Industry and identity

What happens when it's all biz and no music?

by Jon Garelick

Given all the current handwringing about the state of the music business, it's hard to resist the temptation to say, "The music business deserves to die." In fact, the current shakeout may ultimately do the music business some good. It may all be a matter of waiting for "the next big thing," as Time magazine suggested. Or it may be a matter of trying expressly to make that thing happen -- which would require a degree of patience that the record industry, by its nature, never seems to have. Maybe, if the music just sucks right now, the industry's partly to blame -- and always has been.

The last big boom came with the late-'80s CD revolution, and there are those who argue that the back-catalogue phenomenon has been inflating record-industry figures ever since. Only now, those analysts say, when folks have pretty much replaced all their old vinyl, has the shaky foundation of the business revealed itself. Take the comments of Danny Goldberg, president of Mercury Records, who fantasized to the New York Times's Neil Strauss, "Soon there will be a multimedia product that we will sell for $20 or $25. And I'll go back and buy Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited for the ninth time." Goldberg is assuming that there won't be any new equivalents to Highway 61. All the good music has been made, and the only thing that will save the industry is repackaging and reselling it. (Goldberg, by the way, once managed Nirvana.)

In truth, for a "growth industry," the record business is remarkably averse to research and development. "In most fields, the industry invests in research," the composer George Russell told me a few years ago. "And to a certain extent the music business used to. It doesn't any more. It's interested only in what's of immediate value. When that's no longer valuable, it's terminated. But in the old days, it wasn't like that. They didn't can people because they sold a small amount. They knew what they had. Billie Holiday didn't sell that much. And if she did or if she didn't, they kept her."

In the alterna-rock era, indie labels served the R&D function, finding and developing acts like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Dinosaur Jr, and, before them all, R.E.M. But now the majors are gobbling up the indies with dubious co-ownership and distribution deals -- because that's where the hits are supposed to be. And expectations for new bands have gone completely out of whack. A year ago in this newspaper, Matt Ashare pointed out how (in a trend that R.E.M. wrought long before Nirvana) bands like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü got signed on the basis of strong-by-indie-rock-standards sales and then were expected to crash through to the big time. That's been the expectation for any band signed to a major since -- just ask Belly, Fuzzy, and Throwing Muses.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with being a "small" band -- whether that means coasting on unacceptable major-label sales figures of 30,000 (huge in indie terms) or simply being the neighborhood Saturday-night dance band (or Friday-night garage band). But creative surges come with commercial surges, and they generate an energy that the rest of the music, and the rest of the culture, feeds off.

Whether he specifically envisions dollar signs or not, an artist who communicates in pop terms wants an audience. And the visionary artists naturally seek a large audience because, whether they're aware of it or not, they see society not in terms of "formats" but in terms of larger social realities. Krist Novoselic recalls the making of Nevermind as inseparable from the reality of the Gulf War, which was fuming half a world a way while the album was being recorded. These "current events" were never mentioned in the album's oblique lyrics; they informed it nonetheless. There will always be useful artists happy to play for the neighborhood Saturday-night dance, but the great stuff reaches beyond locale and genre despite itself -- X's tightly rendered vision of a recession-era Los Angeles ("The World's a Mess, It's in My Kiss"), the Sex Pistols' vision of the last gasps of a liberal-government UK, even Talking Heads' vision of a fucked-up art scene in Providence, Rhode Island.

And the rule for good business in the music-industry remains what it was when Albert Grossman (then managing Bob Dylan) laid it out for Columbia Records: follow the artist. As described by Fred Goodman in Mansion on the Hill, this was the same Columbia Records that barely had the patience to let Bruce Springsteen get to his third album. If this guy's so great, where are the hits? Then as now, good art makes good business, and the powers at Columbia deigned to issue Born To Run.

It's up to the visionaries to transform our idea of what pop can mean. Will Friedwald has documented how in the late '40s, Frank Sinatra and big-band leader Artie Shaw were willing to resist the novelties of the Your Hit Parade radio-show era. In 1948, Friedwald recounts, Sinatra was singing the "Too Fat Polka" while "The Woody Woodpecker Song" was topping the charts (the "Lump" and "Just a Girl" of their day!).

At the same time, Sinatra was waging a war to save his career by fighting his record company to record better material. He and Shaw (working independently) focused their repertoire on the show tunes of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hart, and others -- material that would come to be known as "The Great American Songbook." Friedwald argues convincingly (In Sinatra! The Song Is You, which Scribners published in 1995) that these songs became standard in large part because Sinatra sang them. And recorded them on one carefully arranged "concept" album after another. Sinatra and Shaw were driven to create this new standard repertoire of American popular song for both artistic and commercial reasons. They searched for quality, for artistically viable material, because their commercial viability depended on it. "The music business . . . must give people things that move them emotionally and make them laugh, too," Sinatra said. "But we're not doing it, and there's something wrong someplace." (Shaw, in fact, quit the music business -- more than once -- in disgust.)

The music business has continued to go through its fallow periods, creative and commercial, since Sinatra's early days. Greil Marcus recalls the few years just before the appearance of the Beatles, the nadir being Jimmy Gilmer's "Sugar Shack" in 1963, "the number one song of the year and perhaps the worst excuse for itself rock and roll had yet produced. Rock and roll -- the radio -- felt dull and stupid, a dead end." Marcus also recalls that "the excitement, the sense of being caught up in something much bigger than one's own private taste, had disappeared from rock years before."

Michael Freedberg argues elsewhere in this special section that the death of alterna-rock doesn't necessarily toll the death of the music industry. In fact, he says, other genres are thriving, and he cites Celine Dion as a pop phenom who's nurtured her career carefully, building it over a period of years, choosing material wisely, conquering the Francophone countries and, finally, America. This would be more encouraging news if it did bode well for the music industry as a whole. But the current sales figures for America indicate a loss overall. So it's not that people are defecting from Pearl Jam to go over to the Celine Dion camp; it's that they're disappearing from the record stores entirely.

Part of pop's meaning comes from its power to send cross-generational and cross-genre shockwaves -- the way Nirvana did, or the Beatles, or Dylan, or Elvis, or Chuck Berry. We'll always have the music of the margins: jazz, classical, the inveterate indies, John Zorn. And we'll have our favorite local rockabilly bands. The all-inclusive creative/commercial surges are what keep radio from going dull and stupid.

In rock this year, the biggest thing going creatively is Beck, and as much as I liked Odelay, I haven't put it on in months. All I can do is shop and compare. Nevermind Nevermind, what's out there now that's even as good as the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head (1992)? Hip-hop has become a tribal bore, and everything else is a soundtrack.

Many are looking for the next big thing to come from all the DJs of the electronic world, but for me there's no there there. Cheap samplers have turned amateurs into musicians faster than you can learn a G-chord. And the result is anonymity when what we need, as Jon Pareles has pointed out in the Times, is a music we can identify with. When music becomes anonymous, when its loses its face and body, its live component, well, as Sinatra said, "Something's wrong someplace." Tricky seems to be backing away from his own complex persona (and, as they say, his live shows suck). In fact, as a persona, Björk has more fortitude than all the DJs combined (on Telegram, her remixed voice is sliced and diced, but it's still as robustly Björk as ever).

The "next big thing" may yet bubble from the electronic underground if someone with a pop sense can use it as a means to bring us the news about ourselves, to tell us something we don't already know, or at least weren't aware that we knew (what were Nirvana or the Beatles about if not unfolding realizations?) So as the majors fizzle and sputter, look for the research and development to flourish again in the underground. And hope that when the next thing comes along, the majors have the wherewithal to recognize it. But don't hold your breath. As James Cagney once said about the quickie Hollywood fast-buck productions of his early career, "Talent was not nurtured, it was consumed. If anyone was practicing art, I never saw it."