NINE YEARS OR SO AGO, Courtney Love may have been the personally least popular figure in the then-Red Hot Seattle Music Scene.
In a town that prized politeness and personability above all other traits (even among punk rockers!), Love was defiantly brash, unapologetically careerist, and defiantly self-promoting.
She would’ve been (and was) unpopular among many here and in her former Portland digs, even without the ludicrously false allegations a few guys made against her concerning hubby Kurt Cobain’s drug addiction and suicide. (I believe she’d tried to save him as best she could, but he was too far gone.)
One of her most outspoken schticks was her embracing of Rock Star glamour. While many local musicians (particularly among Cobain’s indie-rock activist pals in Olympia) treated small-scale DIY music as a religion, Love rode in limos, put on (and took off) designer fashions, hobnobbed with celebrities, moved to LA and became a movie star.
So, despite her deliberately generated reputation for hot-headedness, she’s just about the last one I’d have expected to (1) publicly denounce the major record labels, and (2) put her career on the line in order to do so.
She’s suing Vivendi Universal (nee MCA) Records to get out of her recording contract. More importantly, she insists she’s not out to just quietly settle the suit for her own personal gain, but to overturn the major labels’ whole stranglehold on recording artists’ careers and livelihoods.
The corporate record labels’ litany of sins is surely one you’ve heard often, by everyone from Calvin Johnson to Prince.
Artists get signed with big up-front “advances” that actually put them in debt to the labels, and bind them to the labels for as much as seven albums which could encompass their entire careers (while the labels can drop the acts at any time).
The artists are liable against royalty payments for everything the labels spend on their behalf, and are at the mercy of the labels’ marketing effectiveness and all-too-frequent corporate reorganizations and staff turnovers.
If a label opts to give a particular artist low promotion priority, or wastes money charged to an artist on excessive video-production budgets or on drugs-and-hookers bribery to radio stations, an artist can do little or nothing about it.
Even if an artist gets released from a bad major-label deal, s/he has little choice but to accept another bad deal from another major label.
The indie-label resurgence (particularly in the hiphop, alterna-rock, and techno-dance genres) gave some folk a glimmer of hope that this dilemma could be changed, but also a few sobering examples of just how hard it can be to go up against the majors for radio play, record-store shelf space, etc.
Net-based marketing schemes provided additional hopes for musicians to sidestep the majors’ stranglehold (though the first successful online-sold CDs were by already established acts).
Then the Napster craze, and the labels’ litigous response to it, further exposed the majors’ double-faced attitude and money- and power-hogging tactics.
There’s enough popular opinion out there against the entertainment conglomerates that some industry observers say Love’s suit might just succeed at forcing the labels to give up some of their worst contractual practices.
But will it succeed at rehabilitating Love’s reputation among the street-level music community? Only time will tell.
IN OTHER NEWS: Rumors continue to swirl concerning the fate of the OK Hotel, the legendary music club in an historic Pioneer Square building that was hurt in last week’s quake. Unconfirmed tales currently allege the building owner wants to use the quake as an excuse to raze the whole thing for parking. Further details as they become available.
NEXT: PBS discovers marketing to teens.
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