Last week, Frontline turned its eye toward the music business. Titled “The Way the Music Died,” it was one of those shows that raised fascinating questions, making the viewer ponder the relation between industry economics and the cultural forms of popular culture. It was also a major piece of nostalgic Baby Boomer nonsense. For beneath the interviews with industry analysts and a hard-headed look at ownership trends lay a disturbingly simple thesis: media conglomeration and attendant obsession with short-term profit in the form of the hit single has sapped music of the kind of soul it once had in, say, the 1960s.
The parade of talking heads in the piece is almost a Christopher Guest film: Simon Cowell-like Brit music exec; limited-talent Avril/Jewel/Gwen-wannabe singer songwriter trying to break in the business, waxing on about her “artistic statement”; her beatniked father, whose own moment of glory was in a Monkees-like TV show band; and a Guns-and-Roses-meets-Stone-Temple-Pilots band called Velvet Revolver with Strokes haircuts.
Amid these, David Crosby most clearly articulated the argument of the show.
When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records….
[MTV] changed it from being about the music to being what you look like. And that was a terrible blow to music. Because now you got all these people who look great, and can’t write, sing or play. It doesn’t matter that Britney Spears had nothing to say and is about as deep as a birdbath.
Where to begin tackling this kind of argument? For starters, its historical memory is mighty selective. Hit singles (and the pretty people who sing them) have always been a mainstay of the industry and no more so than in the 1950s and 60s. If anything needs to be explained, it’s not the rise of the hit, radio-ready single, but rather the rise of album-oriented popular music. From folk through counter-cultural rock to prog rock and AOR, the album’s heyday was certainly an important development but now seems anomalous. Even if you look at the top 20 chart in 1967, Summer of Love, you get “To Sir, with Love” (#1), “Daydream Believer” (#6), Nancy & Frank Sinatra’s “Something Stupid” (#7), and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes off You” (#12). One might well prefer these to Britney Spears (then again, maybe not), but at the time they represented Tin Pan Alley’s grip on the charts against the self-conscious artistry of the counter-culture. The best one could say about much of the rest of the chart was that the songs were the radio-friendly, even bubble-gum, entries from otherwise serious rock bands. The Box Tops, the Association and Strawberry Alarm Clock knew that producing hits was necessary for survival. Pace Crosby, record companies have always been bottom-line driven.
And it’s in contrast to the 60s that the show’s thesis of decline has to play out. The intervening decades don’t enter at all. For instance, shots of CDs at Walmart selling for six bucks are meant to show that sales are down and the industry is in crisis. Well, maybe it is, but I remember cut-out bins at the K-mart in the early 80s, or at Tower Records in the 90s. What’s new now?
But beyond its casual approach to history, the worst offender in the piece is its facile anti-corporate rhetoric. Popular music is what it is because of its commodified form. Or, more precisely, because of the dialectic between commodified form and the authenticity (of performance, personality or subculture) that exceeds or resists the mass-produced commodity. The aura that adheres to the music star (much like the movie star) and to the form of the vinyl record or compact disc owes its life to music’s mass distribution. And the evolution of popular music has been a continual subversion of the mass reproduction. Fans develop cult favorites, independent labels crank out 7″ singles many steps removed their hit counterparts, street performers and studio producers alike sample old records. Of course, formulating the issue in that way doesn’t say too much about a specific genre or historical moment, why highly generic rock or pop satisfies some audiences at some moments and seems insufficient to others at different moments. But that would be a worthy subject for Frontline.
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