Shoving from the Margins: Pop Music and the Fringe
Mat Dryhurst for The Guardian:
I believe that those on the margins would do well to shift focus on to more ambitious and untested fund-generating efforts that emphasise the interdependence of musical communities of place and purpose. We need technical and economic concepts that reflect what working artists have long known to be true: an artist creating challenging work is dependent on resilient international networks of small labels, promoters, publications and production services to facilitate their vision. A vision of interdependence acknowledges that individual freedoms thrive in the presence of resilient networks and institutions. It asserts that even pop stars, and the streaming services that prioritise them, significantly benefit from those on the margins market-testing ideas so that they don’t have to. {…}
We need to acknowledge that those communities, and the sounds they foster, generate value that is impossible to quantify on a spreadsheet. The artist and writer Jon Davies recently invoked the ideal of interdependence to emphasise the role that social music spaces play in combating epidemics of loneliness and depression. As well as enlivening commercial culture with a trickle-up supply chain of new ideas, music on the margins offers many a sense of shared purpose.
As noted in my post about the closing of Red Bull Music Academy, independent music communities — especially those operating on the fringes — may need to adopt collaborative and communal strategies to maintain relevance, rather than relying on corporate patronage. Dryhurst smartly suggests that the health of the experimental edges of the music community is vital for pop culture’s continued evolution. I see his point — current hit songs by some of the biggest names obviously draw upon production techniques that were underground and radical ten years ago. Culture becomes stale without the experimental margins giving it a shove.
🔗→ Band together: why musicians must strike a collective chord to survive
The Olds Are Alright: Dance Music Becomes Generational
Joe Muggs in Mixmag:
Which is more important, though – reinvention or continuity? After all, the purity of scenes that are created for and by youth, with all the energy and absolutism that goes with that, is something special. Whether it’s the teenagers excluded from UK garage who turned their youth clubs into moshpits as they invented grime, or kids in bedrooms across the world cooking up ever more mind-warping memes and post-vaporwave electronic sub-genres that only make sense with total immersion in cultural reference points from K-pop, Cartoon Network and dark web research chemicals, some things absolutely don’t need the input of old farts. There’s a stupendous thrill that comes from hearing kids from Shanghai or Sao Paulo, Jakarta or Johannesburg, smashing together extreme electronics with pop and local sounds with zero respect for the canons and hierarchies of the past.
But at the same time, The Black Madonna [who referenced “the young folks and more seasoned folks sharing space and ideas”] is right. In the space of house-techno-rave that she’s operating in, it’s incredible to have people like her and Honey Dijon, Optimo and Harvey and all the other battle-hardened vets right in the thick of things, bringing the weight of decades of experience to bear on the dancefloor and sharing that with the young guns they play next to. Each new generation that discovers the joys of Kerri Chandler or Photek or Chris & Cosey re-ignites the power of their music.
As one of the above mentioned ‘old farts,’ I love this sentiment, and I’ve also thought a lot about it. We are in a unique place where veteran (a kinder way of saying ‘older’) artists freely mingle and perform with younger, emerging talent. For example, in dance music, some of the biggest draws — and influences — are now 50+. In my DJ heyday — the late ‘90s — this wasn’t the case. Though, granted, the genre was fresher.
I used to think it was good for older artists to step aside and let the young take their seats at the table. But it turns out the different generations are just adding extra chairs. There’s a collaboration between the various ages of artists rather than competition or resentment — a transfer of ideas that encourages innovation while respecting history. And it’s not just the artists — the fans have embraced this generational variety, too. When the 79 years old Giorgio Moroder can release albums and tour with enthusiastic fanfare from the electronic music community, it’s evident that we’ve arrived in a special and respectful place.
🔗→ Never mind nostalgia – we’re living in a golden age of intergenerational partying
I sure wish we had Record Store Day back when I owned a record store. The closest thing I had to Record Store Day was that time that the Orlando Lollapalooza date got canceled. My store — the only indie-rock-catering record shop in downtown Orlando at the time — was flooded with disappointed festival-goers looking for somewhere else to hang out. That was the biggest day of profit in the store’s existence.
Record Store Day is a great idea — in a perfect world, every Saturday would be Record Store Day of course — though many independent labels have serious issues as the event becomes dominated by major labels. Last year Numero Group, for example, blasted the current RSD as an “unwieldy grip-and-bitch fest … lines, fights, flippers, backed up pressing plants, stock shorts, stocking, and pricing at 4
As an independent label owner, I understand these gripes entirely. The now major-label (and major-indie) dominated RSD is mainly a nuisance for the small imprint. I’d instead release a high-profile album a week or two before Record Store Day. That way the shops will (hopefully) have my release in stock already, but I’m not vying for attention with the limited edition Devo boxsets and whatnot.
But as a former record shop owner, I am totally cool with Record Store Day. It was tough to keep the lights on at my store in the early ‘90s. I can’t even imagine how tough it must be now. But I do know that the money earned on Lollapalooza-cancellation day paid our bills for a good month. And it allowed us to take risks on some great new records in the following week’s stock order, too.
Meanwhile, Leor Galil of the Chicago Reader reminds us:
RSD’s founding principle is to support local record stores, but I don’t think such support should be confined to shops that stock RSD special releases. Thrift stores can be great places to buy music, even if they devote only a small fraction of their floor space to it. […]
Secondhand shops … rarely sort or catalog their collections in any way, so that it’s futile to take any approach other than “see what you can see.” Such stores are often the last stop records make before the landfill, and browsing their collections can feel like panning for gold in a sandbox. I don’t mind spending 15 minutes at a Goodwill, though, digging through battered Herb Alpert discs and high school marching-band LPs—the longer I look, the slimmer the chance I’ll find anything interesting, but even the tiniest chance is worth 15 minutes to me.
Though record stores maintain some aspect of discovery, I think customers are a lot more educated before going in
Unimpeded access to new music (via streaming and endless opinion and information online) creates a savvy customer who knows what he or she wants, whether today is RSD or not. I do wonder how many people still ask for recommendations from the geeky clerk behind the counter. “I like crazy modern European jazz … what’s good?” gets replaced by “can you direct me to the new The Comet Is Coming album?”
On the other hand, it’s impossible to go into a thrift store with a record-buying agenda. Though rarely can you ask someone behind the counter for a recommendation, but that’s beside the point. Following Galil’s train of thought above, thrift stores remain frozen, unaffected by streaming, by the internet, by the ups-and-downs of the ‘vinyl revival.’ Just as we did twenty years ago, you go in and hope. You often buy something because the cover looks crazy, not because you went in looking for it (you’re cheating if you call up Discogs on your phone). You’ll take a chance on a record even though it’s got a few deep scratches on side two. And then you take that stack home — whoa, it only cost $7 for all of them — and you put on that one record that makes it all worthwhile. You made a .50 gamble, and it’s the JAM. That’s the spirit of vinyl. Happy Record Store Day!
PS – The above photos were taken this morning by Gary Davis at East West Music & More. Gary got the last copy of the Devo boxset!
PSS – My best thrift store find? I once ran across mint copies of the first several original Telex 12″ singles on the floor of a pawn shop, a quarter a pop.
Marc Schneider in Billboard:
Energy drink maker Red Bull is ending its partnership with consultancy company Yadastar, which oversaw the Red Bull Music Academy and its associated entities, including a radio station, event and festival series and online publication. As a result, RBMA and Red Bull Radio will cease operations in their current forms as of late October, Yadastar announced on Wednesday. […] Whether that means the ultimate end for Red Bull’s foray into radio and other types of music-focused projects Yadastar oversaw remains to be seen. A Red Bull spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Corporate patronage is always tricky, even more so in the current age when ‘brand partnerships’ are how some artists are able to maintain careers freely. But Red Bull’s embrace and support of usually electronic, often uncommercial music didn’t come off like a
Ed Gillett in The Quietus:
… however gentle Red Bull’s advertising may have been on the surface, it’s self-evident that those holding the purse strings would have expected a meaningful return on such substantial investment. RBMA’s vast trove of learning and experience may have functioned as a public good, but it was not incorporated or owned as one – ultimately, if and when it no longer made financial sense to Red Bull’s owners for it to exist, then its importance to a wider community of artists and listeners could never have been enough to save it.
In this, RBMA reveals the uncomfortable truth that many of the most influential nodes in our collective network of globalised underground music, whether news sites subsidised by property developers or streaming platforms funded by venture capital, rely not only on the creative communities who provide their content and create their value, but also on the continued indulgence of wealthy benefactors, whose priorities can and will change. In Red Bull’s case, an expectation of the eternal good will of CEO and owner Dietrich Mateschitz might be viewed as optimistic, given his widely-publicised and noxiously reactionary political views.
Is a reliance on (or an optimistic holding-out for charity from) corporate patronage keeping grassroots artistic communities from forming? What will happen to the community around Red Bull Music Academy? Is it shattered? Will we all go home now that the money isn’t there? Or, more importantly, do we need that money to maintain an influential and productive community?
I look at
Let’s circle back to the high-quality content RBMA, and its contributors, have gifted us. In the paragraph above I mentioned two favorites: the Simon Reynolds article and Sound Obsession show archive. I hope you aren’t reading this after October, clicking those links, and finding dead web pages. That’s another worrying problem — art becomes ephemeral when it’s subject to and owned by a corporate patron. If Red Bull is ready to wash its hands of the expense of artistic charity, what further incentive is there to keep the content online?
Terry Matthew in 5 Magazine:
We like to think that information, which wants to be free, will also propagate on its own: that once released, a document or story will be replicated in so many places that you can never take it down again. The internet is forever, we think – but it’s not. According to a New Yorker story by Jill LePore about the Internet Archive, the average life of a web page is about a hundred days. […]
Carter Maness brought this up four years ago about the fate of thousands of blog posts he’d written while employed by AOL and other media companies. “We assume everything we publish online will be preserved,” he wrote. “But websites that pay for writing are businesses. They get sold, forgotten and broken. Eventually, someone flips the switch and pulls it all down. Hosting charges are eliminated, and domain names slip quietly back into the pool. What’s left behind once the cache clears? As I found with that pitch at the end of 2014, my writing resume is now oddly incomplete and unverifiable.” Maness published this story on The Awl, itself defunct and starting to show visual signs of code decay.
Of course, this isn’t solely a problem of corporate patronage.
🔗→ Red Bull Music Academy, Red Bull Radio to Shut Down
🔗→ What Does Red Bull’s Corporate Exit Means For Underground Music?
🔗→ 404: The Internet Has A Memory Problem
Putting the Puzzle Back Together
… today’s most influential music companies [are] increasingly eating into one another’s core businesses in a bid to grow their prosperity. At the center of this trend are those music-streaming services “doing a Netflix,” i.e., investing money into independent artists to create their own content outside the traditional record-company structure. […]
Streaming services are becoming distributors and, in some cases, record labels. Record labels are becoming streaming services and, in some cases, talent management companies. Talent management companies are becoming record labels, while distributors are having a go at becoming managers. (All of these companies, it appears, also want to become video and/or podcast production houses, but that’s a topic for another article.)
This concept isn’t that different than what a traditional major record label would do 20+ years ago (and, remember, there were more than three ‘major labels’ in those days). A major label would have control of A&R, manufacturing, distribution, publicity, publishing, tour support, and so on. And in some (often self-serving) cases the label would also provide an artist’s manager and legal team.
It’s like in the ‘00s the puzzle got thrown on the floor and scattered into many pieces. Now that it’s being put back together the pieces aren’t quite fitting the same — rather than a label providing management or publishing, the current trend is the manager or publisher starting a record label. But without the capital and influence of the flush-with-money major labels of yesteryear, I wonder if many of these new endeavors are spreading themselves thin. I think we’ll continue to see companies handling two or three of these aspects at a time (i.e., publishing, distribution, and A&R) but I don’t feel the trend of trying to do everything under a single umbrella will yield many successes.
