burying the dead, part i

Warren Zevon died Sunday. This was not very much of a shock, as he had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer a year ago and had only expected at that point to live three more months. But he made it this long, and he got to see both the release of the album he had fought to make through his illness and the birth of his grandchildren. This sounds maudlin, I know, but I do find it genuinely touching. He was a very good musician and, from all accounts, a very kind human being, and he will be widely missed.

He is also, however, signed to the label for which I work, and that last album, The Wind, came out a week ago today, an event which I had some small part (quite small, really) in bringing about. And so I find myself in the midst of a rare-yet-common situation--the record label putting out product to, in some ways, capitalize on the death of an artist--one I've always been kind of fascinated by, and I thought I might give a try at writing about that situation in a way that might turn up some tidbits for people who wonder how the music industry works, and just how exploitive it really is. No idea how this will turn out (reportage not being the most common function of this blog, as we know), but hey, I'll give it a try.

+++++

First, some background: you may want to read the AMG entry on Warren, which probably gives a better summary of his career than I could. After signing to Artemis, he put out Life'll Kill Ya and My Ride's Here (the latter of which featuring collaborations with a number of authors), which each sold somewhere between 50k and 100k units. Like a decent proportion of Artemis artists--the Pretenders, Steve Earle, the Fugs--I liked how he made music more than the actual music that was made. He seemed a theoretical compatriot to Randy Newman, except he hadn't gone down the schmaltz path Newman's taken in recent years, and in that he felt a lot like one of my other favorite working-songwriter kind of bands, Fountains of Wayne. Which is not to say I thought the music was bad--I just realized it wasn't really to my taste, but was probably very good for other people.

Then the news came out that he had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, but he was going to try and make one more album before he died. And he set to it. There was an embarrassing stretch there when Artemis didn't have any money and so couldn't pay his studio costs, but we got through it. Warren and Dave Letterman had been friends for a long time, and he taped an episode of the Late Show in October 2002 in which he was the only guest. The episode itself is pretty moving if you get a chance to see it.

And then, a week ago, the record came out. It was a strange situation. The whole thing was preceded by a whole lot of press coverage, including a VH1 special on the making of the album, and so anticipation was running pretty high. Warren was still alive at the time, and so presumably he got to see the great early numbers come in (it ended up going into the charts at #16, I think). But then on Sunday he died.

I'm searching for some sort of parallel here. Certainly if there's anything I've learned from working at Artemis it's that while older, established artists have a pretty steady sales base, it takes something mysterious for a particular album to get attention, and that mysterious thing is "making a good album" only 25% of the time; indeed, it can be hard to tell when an older artist has made a great album, because it's so often overlooked. One thing that can happen, of course, is experimentalism or a big shift in their sound--Westerberg going electronic, Byrne's genre-hopping, etc. Another thing is when a new release happens to coincide with a critical reappreciation of a band's older work--c.f. the recent Sparks revival, or Neil Young's album with Pearl Jam, which is kind of a combination of the two criteria. And, of course, there's always the old reliable standby: death. But this situation isn't really like that of Joey Ramone or Joe Strummer or Tupac or Jeff Buckley or...well, you get the idea. There's not a whole lot of people who knew about their illness and their impending death and used it to make one last album, and lived to see its release. In other words, the album itself is made with the awareness of mortality very much in mind, and the post-death sales spike comes at roughly the same time as the album's release.

I actually heard the news from the Pitchfork newswire just before leaving for work on Monday morning, but when I went in there wasn't any noticeable change in attitude, although I guess this could have something to do with the fact that it was Monday morning. The first indication was when I heard some people in the promo department talking about needing to up manufacturing and shipments, but this had been sort of a problem all along: through the distributor's tentativeness, we hadn't had enough product to actually fill orders. It had already been looking like it was going to be a good seller, but now it looked sure to go gold. But still, not much chatter. And then some e-mails started to come in.

This, from a industry mag editor:

I just want send all of you in the Artemis and Zevon families my deepest, most sincere condolences on Warren's passing. While we were all expecting it, that does not change the sense of loss you must feel - his fans feel it too. Fortunately, we have all that wonderful music to fill the void.

Now, while I appreciate the condolences, this was a weird thing to hear; I'm sure all of his family and friends were deeply affected by the news, but most of us didn't really know him; he was an efficient but independant artist who lived on the opposite coast anyway, and we didn't hear much from him. Certainly no one around the place seemed sad per se.

This, from the radio promo guy at Artemis:

Just wanted everyone to know that 104.3 is doing periodic dj mentions of Warren. They just put a caller on the air that related a personal listening experience with Warren, and then they played "Excitable Boy". The morning show host, The Radio Chick, also did a similar tribute. One of their star DJs, afternoon jock Ken DaShow, is planning a Warren tribute for today with past clips and various tracks.

The radio calls and well wishes are coming in frequently.

And this, from a listener of said radio station (forwarded to us by the station's PD):

Talk about feeling old. I am 45 and have no children so I guess I can stay in denial. Last week I went into the local FYE (one of those chain stores in the mall selling music, videos etc.)to get the new Warren Zevon CD and I couldn't find it with all the other new releases so I asked one of the teenagers who work there where it was and asked me"who is Warren Zevon and is he popular" I proceeded to tell him I think he is popular and the CD was just released. He asks me how to spell the name, so he brings me over to the area where it should be (not with the new releases mind you) and there it is. So I tell this youngster "there it is" and he tells me "you know I been look at his face and he look really out of it" so I told him "he's dying. The kid says oh and walks away. I didn't think I was that out of touch. I have niece and nephews and one nephew is into Ossie Osboure and Black Sabath and he is 17 and my 22 year old niece goes to Bruce Springsteen concerts. Don't these parents teach their children about the classics of Rock. But any way Warren well be missed. I have been lucky enough to have seen him at the Beacon and the Stone Pony and loved it. As long as we have our memories and CDs Warren Zevon will live on.

So it all feels a little weird, and a little dirty, this making a cash machine of the dead, even though it's hardly as if we forced Warren to make the album. And given the increased attention that results from an artist's death, there's bound to be increased public interest, and it seems well and good to feed that interests. Certainly on a selfish level Artemis was not doing so hot, business-wise, and so a hit record would be an immense help to us and a good indication that a lot of people I like are going to remain employed.

And yet, it still feels a bit wrong. Maybe it's that unique timing I remarked on above--the fact that this isn't the way it usually happens. It's not as if the death happened and then a few months later an exploitive compilation comes out, as happened with the post-Strummer Clash comp or any of the other innumerable examples I'm sure you can think of. This was instantaneous: even as he died, the product was already on the shelves. It feels orchestrated, even though it's not; it feels like we're taking advantage of a situation even though we're really just doing our jobs, doing what we would have done anyway, doing right by the artist and his family.

I can honestly tell you that I never thought I'd say this, but it makes the first verse of Fountains of Wayne's "Mexican Wine" feel really relevant:

He was killed in a cellular phone explosion
They scattered his ashes across the ocean
The water was used to make baby lotion
The wheels of promotion were set into motion

I get that feeling a lot when I think about The Wind, the wheels of promotion being set into motion. It's just automatic, a natural reaction. Any death that's interesting sets off a round of storytelling that's inevitably connected with commerce these days, and that's both forgivable (because it allows the narrative to spread) and dastardly (because the source of the narrative is outside the teller; the body is dissolved and cannot benefit but can only be used). Any product that's associated with that death takes on a special meaning, even if there's no tangible difference--all of Warren's Artemis albums were heavily concerned with mortality.

What's maybe incidental to this but maybe also very important is that it's unclear if this album is really any better than his other two Artemis albums; certainly it would be hard to say that it's 10 times better, which is about the sales difference we're going to see. But I guess it doesn't matter, because as long as Warren's out there, that's what's important.

Maybe.

More on this story as it develops--maybe.

ADDENDUM: Didn't mean to imply that no one at Artemis was touched or saddened to a greater or lesser degree by Warren's death; I'm sure some folks were. I just didn't talk to anyone who was, or, really, who brought it up at all; it was kind of this thing you weren't really supposed to talk about, it felt like. Of course, this may be a function of the fact that Artemis has kind of "cleaned house" in the last 6 months, and there are really only 8 employees left who were there even when the last Zevon album came out. Hard to say. But at any rate, I'm definite that some folks there were definitely quite saddened by the passing, although as I say, the expectedness softened the impact noticably.
posted by Mike B. at 8:10 PM 0 comments

Funny-slash-annoying bit in the Onion interview with PJ O'Rourke:

Well, I think in the Clinton era, if people hadn't been spending vast amounts of time attacking Clinton, they would have found that they had essentially the same problems as they do now. It is very hard now to shock people into thinking about government regulation and the extent of government involvement in life... about fundamental Hayekian ideas. Ever read any [Friedrich] Hayek? He's great. The Road To Serfdom is like... I'm not a big political-science reader, but I actually dog-eared my copy. I ended up going back through it and writing a précis, I was so impressed by this book. It's all about what happens when government tries to make everything right. I mean, Hayek is not protesting that things like child labor and stuff are good. He's just trying to show that when government undertakes to make everything good for everybody, this is what happens. And he addresses it to socialists of all parties. It was written during WWII, and basically it's an anti-Nazi, anti-communist thing, but also it's an anti-Conservative and anti-Labor-party thing aimed at the British. He was an Austrian, writing in Britain. And I feel like now, I guess, everybody pays lip service to libertarian—and, indeed, many conservative—ideas, and yet they keep moving forward with an increasingly bureaucratic state. It shows itself in all sorts of little ways. I'm not screaming about injustice here, or gulags. I buy a tractor two years ago, and four-fifths of the tractor manual is about not tipping over, not raising the bucket high enough to hit high-tension wire... not killing yourself, basically. The tractor itself is covered with stickers: Don't put your hand in here. Don't put your dick in there. And in that manual, I found out—and it cost me a thousand dollars—that when the tractor is new, 10 hours into use of the tractor, you have to re-torque the lug nuts. If you don't, you will oval the holes. This is buried between the moron warnings. I never found it. I take the tractor in for its regular servicing, and they say my wheels are gone. A thousand dollars worth of wheels have to be replaced because I didn't re-torque after 10 hours. How am I supposed to know that? "It's in the manual." You fucking read that manual! You go through 40 pages of how not to tip over! Anyway, that's the world that we seem to be moving into. And just because a society has absorbed these ideas and pays them lip service, anyone who's talking about libertarian ideas and certain basic conservative principles will get people who nod politely and say, "Oh, yeah, we knew that already." It's a pain in the ass.

Yeah, Hayek fans tend to be people who "aren't into political science that much." I wonder why? *cough* Maybe has something to do with, oh I dunno, the fact that most political science kind of disproves Hayek?

It's kind of funny that O'Rourke's main argument against government regulation is a tractor manual (!) that he was too old and lazy to read all the way through. Really, PJ, just because you have a short attention span doesn't mean that the fundamental principles of American government are flawed. Sheesh.

posted by Mike B. at 6:07 PM 0 comments

It's probably unfair to call Elvis' "In the Ghetto," as Anthony Easton does, "racial tourism for social concern and soultions that are not soultions [sic]." In fairness, he's doing this in the context of a it's-bad-but-I-like-it judgment call, but it's still not strictly accurate. The "racial tourism" bit, for instance--Elvis has certainly spent more time with actual real-life black people than, say, the far more politically respectable Beatles, so tourism it probably ain't, and Elvis came from poverty just as desperate as what he's describing here, even if it was the country rather than the city. Sure, there aren't any substantive solutions in the song, but are there any substantive solutions in "What's Going On" or "War" or any other anti-racist power ballad of the era? So if it isn't tourism for Elvis, just as it isn't tourism for the singers of the other songs, then who is it tourism for? Why, the listeners, of course. But there's the problem: I'm not really convinced that the listeners for "In the Ghetto" are any more culpable than the listeners for "What's Going On" (just to pick a random representative). Ostensibly the latter had a larger black audience, but given Elvis' sales numbers, you're going to have to show me some hard evidence to back that one up--did not a single black person (some living "in the ghetto," even) hear this song and/or respond to it? The point is that if you're arguing about efficacy, telling a group of people about conditions they're already aware of (the idealized black audience) probably isn't as valuable as imparting this information to a new group of people. So by this standard the white audience, the "tourists," are the ones that matter, and all are equally touristy, even if I'm not altogether sure that the white audience for "What's Going On" was more ignorant of social inequalities than the white audience for "In the Ghetto."

It's the same set of issues that plague the old canard of "multicultural literature"--awareness-as-pity, "The Man of Sentiment," turning your individualist experience generalist in order to represent a particular ethnic/racial/social group and in doing so essentially playing to the expectations and prejudices of outsiders, who are the intended recipients of any such missive. Even if, say, Sula or Woman Warrior or something by Sherman Alexie (who's way better if you just read everything he writes as a parody, incidentally) wasn't written in order to exploit stereotypes of a particular group, once it finds a wider audience it's easy to read it that way. It's like the old semiotics fable that any tribal language you can learn cannot, by definition, have been a "secret" language, because those are never told to outsiders. It's the multicultural version of an indie-rock sellout. The text loses its mystical quality of "authenticity" in the retelling. So by one standard, no group can ever really know anything about another group, because any successful communication will inevitably be couched in terms of the receiving group, and the teller himself will be tainted by this knowledge of how to speak the language of the receiving group, so no communication is really possible. On the other hand, Japan closes itself to outsiders for centuries and stagnates, only becoming a fully realized nation once it takes on the painful task of adjusting to the outside world, with much internal resistance. So you see this with the argument that certain forms of hip-hop (both the wildly mainstream and a certain branch of the underground) is illegitimate because too many white people listen to it and it's simply confirming their prejudices, either of a hard, alien "ghetto" life or the "magical mystical nigger" who has a special knowledge/coolness/etc. And despite my natural impulse to reject this simple-minded condemnation, I gotta say that I would be pretty eager to support this argument when made against a lot of the more mainstream multiculturalist lit, which seems simply designed to inspire pity in guilty liberals and middle-class white women watching Oprah, which is a whole other set of issues right there. (In brief, though, I think I hold writing to be a more "pure" genre than music, but I won't attempt to justify that, it's simply my kneejerk response.) So it's a difficult issue. We're not supposed to regard "In the Ghetto" as authentic because it's sung by a white man who rose up from poverty and has a weakness for cheesy arrangements, but we are supposed to regard "What's Going On" as authentic despite the fact that it's well-loved by white people with no experience of racial suffering?

But let's get back to that Beatles comparison. Like I say, the Beatles are regarded as far more sophisticated artists than Elvis, especially in terms of their political views. But the closest thing the Beatles ever wrote to an anti-racist song is "Blackbird," and while that may have more of a gauze of authenticity (ooh finger picking!), I don't think you could really consider it a more specific or political or even accurate song than "In the Ghetto," because while it has some nice images, it's not really saying anything. Which is fine--don't get me wrong, it's a good song--but the fact is, the Beatles were less political artists and more social critics. And if the worst excesses of the former would be a bunch of teenage hardcore kids doing amelodic songs in which they scream about globalization, the worst excesses of the latter could be something like a criticism of the color schemes of fast food franchises and their deadening effect on the human spirit. So while I'm pretty firm in my opposition to a lot of the expressions of "political music," I think the only reason social criticism doesn't take more heat is because it doesn't really take any chances; at worst, you can call it vapid, but not really offensive or strident. And I don't really think this makes it better.

Thus the argument could be made that the reason "In the Ghetto" sounds so bad to us today is because it truly was a political pop song, one that only had relevance in the time it was placed. So just as we wouldn't criticize elements of JFK's political platform as being irrelevant to us today or ignorant of current social conditions, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge something for which we weren't, after all, the intended audience.

At any rate, criticizing country music for writing songs that pity black people is sort of weird, since a lot of what country does already is pity white people. The pity is not a special treatment they're getting; it's just an effort, arguably, to make the issue relevant to the audience at hand.

posted by Mike B. at 11:48 AM 0 comments

Monday, September 08, 2003

Thanks to the fine denizens of wallace-l, I discover that John Taylor Gatto, the author of that dumb Harper's article about the American Publick School System, has a website that features some other articles about the evils of compulsory education etc.

posted by Mike B. at 5:56 PM 0 comments

Two things I have learned from listening to soft-rock radio at lunch:

1) The groove for Phil Collins' "You Can't Hurry Love" is pretty much the same as the groove of Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life."

2) The pre-chorus in Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It" is pretty much the same as the chorus of R.E.M.'s "Finest Worksong." (Except for the words, of course.)

Make of it what you will.

posted by Mike B. at 3:36 PM 0 comments

As I figured, the other major labels are not following UMG's lead, price-wise.

AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group, the nation's second-largest music company, says it won't match market leader Universal Music Group's plan to cut its CD prices as much as 30% on Oct. 1.

"We're always looking at our pricing policies, but have no specific plans to do something similar at this time," says Warner spokeswoman Dawn Bridges.

[...]

While UMG is making headlines with its price plan, Sony Vice Chairman Sir Howard Stringer said Thursday that Sony Music will challenge online song sales by Apple and Microsoft — and online pirates — with its own online music store for Sony devices this spring.

"We believe in maximizing the opportunities for people to enjoy music by making networks much friendlier places to visit and easier to obtain music from — in a legal manner," Stringer says.

posted by Mike B. at 2:29 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 07, 2003

Bit of a fallacy here:

But other Democrats argue that the appetite for homey anecdotes might prove limited in an election taking place against a backdrop of threats from abroad and a weak economy at home. And some suggested that voters might be recoiling from an excess of personal information that marked Mr. Clinton's years in Washington, and are looking for less confessional candidacies, which may account for some of early success of Dr. Dean..

"Howard's life is an open book, but frankly he thinks what people are more interested in is how he's going to improve their lives, rather than where he grew up and where he went to school," Steve McMahon, a senior adviser to Dr. Dean, said. "He thinks it's much more relevant and important to people to understand what he thinks the president is doing wrong for the country."

Well, I guess it might be more relevant than talking about your po' childhood, but it's still not particularly relevant, especially compared to, you know, stating your actual policy proposals. After all, a Democratic Presidential candidate criticizing the Republican President is about as surprising as the leaves changing color in the fall; both might provoke a justified emotional reaction, but they're not really "relevant" or "important."

As you can probably tell, I haven't been as up on the politico blogs lately, but FWIW I really haven't seen any of this kind of positivism from Dean--the "vision thing," if you will. Not that it's there in any other candidates either, really (and the current moderate wet-dream of Wesley Clark seems to be mostly lusted after because he can "nail" Bush on national security), but it's worth remembering that Bush was elected on a sort of "vision-oriented" version of the political; his actual life story kind of sucks, but put in vague terms, it seemed to work pretty well.

posted by Mike B. at 2:36 PM 0 comments