Commercial Suicide

The story of Ridinghood, a novel

One: The Democratization of the Music Industry 

Notes from the  mainstream

A year and a half ago, Rhiannon and I spent 600 pounds on an audio recording software package, and set out to record, on my laptop, the first fully independent, mainstream rock/pop album. This record, our band RIDINGHOOD’s debut album RIDING HIGH is now available online. Download it here.

Science goes where Culture leads it. Forgive the boldness of this statement; I intend fully to provide eloquent proof in due course. Suffice it to say for now that it is one of my most firmly held beliefs. While working on the album, it made me constantly mindful of the fact that the technological advances enabling us to record it, were preconditioned on a cultural development that has always been rather repugnant to me: the democratization of the music industry. Even worse: I was certain that, with the release of RIDING HIGH, this democratization would come full term. On top of this came the realisation that in the current climate RIDING HIGH could not have been recorded any other way than on a laptop in my living room.

It is my intention to explore, in these pages, the irony of that circumstance – an irony of which at times I seem to be some kind of personification.

 
Laptop Album  

One take

In the early days, when making a record, record companies relied on the concerted efforts of trained artists.

Regardless of whether you were hired as a musician, singer, songwriter, lyricist, arranger or recording engineer, you had in all likelihood studied your craft in university and were familiar with its conventions and rules: even composers of mere jingles and sync tunes had studied Bach and Mozart; lyricists had studied English literature.  The orchestras involved in the recording of a Frank Sinatra record were as a rule made up of such virtuoso musicians that not more than three takes of any given song were usually required. Sinatra himself always felt that if he did not get it in three, there was little chance of him getting it at all that day.

A Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald vocal performance is always a single take recording, a fact that is bound to strike us, in our age of unlimited disc space, as almost miraculous.

Nowadays, a producer will record the singer performing the song seven or eight times. He will then sift through these takes and compile one vocal performance from the best bits, often having to tune up certain words or, indeed, phrases that the singer failed to sing in pitch, despite his eight attempts.

 
Misdirection 

In former ages artists understood that their work of art’s effectiveness was significantly enhanced if audiences were kept in the dark as to the process of its creation, not unlike magicians, who refuse to explain to the audience how they made the bunny disappear from the hat.

People who have no talent for music are rather quick to assign the term ‘genius’ to anyone who does, both from a pagan compulsion to idolatry and also as a means of assuaging a sense of inferiority: viewing a talent as a gift from God, and the artist, by extension, as a divine being, enables one to reflect: “With someone so blessed, I do not need to compete.” People who do not understand the creative process generally assume that it cannot be understood. They find it magical, and use terms like divine inspiration.
To have such an attitude towards the creative process is understandable if you are a layman, but if you work in a record company’s A‘n’R department and your job is to scout and develop its most successful results, it is inexcusable. Nevertheless, nowadays, anyone who works in the music business has just such a metaphysical outlook on the artist and his creative endeavours. They freely admit to it: spend a day in record company offices and you will hear a number of people sighing that nobody in the industry really knows what makes a hit. And yet: this is their job!

In the early days, A and R departments were made up of seasoned musicians, composers and arrangers, again: highly skilled individuals, who had been in the business for years and who knew how to spot a talented singer and knew a well crafted song when they heard one. They applied their knowledge, experience and taste, and habitually scored hits.

I sometimes ask present day A’n’R managers in which key their current favourite record was recorded. They always know how to look at me as if I had lost my mind, but as for an answer to my question…

The full extent of the malaise, however, is this: in our age, even artists seem to be under the impression that knowledge of the creative process inhibits creativity. They worry that analysing the process will kill inspiration. Nowadays, the term ‘trained artist’ even strikes us as a contradiction in terms, especially with regards to pop.

 
Guns 'n' Roses 

“She’s got a smile that, it seems to me, reminds me of childhood memories.”

Axl is here singing about a girl whose smile reminds him not of his childhood, but of the memories of his childhood. As if that were not absurd enough, it also emerges that he is not entirely sure whether her smile reminds him of the memories of his childhood, since it only seems to remind him of the memories of his childhood. At this point, already in the first sentence, Axl is at least three levels removed from reality, which, with the knowledge of hindsight, is clearly where he felt he most belonged.
A student of literature would not have allowed that line to be committed to tape. It is non-sensical, clumsy and entirely divested of poetry. Fifty years ago, such a line would not have made it through the first run-through. Even the studio’s janitor would have shaken his head in disbelief (after he had finished wetting himself, that is.)

Twenty years ago, however, that line not only made it to the record, but actually went on to make an impact on the public.

The public is not to blame. The question is: how did the creation of music fall so irretrievably into the hands of dilettantes and amateurs? (We add to this the solemn promise to examine why at a later stage.)

 
Art is hard

The creative process is, of course, not miraculous. (Although it might seem so to Axl.) The conventions and creative limitations that constitute an art form can be easily explained. Anyone with intelligence, as well as the discipline to apply himself for a good number of years to intense study, can gain a solid grounding for their practical application. Of course, from lack of talent, you may yet fail to make a masterpiece, but you will have gained an understanding of the process (and can be secure in the knowledge that you fulfil the minimum requirements for a job in A’n’R.)

However, besides individual talent and diligence, the creation of enduring works of art also requires protracted cultural effort. While many masterpieces themselves may have taken almost no effort to create, the process that lead to their creation was invariably painstaking. For indeed: besides the artist’s talent and total command of the conventions of the art form, it also requires a strong tradition to bring forth great art: only the strictest adherence, over the course of many generations, to a set of aesthetic rules creates conditions favourable to the genesis of a masterpiece.

Art is (among other things) a highly refined form of communication, and wherever people communicate, a set of rules is in operation to ensure that all individuals understand each other. When generations of artists all adhere to the same set of sometimes quite arbitrary basic rules, the public gradually becomes attuned to increasingly complex handling of motifs. Only by virtue of rules are artists able to carry their aesthetic principles and the audience’s appreciation of them along to ever-greater levels of sophistication. Not taking anything away from Homer’s personal achievement, it is not unreasonable to say that the Iliad, one of the most enduring works of art ever, was a few thousand years in the making. The first man to hum a tune did not hum Beethoven’s Ninth. Many generations of artists labouring in the field of music paved the way for one man of genius to ride the crest of their efforts and create a timeless masterpiece. No artist has ever made a masterpiece alone, by accident. His position in the chain of refinement is crucial, that is to say, his time and place of birth are every bit as important as his innate talent and the rigours of his musical education.

In a sense, a masterpiece is a kind of greatest hits collection: all the best bits from one art form drawn together into one supreme artistic statement, by a single genius artist. A great artist knows how to use for his own benefit the accomplishments of the good artists that went before him. (On a (very) small scale we witness this process in action in modern pop music, where a hit song is usually fashioned out of the most elegant characteristics of two or more musical styles: from ‘I Get Around’ to ‘Roxanne’ to ‘Man, I Feel Like A Woman,’ careful examination of a hit song’s stylistics usually turns up a cross-over or two.)

The modern day liberal view that Mozart achieved greatness because he was a rebel and broke rules is indicative of our age’s deep-seated disdain for rules in general, and is as such highly destructive, since it engenders the attitude among aspiring artists that it is no longer necessary to become familiar with the rules at all to achieve greatness. Mozart was not born as a rule breaker: as a child prodigy he assimilated the extent of his predecessors’ achievements, which allowed him, as an adult, to become the crowning glory of their musical tradition. Through single-minded devotion to his art at the expense of all other pursuits, an artist attains naturally to a greater understanding of his field of excellence than his audience, and is constantly at risk of rushing too far ahead. Not every artist sees it as his sacred duty to communicate with his contemporaries, but he who expresses obscurities to cover up a lack of basic training is no artist.

 
The Sixties 

In the field of popular music, the Sixties have come to be regarded as the pre-eminently brilliant decade of the twentieth century. Compared to our current age, one would surely have to admit that it had one or two things going for it. However, as regards musical sophistication and poetic elegance, in other words, on a purely aesthetic basis, the songwriters of the Sixties pale into insignificance next to those of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, with one notable exception: Brian Wilson, the man who founded the Beach Boys. He alone can rightfully be linked to the Golden Age of Song. He is in the main line of the great American songwriters, such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, but only as a figure of decadence, as the art form’s last hurrah, as a final glimpse of its former grandeur.

Quite frankly: by the time Kennedy was shot, the art of song writing had been in decline for some time. Through the increasing scarcity of classically trained, highly skilled composers and the public’s consequent attenuation to increasingly impure expressions of the artistic form, dilettantes like the Beatles found themselves able to make an impact on the public domain.More...

When the Beatles wrote their first song, they were a well-rehearsed cabaret act. They had played countless gigs singing other people’s material, in the process of which the stylistic and structural dimensions of that material had become second nature to them. Then, with a practical grasp of the requirements of the craft, they started writing their own songs. They did not set out to write groundbreaking, experimental music. They began by writing traditional pop songs in the style of the ones they had been covering for so long. They still had an instinctive understanding of what strikes most songwriters today as a thoroughly far-fetched proposition: that a songwriter is not ready to break any rules until he knows all of them and is able to apply them in his sleep.

The musical genius of the Beatles' early albums lay in Lennon and McCartney’s ability to tie a number of stray musical strands together into one comprehensive overview. The early albums safeguard the musical legacy of the Fifties and early Sixties. They are creative ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ albums that provide an elegant summary of the era. More malicious minds might propose that the Beatles’ success was merely a question of timing: black American artists had laboured tirelessly for a number of decades to instill, against prevailing musical attitudes and, of course, bigotry, a taste for their style in the general public. At the exact moment when public opinion had come round to their point of view, a ragtag quartet of Brits swooped down and cashed in on their hard work. The fact that the new style was at root a decadent one, a cancer on the Golden Age of Song, lends the Liverpool swindle a subtle irony.

 
Artists are freaks 

Artists have always been viewed by the people as rather freakish. Indeed, to possess a talent is still something of which the common man is naturally in awe and at the same time highly suspicious. Traditionally, talent is viewed as a gift from God or something one acquires through haggling with the Devil. A poet is a travelling visionary who is everywhere a welcome guest, but who is never invited to stay indefinitely.

Before the Beatles, singers sang the song. They sang with the aim best to represent the song’s emotional intention. The song told a story with a certain universal quality to it. It would deal in archetypes. The listener identified with the archetypal people and situations within the song, not with the singer, who was merely its medium.

The Beatles’ early albums are pervaded by an inescapable sense of labour: one feels that they made records at such a consistent level of quality and released them at such an awe-inspiring rate as a consequence of a tremendous innate work ethic, rather than ambition. They were as reliable as German car manufacturers. They were self-sufficient with regard to writing and performing, and recorded with an efficiency that is entirely unheard of today. In their early phase uniform black suites they seemed on stage to be working a day job. With their down to earth banter and cheeky wit they could not help but come across in the media as salt of the earth working guys, rather than elusive, glamorous and supremely gifted stars. In short: the Beatles acted out the working-class theme of their songs in ‘real’ life. Their marketing strategy was to inhabit their songs. For the first time audiences could project their recognition of the archetypes within the songs onto the singers. They recognised the Beatles as of their own kind.

This perceived commonness caused fame and talent to become divested of their mystique. The noble art of song writing began increasingly to be taken up not by freaks, but by ordinary boys, who felt that if the Beatles could do it, then so could they: learn a few chords, bang out a few tunes over the weekend and make a smash. How hard could it be?

 
Plagiarism is easy

Well, those who try to follow in the Beatles’ footsteps, seduced by their public image, rather then the evidence of their talent and phenomenal work ethic, predictably manoeuvre themselves quickly into a tight corner. Having never received anything but the most basic musical training, these ordinary boys can not help but be of the opinion that experimentation fosters great art and habitually claim they write with the aim to break rules. Ironically, since they are unschooled and have no instinctive grasp of the rules, they are incapable of breaking any and end up writing extremely derivative and unoriginal material.

The self sufficient ‘rock band’, the Beatles’ shameful legacy, can be defined as a group of white guys with a limited degree of formal training, who forge a career out of liberally quoting from the songbook of black popular music. After the Golden Age had been sufficiently eroded by black innovations (harmonic simplicity, rhythmic rigidity,) white guys found themselves able to plagiarise their way into thinking they were songwriters.

Other commercially successful examples of the rock band are the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Bee Gees and the Police, (Gee, all British bands!)

With the further integration of black people into American society and black people being increasingly capable of selling their stuff to white audiences themselves, the ‘rock band’ is being divested of its raison d’etre. One might have expected the phenomenon to have died out, if it were not for the unfortunate circumstance that their legacy is by now so widely regarded as rather magnificent in its own right, that ‘rock bands’ can build a career on quoting from their own buccaneering tradition. This is an absurd situation. The Beatles were an end-stop: a summary and convenient index at the back of a reference book. To use them as a starting point is the death of creativity.

 
Zombie music

Imagine it: a random teenager, having been a fan of white rock music for much of his life, picks up a guitar and manages somehow to write a song. In light of the fact that record companies expect to receive a return on only 5% (sic) of their signings, it is not wholly unimaginable that some A’n’R guy somewhere decides to put the marketing department behind precisely this song and turn it into a hit. Perhaps the teenager is good looking and speaks in a northern accent, who knows? In any case: he has a hit. Now he thinks that he has a God-given talent to write popular songs. Since he has done it once, he feels that his talent will see him through in all his other artistic creations. All he has to do is sit down with his guitar and more gold will start pouring from it. Ready to assist him in perpetuating this myth is usually a battery of industry yes-men with as little grasp of the creative process as the songwriter himself. They are so in awe of his talent and the money it can make them, that they give him the impression he is a genius. Our poor songwriter will try his best to write another song, but even though he is a genius he does not understand that inspiration is the result of decades of hard work. In his fruitless wait for another masterpiece to come spontaneously rolling out of his guitar, he turns for comfort time and again to his one hit song and ends, since it is the only song that he has managed to assimilate in any useful degree, by writing it again. How many times have you bought an album by a group whose single caught your ear when it was in the charts, only to discover they were totally incapable of sustaining artistic invention for the duration of an entire album?

Aesthetic standards are now so low that bands can sustain long careers releasing albums that are essentially either a reworking of a certain musical era or just a rehash of their own back catalogue, which was in itself already a master class in treading water. I would like to point to U2, the first band to fashion a seemingly endless career out of what strikes me as a complete lack of expertise what so ever. Whereas the Beatles were marketed as a group of ordinary boys next door, lovely but unremarkable, while in real life they were a rather dysfunctional collection of deeply troubled individuals, not without a degree of genius, U2 actually are ordinary boys, with nothing to recommend them apart from the fact that they are lovely and unremarkable. They wrote one song and they have been writing it over and over ever since. Other notable examples of one-song careers are those being enjoyed by Oasis, Radiohead and Coldplay. (Gee, all English bands!) It ought to be noted that, despite the overblown hype that publications like NME and Q magazine can still generate for these bands, they cannot be viewed as anything other than Beatles tribute bands: cabaret, derivative and irrelevant. British Indie Rock is a slimy carcass that feeds on itself. When will it realise it is dead?

 
Only in it for the money

Record companies have always promoted the hit. As such they were vanguards of popular culture. Now popular music is losing its value. Britain's ‘Top of the Pops' was discontinued because it was no longer possible to turn a handful of our era's pop songs into a culturally significant television programme. Nowadays, people consume music, rather than listen to it. Music provides background noise for mundane activities: jogging, driving, dishwashing. This is music's new purpose, and as such it still carries huge economic force, but its cultural relevance is none. Even financially viable pop songs are mercifully forgotten one, maybe two, month after their release. The BBC all but admitted that ‘Top of the Pops' was axed because today's pop music was rubbish.

A record company's lifeblood is trained talent and it is on account of the absence of a strong cultural drive towards education in musical discipline that record companies are floundering. Record companies can only market what is on hand. It is not their task to encourage education. If there are no trained, talented artists to be had, their marketing departments will market untrained, talentless ones. The public's taste will become accustomed to their meaningless, tuneless songs and aesthetic standards will erode further. It is a vicious cycle of decadence.

Whereas the Beatles acted out a common man persona, current bands are made up of common men; current artists are common men. The spirit of the Sixties actively sought to bring about a more democratic musical ethos. Its slogan was: music by the people, for the people. As the ultimate consequence of this attitude our pop music has descended into karaoke. Aesthetic standards are now so low that almost any cheerful hobbyist can have a career in music. To be an artist has become an entirely mundane pursuit, increasingly taken up by mundane individuals. (Mobile phone salesman sings opera.) Aesthetic considerations are pushed ever further down the agenda: mundane people are concerned with making a living, not with making an enduring cultural impact.

With the decline of record companies, our music industry now seems ruled by a kind of shopkeeper mentality; artists as mean-spirited little salesmen, flogging their dubious wares by means of flimsy hype and virtually undisguised cons. An artist's viability is measured by his talent for shameless self-promotion. There are some talented artists around today.

 
Niche art versus universal art 

Great music markets itself. The only reason why marketing considerations are so important these days is because product is so bad. It has by now become even impossible to write a hit. Our pop tradition is so weak that even a genius will struggle to shape something memorable and universal out of the refuse to which the public is currently attuned.

In their desperate attempts to create brand recognition, our mundane and anaemic artists/marketers are forced to think up increasingly absurd niches for themselves. On the Internet these wretches have discovered their natural home.

In his hair-raisingly cynical blog ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online’, Andrew Dubber matter-of-factly announces the death of the hit and encourages online businesses to sell less of more : since the Internet provides businesses with unlimited storage space, it makes more sense, he argues, to try and sell a few copies each of a large number of items, rather than waste time chasing one million-selling hit.

Magazine editor Chris Anderson, even wrote a book about it, called ‘The Long Tail’, in which this marketing tactic is identified as an Internet innovation. A neat little graph illustrates the phenomenon’s decadent ramifications:

 
The graph looks at items against number of sales. The further to the right you go on the item line, the fewer the sales. The green bit represents the hits, the stuff that sells well. The yellow bit represents the rubbish. There are vastly more rubbish items than hits.

( Before I continue, I feel I need to mention that, on account of deteriorating standards, many sophisticates are developing an aversion to the mere term hit, and feel more confident of finding a nugget in the Long Tail. These people might be tempted to poke fun at my representation of the hit as a cultural peak. I would like to point out that, in my conception, Homer, Vergil, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart etc were all hitmakers.)

Back in the modern age, mainstream outlets like Amazon already claim to sell fewer copies of their top one hundred bestsellers than of all their other titles together. Not that anyone is disputing it, but this state of affairs proves that our culture is in an advanced state of decay. A work of art (bestseller) is a celebration of the era in which it was made and, if it is good, is capable of communicating (selling) its cultural values to audiences that have yet to be born. The more a tradition is able to sell of less is an indication of its vibrancy. For heaven’s sake: the Iliad is still going strong. What a hit!

It is rather facile to blame the Internet: the slogan ‘sell less of more’ has been in slow, steady ascendence for the last couple of thousand years. The Internet is merely another symptom of our culture’s cascade into mediocrity. We find ourselves in our age so ill equipped to achieve greatness, that a framework to accommodate selling less of more was bound to emerge. They would not have known what to do with the Internet in the Renaissance. The emergence of the Internet in our times constitutes an admission: to create a hit is beyond our capability.

So now, rather than trying to score hits, we see an almost inconceivable number of bands and artists chasing the Long Tail: flooding the market with inane drones, the one entirely indistinguishable from the next, and yet shamelessly marketed as niche product.

If the Tail is Long, you cannot fail to catch it.

Personally, I hope they all swallow themselves. I would like to suggest an alternative title for Dubber’s blog: ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, If You Know Nothing About Music’

 
Connecting people