Music/ marketing/ Book covers
I guess I shinedboxed someone with the little bit about Gnarls Barkley two posts ago.
First off, maybe this is a good point to clarify what I am going to be doing more often with the purpose of the writings. I am going to start focusing on media and it’s symbiotic effect on us as a culture. The My Generation posts are going to become more frequent, and I’m going to work more on the impacts of shows and music, from how it plays, to who and how it is marketed, and some of the connections between. Ranging from the idiotic appeal of Deal or No Deal, the Teflon power of American Idol and why American Dreamz failed, and the growth of our Generation as boomer culture fades away. Also, comments will be turned off on some of these. If you want to say something, my email's available. Save the jokes for the casual posts.
I will also put up more short fiction and a few more jokey stuff. And of course plenty of youtube clips and tons of emo and Fallout Boy jokes.
+++++
If I had any intent of making a social commentary, I would have expanded it, and I perhaps should have.
What I wrote. “This is probably the least Ghetto album from a “Major Black (American) Artist” in years.
I guess my first mistake was prefacing it with the type of music line, and how this is everything I love about the genre. The type of music was referring to Funk/soul, not to rap, not to “black, urban” music. I have said before I think the best period in pop music history was the Motown Years, not the British Invasion. There was much more albums, singles, and singers that are in the canon than the four years. And the evolution of Motown became funk, which was integrating rock and roll. Rock is blues based; funk is Motown based, and the Gnarls Barkley is the first major label funk release I can think of since Robert Randolph and his Family Band, at the first to get significant airplay since maybe D’Angelo (who I think gets more attention because he is a R&B / Funk hybrid). While I don’t actively search out enough funk, when a big release like this comes out, I’m giddy because adds another dimension to radio airplay and keeps me away from my Ipod or talk radio. Make no mistake, we need more of this, not just more “funk’ per say, but less of the same which we normally get and the less modern radio sounds like classic rock radio and expanding it’s play list, the better the public music scene gets.
I probably should have also referred to it as a release and not an album, because I wasn’t talking about the music itself, beyond the first song. I was referring to the marketing, which I think is interesting because of its something of an anomaly. The play in LA is on KIIS, Power 106 which is where Cee-Lo is normally played, but on Indie 103.1 (who like Danger Mouse) and most staggeringly on K-Roq, which apparently took time out from their hourly airings of Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
The album is also being pushed on websites like pitchfork which for all of it’s sap and over zealous writing, is probably the best overall music site out there since Q magazine began to scale down their online side.
It’s been a while since a major black artist wasn’t pushed in the current common way, from mixtape sales, flyer promotion, and the traditional print/TV outlets of Source, King, BET, and MTV. And the part which I was commenting on about the Ghetto remark is that Gnarls isn’t being sold as most other current black artists. While TI and Young Joc (both also from Atlantic records, and played on the same stations and MTV channels) are being pushed with the Ghetto angle – as a hustler, as a pimp, as someone repping their hometown. While in most cases, it’s just an act to sell their image further, stressing the “hood” side is just an image push.
This is one of my biggest issues with rap music; it seems to the labels that it’s essential to push the hustler and ghetto angles, and so each new wave of artists feed the cycle by adding another level, having more bling, having more Hood rep, more gang connections. Every three years or so, the respective levels increase anywhere from 25 to 50 percent, and they cross into all angles and become a matter of course in the songs, and are pushed more with each new artist. It went from being one girl in a bikini to three, three to five etc. Biggie had one car and sang about the being able to afford champagne. Then Big Tymer’s did “get your roll on” which was all about the perks of being able afford rich cars and putting bells and whistles up the wazoo on them. Most singles now out have at least one refrence to liquor, one to weed, one about rims, and one about women. Say what you will, but my problem arises from the fact the music quality falls to the wayside when artists have to conform a single to a corporate checklist. It’s not as if there aren’t good rap artists out today, it’s just that we’re not hearing them. This competition to be more in your face than they last guy is the same thing that ruined punk and hair metals best periods, the focus became on getting bigger instead of getting better to get signed/successful.
When 50 cent and Jay-Z toured in 2003, both of them admitted that this is all just an act, it’s behind them (for those who did actually lead a life of crime for a bit), but when a music company decides to launch an artist, they look for that angle. To his credit, 50 cent has somewhat bucked this trend, living not inside the lines, but close to it. Wankster was about those who pretend to be hood, and while 21 Questions was about a guy getting locked up, it was more of a love song than anything else. Only P.I.M.P. played to a hustler or Ghetto side, but it was more of a double meaning of the stature of pimp as well as the whole prostitution thing, and it was more of a party song than a flaunting, aggrandizing ganstga-rap song. Jay-Z too got through his last three albums without leading with any real “gangsta-“ tropisms, and even got into social commentary with the “there’s a liquor store on every corner” line from Justify my Thug. And he even gets a pass for the wealth angle, because he has a modicum of cause and effect, he earned this, and that’s why he’s living it, it’s a choice not a personality trait. In the article though, I remember that right around this segment 50 cent told a story about how he was somewhat related to a gang related death some many years before. I'm gonna hold back judgement and place that choice on the journalism side, as if the mag was trying to counterbalance an act of good will.
The problem too comes from when it crosses medias and genres, some get needlessly saddled with the negative connotation, while others get away with it and often with a potential for further damage.
When Kevin Garnett made a war metaphor in the 2004 playoffs, talking about getting out the big guns for a battle, there was a huge media blowback. People were furious, claiming it was insensitive to the soldiers in Iraq, to the crime in the streets in poor black communities, etc. He was forced to make a public apology. The whole thing was ludicrous, and it was a shame because it was totally innocuous, and if he was a white player (and of his stature), little coverage would have been made of it unless he was of representing the white extreme, a card carrying member of NRA. It takes extremes for it to become a white issue, it takes one connection for it to be a black issue.
But when Destiny’s Child made the song Solider and pushed it as a single, no media outlet blinked an eye. Worse was the fact that they were doing Crip walking in the video, something that Snoop Dogg decried (yet latter flip flopped on) as something that should stay out of the videos. MTV even censored his crip flag in the “Drop it’s like it’s hot” video, and radio stations in LA bleeped the line when they aired it. (Interestingly the same line wasn’t bleeped in Indianapolis; take what you will with that) This was a pretty extreme example, and it was Snoop who was censored, not Destiny’s Child. The single was release around the same time as the Garnett incident, and it seems like a pretty poor double standard.
And we don’t need to thug up R &B any more than it’s already becoming. It’s fine in some cases, for the most part, when Usher is the best selling artists and acts like Maxwell are getting no airplay, R & B is in as weak of a public state as rock and roll right now, and just as over the top emotionally (see Ray J, Dashboard Confessional).
There was a minor flare-up around this when it came to the NBA’s dress code last year. I have a long post about it I never posted because it was way too unfocused, and I finished it about 2 months after the fact, making it almost worthless.
Here’s a bit of it:
Iverson will always be hurt by his thuggish image, even when, by all sensible thought, he should be remembered for his play (the good, not the entrance of the shot happy 1 as a player) as one of the top 5 little men ever to play in a land of 7 footers.
It’s not that the NBA is decrying black people, it’s that it’s trying to establish a unity in the face of the league. They want to hide all traces of criminality (like the doo-rag and its prison based roots), and enforce a level of professionalism in the workplace. This is about a subculture in a corporate world. The only reason people want to bring up race is the connection to the community of which it relates to. That is something of a shame in itself, but not racist.
(that’s the end of the original and I am not really that happy with it, but it’s part of a point)
In the end, it was a difficult and straining decision, but what it did do was to move the focus back to the game, and not to the idiosyncrasies of single players. It, and the concurrently revamped NBA cares program, was a direct response to the Artest melee, and it did help to clean up the image issues for the audience for the leagues corporate marketability and to the fans. Did it destroy some of the games uniqueness?
Maybe, it’s up for debate. The ABA was partly successful because it was filled with a funky additude, players with fro’s, white centers in mink coats. Part of the success came from the fact that it was in direct confrontation to the buttoned up 70’s NBA. The play was more street (not solely blacktop, but in the free flowing pickup style of ref-less games in gyms across the nation) in the ABA, the three point line, the prominence of the dunk, the open offenses. By the time the ABA-NBA merger, every progression in style and play of the NBA set up the league to be saved by the big three of 33, 32, and 23.
But the plus side of this is that the audience is more likely to single out a guy like Iverson for his play instead of his image, and then to single him out for what was for a while in the late 90’s, his street rep and thuggish style was created a racist “Unforgivable Blackness” backlash in the eyes of the white media and much of the viewer-ship, and many hated him for nothing more than the bad qualities of a different race and class.
Is it a not a good thing to crack down on individuality, especially since it was tacitly aimed at a very select group, but it’s not a bad thing to avoid racial profiling by an audience.
The implicit connection is not that rap artists need to tone down their ghetto image (it’d be nice, but not a firm need), but that the record companies need to stop exploiting it to further record sales. An Artest like explosion from the hip hop world isn’t destined to come, but it’s minutely possible and has happened before.
Rock and Roll had Altamont, The Who stampeding deaths in Ohio, the death of Dimebag from Pantera, and while I am not making the connection or placing blame, it’s hard not to think of Colombine as something of a rock tragedy. There were signals of foreboding problems, and yet they didn’t get enough attention until disaster struck.
Part of the concern I have about the current iconography with rap is it’s stressing the issues below, and I mention the Artest angle and the rock and roll tragedies because I get a small sense like something is coming, whether it’s a major act shooting each other (unlikely) or a more serious racial strife. With the current immigration debate, racial tensions are as high as they have been in years. Add the ongoing war debate, everyone is a little more on edge about everything, their eyes more sensitive to difference. Both music related and social/ racial tragedies are like volcanoes, they explode huge, leaving massive destruction in it’s aftermath, and the collective pressure is eased and everyone eases up and works a bit harder to do their part but thinks not about another eruption, and pays little attention. Where I work, I am allowed to be a fly on a wall to a lot of drunken conversations of people from all over the country, and it’s scary how many of them are racially fueled, and deeply worrying how venomous some of the dialogue becomes. It may be a false alarm, but I am sensing some minor shaking.
Gnarls Barkley are being pushed as an act more than as individual, which is the current and dominant style. The whole Ghetto thing isn’t being included as a matter of course, and it’s been a while since a black artist has been marketed and promoted without the ethnicity in the forefront.
I think that’s a welcome relief to hear the art leading and not the persona. And not just in rap, but in rock, pop, and R&B. The worst side effect in terms of music after the death knell of grunge in 1997 or so, is that we are seeing the artists with crossover potential 2:1 or more than to “just the music” oriented bands. The major music landscape is littered with acts like J. Lo, Britney Spears, Rob Thomas, Lindsey Lohan etc. The music machines are looking for singers who can act, who can sell makeup, who can shill Pepsi.
It’s important to note:
J. Lo’s movies post 1999 haven’t been any bigger than if they cast a similar actress, and her albums have been huge.
Crossroads flopped.
You Got Served was a punchline for any comic in the country.
Every who likes the NBA, hated ABC using Rob Thomas to have the theme song.
Lindsey’s albums are minor hits.
But Bow Wow is in the new Fast and the Furious, Ciara is in an MTV series, and Paris’s album lurks ever closer.
Coming out this year is OutKast’s Idle wild. It’s basically a visual album and they have been working on it since Speakerboxx/The Love Below. And it’s probably going to be very good, because they took it from it’s inception to it’s finish. And it stands good odds to sell a million soundtracks and to crack 75 million at the box office. I certainly will go, and buy the album.
But part of me is reluctant to see it, because it’s going to copied as a business model, and studios will likely green light copycat films. Can you imagine a Fallout Boy motion picture. Their video for “A little less 16 candles…” is torture enough. I’ve watched it 4 times and I still can’t figure out why the vampires are dancing in the street while the guitarist fights them, or even why the band is playing instruments in the video. Are they supposed to be rock and roll vampire hunters, or vampire hunters who formed a band and practice when the vampires sleep through the sun? But the odds of this movie get closer to even if Idle Wild breaks 100 million. And it’s the record companies to blame, not the artists.
++++
As for the whole music taste thing, I listen to a lot of music by black artists. I don’t care if it’s geared for a black audience or if it’s geared to white people. I care if it’s good. I mention Biggie almost every 5th post, I mentioned Lupe Fiasco a week ago, and my of my top 5 singles, 2 were of black artists, one was rap and the other R & B.
But I don’t aim to give the “but I have a lot a black friends” defense. I don’t care to search for any scene because of where the music comes, and that’s a matter of tasts. It’s why I took down my Houston post, because the whole issue of that was to mock the repping culture, but it went away and became too much of an assault on the emerging artists and scene. Part of it was tempered with the needless marketing push because two artists from the city came out, and the albums then pushed everyone from their out, but in the end it became a “I don’t get it” and while I think most of the stuff that came out was crap except for Chamillionaire who has fleeting moments and a decent enough voice to keep listening. But the whole thing was not written well enough to seem like anything other than a white guy bitching about rap.
But the whole; Black music for black people or white music for white people? Please. Most of the time I listen to music to understand a different part of humanity, whether it’s Britain, the Dirty South, or Brooklyn, I don’t care. That’s part of the charm of the music, but just the same I am often looking for music take me away to the ethereal. I want good music for all people, and it’d be nice to hear and see it at face value. Ethnicity is often tied with one’s introduction to music, but it’s not responsible for taste, and don’t accuse me or anyone of a connection because of race or upbringing.
I have jokingly said I know how a black guy must have felt during the 80’s before 1988 and the emergence of hip hop; basically being inundated by music and promotions of a culture you don’t connect to, and often the most extreme examples. In the 80’s when all there was on MTV was four hours of hair metal bands and then a LL or Run DMC video. And it’s not really now about seeing rap being promoted more than rock is; or in the 80’s seeing Poison girl it up more so than other alternatives. And music fans certainly have more outlets to find music than every before, and maybe it’s pointless to comment on it. I just am angry that more artists like Lupe fiasco are not promoted well enough, and his video/song is on once for every three times My Chemical Romance or Paul Wall videos are aired. And moreover, why artists like Bloc Party or The Streets or Secret Machines only are played on an anomaly like Indie 103.1 or on a late show like Rodney on the rocks, and the videos show on alternative hours on Sunday nights.
The reason is that most people don’t care as much about music as some of us freaks do, and don’t notice, or are so turned off by the shitty music they don’t even listen to the radio anymore, leaving the lowest common denominator to play to the ones who do listen to the radio the most, 11-19 year olds. And while that’s the consumer’s blame, the companies don’t do anything drastic to push the new artists outside of printing their album. When new artists come out, the videos come out of their end, and getting them played on Viacom channels can be just as hard as getting signed in the first place. Maybe if they actually paid for decent promotion or attempted new methods it’d work. The companies actually resisted advertising on Myspace until it became a hit, and it’s going to change the way music is forever shipped.
But to see Gnarls Barkley get promoted at all is a minor miracle. I’m damn glad to see it in any form, and happier to see it buck a trend.
First off, maybe this is a good point to clarify what I am going to be doing more often with the purpose of the writings. I am going to start focusing on media and it’s symbiotic effect on us as a culture. The My Generation posts are going to become more frequent, and I’m going to work more on the impacts of shows and music, from how it plays, to who and how it is marketed, and some of the connections between. Ranging from the idiotic appeal of Deal or No Deal, the Teflon power of American Idol and why American Dreamz failed, and the growth of our Generation as boomer culture fades away. Also, comments will be turned off on some of these. If you want to say something, my email's available. Save the jokes for the casual posts.
I will also put up more short fiction and a few more jokey stuff. And of course plenty of youtube clips and tons of emo and Fallout Boy jokes.
+++++
If I had any intent of making a social commentary, I would have expanded it, and I perhaps should have.
What I wrote. “This is probably the least Ghetto album from a “Major Black (American) Artist” in years.
I guess my first mistake was prefacing it with the type of music line, and how this is everything I love about the genre. The type of music was referring to Funk/soul, not to rap, not to “black, urban” music. I have said before I think the best period in pop music history was the Motown Years, not the British Invasion. There was much more albums, singles, and singers that are in the canon than the four years. And the evolution of Motown became funk, which was integrating rock and roll. Rock is blues based; funk is Motown based, and the Gnarls Barkley is the first major label funk release I can think of since Robert Randolph and his Family Band, at the first to get significant airplay since maybe D’Angelo (who I think gets more attention because he is a R&B / Funk hybrid). While I don’t actively search out enough funk, when a big release like this comes out, I’m giddy because adds another dimension to radio airplay and keeps me away from my Ipod or talk radio. Make no mistake, we need more of this, not just more “funk’ per say, but less of the same which we normally get and the less modern radio sounds like classic rock radio and expanding it’s play list, the better the public music scene gets.
I probably should have also referred to it as a release and not an album, because I wasn’t talking about the music itself, beyond the first song. I was referring to the marketing, which I think is interesting because of its something of an anomaly. The play in LA is on KIIS, Power 106 which is where Cee-Lo is normally played, but on Indie 103.1 (who like Danger Mouse) and most staggeringly on K-Roq, which apparently took time out from their hourly airings of Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
The album is also being pushed on websites like pitchfork which for all of it’s sap and over zealous writing, is probably the best overall music site out there since Q magazine began to scale down their online side.
It’s been a while since a major black artist wasn’t pushed in the current common way, from mixtape sales, flyer promotion, and the traditional print/TV outlets of Source, King, BET, and MTV. And the part which I was commenting on about the Ghetto remark is that Gnarls isn’t being sold as most other current black artists. While TI and Young Joc (both also from Atlantic records, and played on the same stations and MTV channels) are being pushed with the Ghetto angle – as a hustler, as a pimp, as someone repping their hometown. While in most cases, it’s just an act to sell their image further, stressing the “hood” side is just an image push.
This is one of my biggest issues with rap music; it seems to the labels that it’s essential to push the hustler and ghetto angles, and so each new wave of artists feed the cycle by adding another level, having more bling, having more Hood rep, more gang connections. Every three years or so, the respective levels increase anywhere from 25 to 50 percent, and they cross into all angles and become a matter of course in the songs, and are pushed more with each new artist. It went from being one girl in a bikini to three, three to five etc. Biggie had one car and sang about the being able to afford champagne. Then Big Tymer’s did “get your roll on” which was all about the perks of being able afford rich cars and putting bells and whistles up the wazoo on them. Most singles now out have at least one refrence to liquor, one to weed, one about rims, and one about women. Say what you will, but my problem arises from the fact the music quality falls to the wayside when artists have to conform a single to a corporate checklist. It’s not as if there aren’t good rap artists out today, it’s just that we’re not hearing them. This competition to be more in your face than they last guy is the same thing that ruined punk and hair metals best periods, the focus became on getting bigger instead of getting better to get signed/successful.
When 50 cent and Jay-Z toured in 2003, both of them admitted that this is all just an act, it’s behind them (for those who did actually lead a life of crime for a bit), but when a music company decides to launch an artist, they look for that angle. To his credit, 50 cent has somewhat bucked this trend, living not inside the lines, but close to it. Wankster was about those who pretend to be hood, and while 21 Questions was about a guy getting locked up, it was more of a love song than anything else. Only P.I.M.P. played to a hustler or Ghetto side, but it was more of a double meaning of the stature of pimp as well as the whole prostitution thing, and it was more of a party song than a flaunting, aggrandizing ganstga-rap song. Jay-Z too got through his last three albums without leading with any real “gangsta-“ tropisms, and even got into social commentary with the “there’s a liquor store on every corner” line from Justify my Thug. And he even gets a pass for the wealth angle, because he has a modicum of cause and effect, he earned this, and that’s why he’s living it, it’s a choice not a personality trait. In the article though, I remember that right around this segment 50 cent told a story about how he was somewhat related to a gang related death some many years before. I'm gonna hold back judgement and place that choice on the journalism side, as if the mag was trying to counterbalance an act of good will.
The problem too comes from when it crosses medias and genres, some get needlessly saddled with the negative connotation, while others get away with it and often with a potential for further damage.
When Kevin Garnett made a war metaphor in the 2004 playoffs, talking about getting out the big guns for a battle, there was a huge media blowback. People were furious, claiming it was insensitive to the soldiers in Iraq, to the crime in the streets in poor black communities, etc. He was forced to make a public apology. The whole thing was ludicrous, and it was a shame because it was totally innocuous, and if he was a white player (and of his stature), little coverage would have been made of it unless he was of representing the white extreme, a card carrying member of NRA. It takes extremes for it to become a white issue, it takes one connection for it to be a black issue.
But when Destiny’s Child made the song Solider and pushed it as a single, no media outlet blinked an eye. Worse was the fact that they were doing Crip walking in the video, something that Snoop Dogg decried (yet latter flip flopped on) as something that should stay out of the videos. MTV even censored his crip flag in the “Drop it’s like it’s hot” video, and radio stations in LA bleeped the line when they aired it. (Interestingly the same line wasn’t bleeped in Indianapolis; take what you will with that) This was a pretty extreme example, and it was Snoop who was censored, not Destiny’s Child. The single was release around the same time as the Garnett incident, and it seems like a pretty poor double standard.
And we don’t need to thug up R &B any more than it’s already becoming. It’s fine in some cases, for the most part, when Usher is the best selling artists and acts like Maxwell are getting no airplay, R & B is in as weak of a public state as rock and roll right now, and just as over the top emotionally (see Ray J, Dashboard Confessional).
There was a minor flare-up around this when it came to the NBA’s dress code last year. I have a long post about it I never posted because it was way too unfocused, and I finished it about 2 months after the fact, making it almost worthless.
Here’s a bit of it:
Iverson will always be hurt by his thuggish image, even when, by all sensible thought, he should be remembered for his play (the good, not the entrance of the shot happy 1 as a player) as one of the top 5 little men ever to play in a land of 7 footers.
It’s not that the NBA is decrying black people, it’s that it’s trying to establish a unity in the face of the league. They want to hide all traces of criminality (like the doo-rag and its prison based roots), and enforce a level of professionalism in the workplace. This is about a subculture in a corporate world. The only reason people want to bring up race is the connection to the community of which it relates to. That is something of a shame in itself, but not racist.
(that’s the end of the original and I am not really that happy with it, but it’s part of a point)
In the end, it was a difficult and straining decision, but what it did do was to move the focus back to the game, and not to the idiosyncrasies of single players. It, and the concurrently revamped NBA cares program, was a direct response to the Artest melee, and it did help to clean up the image issues for the audience for the leagues corporate marketability and to the fans. Did it destroy some of the games uniqueness?
Maybe, it’s up for debate. The ABA was partly successful because it was filled with a funky additude, players with fro’s, white centers in mink coats. Part of the success came from the fact that it was in direct confrontation to the buttoned up 70’s NBA. The play was more street (not solely blacktop, but in the free flowing pickup style of ref-less games in gyms across the nation) in the ABA, the three point line, the prominence of the dunk, the open offenses. By the time the ABA-NBA merger, every progression in style and play of the NBA set up the league to be saved by the big three of 33, 32, and 23.
But the plus side of this is that the audience is more likely to single out a guy like Iverson for his play instead of his image, and then to single him out for what was for a while in the late 90’s, his street rep and thuggish style was created a racist “Unforgivable Blackness” backlash in the eyes of the white media and much of the viewer-ship, and many hated him for nothing more than the bad qualities of a different race and class.
Is it a not a good thing to crack down on individuality, especially since it was tacitly aimed at a very select group, but it’s not a bad thing to avoid racial profiling by an audience.
The implicit connection is not that rap artists need to tone down their ghetto image (it’d be nice, but not a firm need), but that the record companies need to stop exploiting it to further record sales. An Artest like explosion from the hip hop world isn’t destined to come, but it’s minutely possible and has happened before.
Rock and Roll had Altamont, The Who stampeding deaths in Ohio, the death of Dimebag from Pantera, and while I am not making the connection or placing blame, it’s hard not to think of Colombine as something of a rock tragedy. There were signals of foreboding problems, and yet they didn’t get enough attention until disaster struck.
Part of the concern I have about the current iconography with rap is it’s stressing the issues below, and I mention the Artest angle and the rock and roll tragedies because I get a small sense like something is coming, whether it’s a major act shooting each other (unlikely) or a more serious racial strife. With the current immigration debate, racial tensions are as high as they have been in years. Add the ongoing war debate, everyone is a little more on edge about everything, their eyes more sensitive to difference. Both music related and social/ racial tragedies are like volcanoes, they explode huge, leaving massive destruction in it’s aftermath, and the collective pressure is eased and everyone eases up and works a bit harder to do their part but thinks not about another eruption, and pays little attention. Where I work, I am allowed to be a fly on a wall to a lot of drunken conversations of people from all over the country, and it’s scary how many of them are racially fueled, and deeply worrying how venomous some of the dialogue becomes. It may be a false alarm, but I am sensing some minor shaking.
Gnarls Barkley are being pushed as an act more than as individual, which is the current and dominant style. The whole Ghetto thing isn’t being included as a matter of course, and it’s been a while since a black artist has been marketed and promoted without the ethnicity in the forefront.
I think that’s a welcome relief to hear the art leading and not the persona. And not just in rap, but in rock, pop, and R&B. The worst side effect in terms of music after the death knell of grunge in 1997 or so, is that we are seeing the artists with crossover potential 2:1 or more than to “just the music” oriented bands. The major music landscape is littered with acts like J. Lo, Britney Spears, Rob Thomas, Lindsey Lohan etc. The music machines are looking for singers who can act, who can sell makeup, who can shill Pepsi.
It’s important to note:
J. Lo’s movies post 1999 haven’t been any bigger than if they cast a similar actress, and her albums have been huge.
Crossroads flopped.
You Got Served was a punchline for any comic in the country.
Every who likes the NBA, hated ABC using Rob Thomas to have the theme song.
Lindsey’s albums are minor hits.
But Bow Wow is in the new Fast and the Furious, Ciara is in an MTV series, and Paris’s album lurks ever closer.
Coming out this year is OutKast’s Idle wild. It’s basically a visual album and they have been working on it since Speakerboxx/The Love Below. And it’s probably going to be very good, because they took it from it’s inception to it’s finish. And it stands good odds to sell a million soundtracks and to crack 75 million at the box office. I certainly will go, and buy the album.
But part of me is reluctant to see it, because it’s going to copied as a business model, and studios will likely green light copycat films. Can you imagine a Fallout Boy motion picture. Their video for “A little less 16 candles…” is torture enough. I’ve watched it 4 times and I still can’t figure out why the vampires are dancing in the street while the guitarist fights them, or even why the band is playing instruments in the video. Are they supposed to be rock and roll vampire hunters, or vampire hunters who formed a band and practice when the vampires sleep through the sun? But the odds of this movie get closer to even if Idle Wild breaks 100 million. And it’s the record companies to blame, not the artists.
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As for the whole music taste thing, I listen to a lot of music by black artists. I don’t care if it’s geared for a black audience or if it’s geared to white people. I care if it’s good. I mention Biggie almost every 5th post, I mentioned Lupe Fiasco a week ago, and my of my top 5 singles, 2 were of black artists, one was rap and the other R & B.
But I don’t aim to give the “but I have a lot a black friends” defense. I don’t care to search for any scene because of where the music comes, and that’s a matter of tasts. It’s why I took down my Houston post, because the whole issue of that was to mock the repping culture, but it went away and became too much of an assault on the emerging artists and scene. Part of it was tempered with the needless marketing push because two artists from the city came out, and the albums then pushed everyone from their out, but in the end it became a “I don’t get it” and while I think most of the stuff that came out was crap except for Chamillionaire who has fleeting moments and a decent enough voice to keep listening. But the whole thing was not written well enough to seem like anything other than a white guy bitching about rap.
But the whole; Black music for black people or white music for white people? Please. Most of the time I listen to music to understand a different part of humanity, whether it’s Britain, the Dirty South, or Brooklyn, I don’t care. That’s part of the charm of the music, but just the same I am often looking for music take me away to the ethereal. I want good music for all people, and it’d be nice to hear and see it at face value. Ethnicity is often tied with one’s introduction to music, but it’s not responsible for taste, and don’t accuse me or anyone of a connection because of race or upbringing.
I have jokingly said I know how a black guy must have felt during the 80’s before 1988 and the emergence of hip hop; basically being inundated by music and promotions of a culture you don’t connect to, and often the most extreme examples. In the 80’s when all there was on MTV was four hours of hair metal bands and then a LL or Run DMC video. And it’s not really now about seeing rap being promoted more than rock is; or in the 80’s seeing Poison girl it up more so than other alternatives. And music fans certainly have more outlets to find music than every before, and maybe it’s pointless to comment on it. I just am angry that more artists like Lupe fiasco are not promoted well enough, and his video/song is on once for every three times My Chemical Romance or Paul Wall videos are aired. And moreover, why artists like Bloc Party or The Streets or Secret Machines only are played on an anomaly like Indie 103.1 or on a late show like Rodney on the rocks, and the videos show on alternative hours on Sunday nights.
The reason is that most people don’t care as much about music as some of us freaks do, and don’t notice, or are so turned off by the shitty music they don’t even listen to the radio anymore, leaving the lowest common denominator to play to the ones who do listen to the radio the most, 11-19 year olds. And while that’s the consumer’s blame, the companies don’t do anything drastic to push the new artists outside of printing their album. When new artists come out, the videos come out of their end, and getting them played on Viacom channels can be just as hard as getting signed in the first place. Maybe if they actually paid for decent promotion or attempted new methods it’d work. The companies actually resisted advertising on Myspace until it became a hit, and it’s going to change the way music is forever shipped.
But to see Gnarls Barkley get promoted at all is a minor miracle. I’m damn glad to see it in any form, and happier to see it buck a trend.
posted by Indiana at
10:50 PM
