to say (quoted because he doesn't have permanent links):
Soon enough I began to hear stories, but still these didn’t apply to the circle of musicians I moved in. We could pretend that we were immune.
By the mid eighties, when Talking Heads had had some hit singles, the biggest of which was “Burning Down the House”, I got the news. “Burning Down The House” had some serious “indie” promotion money behind it. It got played on some college and other stations without financial prompting, but the jump to “commercial FM”, as I think it is called, was helped by cash and whatever else was used at the time — probably coke and women.
The band was in the midst of a tour, the one that was eventually filmed as Stop Making Sense. As we crisscrossed the continent (due to technical miscalculations this tour never really went to Europe) I could see that audiences were reacting more and more vociferously and positively to this relatively new song. How exciting! But as I began to hear rumors about the promo money being spent to help the song on radio all sorts of thoughts ran through my head.
I wondered if every pop song that had moved me on the radio, from when I was in my teens, had been paid for. Oh jeez! Therefore, other than a few free-form stations around at that time I was being treated like a Pavlovian dog — what I had believed were my subjective passions and discoveries were actually the result of a concerted program to pound certain tunes into my innocent brain. I had been totally manipulated! What I thought were decisions and loves that were mine and mine alone had been planted in my head by sleazy characters I could barely imagine. Free will? Hah! My entire past was called into question. Who am I? Am I not partly what I like? And if those things I like were not completely of my own choosing, then what am I?
Obviously, this insight applied to our audiences as well. And now, with the success of this single, to our own songs! I caught myself thinking to myself, “they APPEAR to be loving this song, but little do they know they’ve simply been manipulated to like it, just like I was manipulated to like the stuff I like!” They don’t REALLY like it all THAT much, I shouldn’t believe what I see. In fact, I began to doubt whether the song was as good as its reception seemed to imply. As a songwriter and musician I of course would like to believe that when an audience shouts for a song it’s because we’ve written something pretty good that touches them in some significant way. The implication is that my fellow musicians and I are pretty talented. We should pat ourselves on the back, be proud, we deserved some of the perks that were coming our way.
Knowing that the song was partly paid for throws all that ego boost material out the window. Ooops, maybe the song is just O.K., and we’re all so easily manipulated that it doesn’t really matter if it’s good or not. And, as well as thinking less of myself, I began to think a whole lot less of our audience. When people would come up to me and say “boy is that a great song, I LOVE that song!” I would be tempted to tell them, “no you don’t, you’ve just been saturated with it and manipulated like the rest of us. You like it because your soul, your likes and dislikes, are up for sale to the highest bidder.”
Cynical stuff.
In case some of you think this only applies to rap or mainstream pop or dance music or whatever you and your friends don’t listen to, think again. Alt rock, the symbol of “integrity” and “authenticity”, along with hip hop, is just as guilty of payola and promotion as the songs of Madonna and J.Lo. There’s a reason you think so-and-so is cool, and the reason has nothing to do with how good it actually is. There’s a reason writers write about certain artists, etc. etc. (The writers and magazines may not have been paid off, but the popularity of something makes it a valid subject, for example.)
It’s not all bad news, though. There’s another side to it. As has been pointed out many times, you can’t make people like a BAD song. You can only get a song across if it really truly does connect to people, if they really truly do like it. What the payola does, from a very very skewed perspective, is simply reinforce what is already desired. What is already good. It weeds out the lame and the sick and dying and helps the strong and healthy. Eugenic cultural filtering, sort of.
That’s a somewhat benign view of it. But it is true that the indie promoters say they won’t take the money unless the song proves it has at least a shot. They can’t promote a total piece of crap — or so they claim. So you can only get away with shoving a couple of lame singles down the public’s throat, and then the radio programmers themselves will probably react — “keep your money, we won’t play it — it will hurt our listenership, they’ll tune out if we play too many lousy songs.” Well, maybe, up to a point. Over time you can get an audience to accept less and less. The bar gets lowered and it’s easier to break songs that are pure bullshit. But let’s believe there are limits below which the marketplace will not sink.
The other problem with the payola system is that it bankrupts the artist. Not always, but very often, these costs — hundreds of thousands of dollars — are recoupable against the artist’s share of the record royalties. If the song clicks and the record sells millions, then no one complains, as money eventually trickles into the artist’s account. But if other things happen — if the song gets plenty of play maybe everyone really likes it too, but no one buys the CD — then the artist will be unlikely to recoup those costs. So maybe the record company tries a second single, with more indie promotion expenses, which indeed may be the one… or it may simply put the poor artist even further in the hole.
So, what to do? I agree with the Times writer that if payola is going to always be with us then at least let’s level the playing field a little. The harm the present arrangement does is that it locks out artists and labels whose songs are just as good, if not better, than what is getting played, but can’t afford the payments. Things succeed partly on worth, but partly on cold hard cash. It would be nice if worth had a chance on its own every once in a while.
It would also be nice if these hidden costs were less hidden — if the artist were apprised of what was going on in his or her name and had to sign off before incurring substantial debt.
Salon once ran an article by, of all people, Courtney Love, that rambled through the finances of the music industry from an artist's perspective, as well as the whole Napster debacle. It's quite good--I hope she did it herself, and someone didn't have to tell her which end of the pencil to rub against the paper. I'll summarize, since I understand that my Townhall link a few days back may have unavoidably scarred your click reflex:
- Artists don't make nearly as much money as you think they do, because the industry takes all of the recording and promotion expenses out of their fees.
- Even when artists do make money, they still don't legally own their songs. Copyright is at least partially (and often fully) reserved by The Man.
If you're familiar at all with popular musical history, this probably shouldn't surprise you much. The first distinctly American music, the blues (and the rock that followed it) was heavily subsidized on the exploitation of Black artists. It was cheap to search out a blues musician, who was probably playing in dives and capitalizing on his bad reputation for drinks and sex (see: Robert Johnson), record him (or her, see: Bessie Smith), and then turn around to sell the resulting "Race Record" to a hungry white audience. Many of those contracts had a "no-royalty" clause.
Later, during Motown, manufactured music began to hit its stride. The outstanding documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown documents the story of the Funk Brothers, an incredible group of studio musicians who played behind many of the period's hits. The recognition went to the title artist, while the Funk Brothers were paid next to nothing and strung along by their manager. Some of R 'n B's greatest performers, such as pioneering bassist James Jamerson, were underpaid and underrecognized for their role in creating (and in some cases, writing) the Motown sound. Jamerson himself died in poverty shortly after watching someone else mangle the lines he had recorded many years before.
Likewise, when Rock took over, its appropriation of the contributions of Blues artists was legendary. Led Zeppelin was actually sued by Chess Records for theft of songs by prolific bluesman Willie Dixon (15 years after the fact, unfortunately), and later covered a Memphis Minnie song, "When the Levee Breaks" (all too appropriate as Katrina breaks a few Louisiana levees). Of course, White rock artists are not immune to abuse of their intellectual property--note how Paul McCartney was outbid for his own music by Michael Jackson, and now only owns the publishing rights and control over a few early compositions.
But what can anyone do? Clearly, The Man has a stranglehold on the distribution, financing, intellectual property, and (with the growing number of Clear Channel-owned venues) the largest performance opportunities. In these desparate times, it is tempting to call for a revolution: storm the bastards and make them pay! I'm not sure how feasible any of that would actually be: while indie music has made great strides toward respectability and success, it's still very limited. Moreover, much of it is indie for a reason--it would never stand a chance in a local market. And of course, I can't endorse piracy, even though I don't think it objectively hurts the artists. I do believe that musicians should have the right to decide whether their music is on P2P networks, and we should respect that decision (even when it's a stupid one).
Perhaps instead of blockin' the beltway to move on DC (or LA, or Nashville--hold it together, man!), what we really need is transparency on record label operations. After all, nobody forced Hole or the Talking Heads to sign an exploitative contract. But if more artists like these speak up and get the message out, we may see two happy circumstances. The first could be a movement against artist exploitation for marketing and recording, politically and legally. I'd love to see Spitzer or his equivalent take on the structure that's been fattening the cats in the corner offices. The more people know about these abuses, the more support that person will have. We're Americans, we love our rock stars. Second, I want new artists who are signing up to be aware of this, especially as indie artists get smarter and more desirable. I want bands and songwriters to be cognizant of their situation, and to consider whether they really want to relinquish rights to their songs, completely or in part. This is particularly true if it turns out that they won't be making any more money, really, than they were as an independent.
What really touched me about Byrne's post, and also Love's article, is the integral cost of selling your music (in every sense of the word). Both write about being cheapened as artists because of the money being used to push them as a product, not as a creative expression. When you look out over the landscape of popular music today, with its peaks and its valleys, consider whether you want that environment to favor the easily-cheapened and the corruptible. If you're one of the people who flips madly across the radio spectrum until the quartz cracks, tired of nu-metal and pop-punk soundalikes, ask yourself if you really think the system is working. Or, as Byrne said, have we lowered the bar so low that it's practically under our feet? Is the payola system now less about promoting the good, and more about preserving the status quo?
If you're a musician, abandon that dream of hitting it big, until the conversation between artists and suits changes. Stick to your small stages and your day job that pays for the sweet joy of making music. You might not enjoy selling out as much as you think you will.
August 29, 2005
It's all about me! Me!
I'm planning on opening up a domain for posting music and gig announcements (cross-posted here, of course) so people won't have to wade through tons of Electroplankton and bizarre microfiction just to hear my latest bass-only cover of Boyz 2 Men and find out which streetcorners I'll be playing on next. The following is a short list of prospective domain names, not to be confused with a band name. Any preferences?
- fourstringriot.com
- backtobassics.com (along with a whole host of other bass puns, including BassicInstinct.net)
- dejafu.net
- repeatlow.com
- loopunder.com
June 20, 2005
Broken Records
Just for the Madmunk, I offer this lists from the Musicplayer forums as the most overplayed bar band covers of all time. These 17 songs, Tedster's Set List of Doom, could be used for good or evil. Choose wisely!
Wonderful Tonight
Sweet Home Alabama
Old Time Rock and Roll
Mustang Sally
Brown Eyed Girl
Freebird
Gimme Three Steps
Turn The Page
Crazy
Proud Mary
Wipeout
Margaritaville
Friends in Low Places
Boot Scootin' Boogie
House of the Rising Sun
Johnny B. Goode
I'm a little queasy just thinking about it. All I have to add to that are "Red House" or "Hey Joe" by Hendrix (popular with the guitar players for obvious reasons). I'm surprised there are so few Stones tunes that are overplayed (by cover bands, not by radio), but I'm guessing it has something to do with Keith Richards' unconventional tunings.
It will be interesting to see what songs from my generation burn their way onto a similar list.
