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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.
ELSEWHERE:
IF THERE’S ONE CONSTANT about my lifetime in the Northwest and particularly my adulthood in Seattle, it’s that somebody’s always complaining about anything and everything around them.
If folks aren’t complaining about the weather, they’re complaining about the economy. If it’s not the economy, it’s the politicians.
And if it’s not the politicians, it’s the whole town’s supposed total and incurable suckiness in regard to everything except natural scenery.
You know the drill. If folk in Seattle aren’t listening to (or wearing, or eating, or reading, or watching, or drawing or painting) whatever the folk in NY/LA/SF are, it just shows how we’re hopelessly behind the times. If we are doing what the bigger-city folk are doing, it just shows how we’re rote trend-followers who can’t think up anything “unique.”
Then there’s the rant I recently receivd in a bar from some musician who apparently still thinks he has to rebel against the dreaded Seattle Grunge Stereotype, 10 years later.
He apparently thought that (1) everybody in the music world would immediately love him if he simply got the hell out of hicksville Seattle (tell that to L7, the Beat Farmers, Concrete Blonde, the Minutemen, and all the other Calif. bands who never got their deserved due), and that (2) to be “Notgrunge” was to be a persecuted musical minority in this town (even though every single act in Seattle since ’92 has insisted it was “Notgrunge”).
But if you think I’m just here today to complain about all the complaining, you’re wrong. (I may be susceptible to many ideological recursive traps, but that’s not one of them.)
Whining about the supposed lack of a local identity actually is a longstanding, integral part OF our local identity. (It’s just one of the many traits we have in common with the Canadians.)
WTO could be seen as complaining taken to epic scale.
Kurt Cobain and co. could be seen as complaining taken to the level of art, or at least great entertainment.
But complaining can be good for you, and for the world around you. You wanna live someplace like Singapore where saying anything negative aboutalmost anyone or anything is not only legally but socially taboo? Didn’t think so.
So go ahead and bitch and moan. Get it out of your system. Feel the potentially healthy ego trip. Be proud of your willingness to speak up and call truth to power or whatever.
Just try, at least, to get to the next step–proposing a solution to your complaint (other than “screw it all to hell”)–and maybe even attempting to act upon this potential solution.
NEXT: WTO videos, the hot and the not-so-hot.
YESTERDAY, we riffed on a vision of sexual liberation for a post-corporate era.
That, of course, presumes that such an era is imminent, or at least that one can imagine it to be imminent.
I know I’m far from the only observer who’d like the current socio-economic-political zeitgeist to change. And I can’t think of a better way to help it happen than by making positive affirmations that it already has.
In that spirit, let’s imagine the components of the ’90s nostalgia craze, sure to hit just as soon as the rest of the nation realizes how over the era is.
And as for that other form of techno-optimism, that John Perry Barlow-propagated idea that we should just let big businesses run everything (in the name of the Internet Revolution) took a rather substantial dip in credibility around late ’99 and early ’00.
Of course, my having listed these trends under the “nostalgia” rubric implies they’re not just going away, but will roar back with a vengeance. And with the ever-shortening revival cycles, you can expect them back sooner rather than later, ensconced with all layers of hip-ironic sensibility.
Consider yourself warned.
NEXT: The wrong way to turn an Internet startup into an established respectable firm.
ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITE HAUNTS closed last week.
The Ditto Tavern was one of the tiny joints where, in the mid-to-late ’80s, you could see the likes of Green River, Soundgarden, Andrew Wood, and the other unsung heroes of what was still a very underground local alterna-rock scene. The place was willing to book this stuff because it was a tiny spot, well off of Belltown’s foot-traffic patterns, and hence needed to attract a “destination” clientele.
But as the Seattle scene actually got popular, the little out-of-the-way Ditto could no longer compete for acts with any real following. The place’s old owner seemed unable or unwilling to do anything to improve its situation.
It closed in early ’98 and reopened that fall, under new management and with a very handsome orange-and-black paint scheme. I was in a fairly decent drinking mode that fall, having been hired from a longtime post, and enjoyed having another regular hangout.
It had good pub meals and 21 (count ’em!) micros and imports on tap. It was clean and bright and had good rotating art exhibits. It did a good lunch business and had a modest but loyal regular evening crowd.
But the location problem remained a problem; and without the capital to hire enough relief staff, Lydia the new owner went on a slow-n’-steady road to burnout.
So when the building’s owner announced plans to raze the whole half-block for yet another office-retail midrise, she was, as she told me later, only too happy to get the heck outta Belltown.
Besides, she said, the type of people she wanted as customers seemed to have all moved away from the neighborhood. The affluent new condo dwellers, furthermore, don’t walk around in the neighborhood, preferring to drive to and from their secured garages.
Belltown really lost its “artist neighborhood” status back in ’97 or so; with the demolition of the SCUD studios (a.k.a. “the Jell-O mold building”) as the signature event of this loss. Developers of condo tower in the neighborhood continue to advertise their luxury homes with hype-words about the “lively urban creativity” their projects have already kicked out–or which the new condo dwellers immediately attempt to kick out, via lobbying for enhanced zoning and anti-noise regulations.
(And no, I don’t consider architects’ offices to be “art studios” or $100-a-plate restaurants to be “avant-hip nightspots.”)
Just don’t count on any potential ’01 economic recession to change this trend. All it might mean is a few projects could take a little longer to get off the ground, and the resulting new abodes could be merely ridiculously expensive instead of obscenely expensive.
So with the situation unlikely to change on its own, perhaps an urban-preservation movement is in order. But I don’t mean that old kind of urban preservation, in which ancient meat-packing plants, brothels, and horse stables were “restored to their original elegance.”
I mean a preservation of usages, not just of structures.
Other activists and thinkers have already suggested officially designating certain buildings (or spaces within buildings) for below-market-rent artist use. I’d go further, and designate certain parts of certain “urban village” neighborhoods for affordable housing (artist and otherwise), non-luxury retail, and entertainment (including bars and live-music clubs). Folks who move into a block that a live-music club is on will be told as they move in that they can’t just kick the music people out.
None of this would’ve saved the Ditto, whose problems were endemic from its first opening. But maybe they’ll save what’s left of the ol’ Belltown scene on First through Fourth Avenues.
And, just maybe, if there does turn out to be an oversupply of luxury home units in Belltown this year, the purveyors of those units might be willing to participate in a scheme that would limit or even cut back these units’ inventory, thus keeping the prices of the remaining units from falling too far.
NEXT: The bad old days of energy crises–they’re baaaaaaaack.
I’VE LONG BELIEVED more modern-day American citizens would be fans of jazz music if they weren’t so aggressively ordered, from childhood on, that they MUST love it.
You know, that music-appreciation-class bluster about “American Classical Music” or “This Country’s Only Indigenous Art Form.”
That, alas, is the overriding spirit of Ken Burns’s PBS maxi-documentary Jazz, lumbering to its dubious close next Monday. (The last episode being the only one to cover anything done within many of our readers’ lifetimes.)
The whole 18-hour thing is sluggishly laden with the worst didactic balderdash in the stoic narration and the even stoic-er read quotations from old critics (drowning out every single instrumental band and solo segment and even many vocal clips).
Then there’s the structure, the storyline Burns built the show around. It’s all about Great Men (and a few Great Women), American heroes who overcame (for the black musicians) a racist society or (for the white musicians) conformist notions of social respectability. The swirling stew of influences and trends, of commercial thrusts and avant-garde parries, gets muted and confined by the restrictions of a narrative amenable to suburban middle-class parents (i.e., boring as hell to suburban middle-class kids).
One critic even compared Burns, in his pedestrian approach to the topic and his sports-hero depiction of jazz’s greats, to “Bob Costas with an NEA grant.”
But, this being an age when audiovisual entertainments can be as mutable and expansionist as the best jazz has always been, we don’t necessarily need to be stuck with Burns’s work in its current form. We can write in to PBS and demand a deluxe DVD version of the series.
The new on-camera interviews in Jazz are fun, so they could stay in this proposed special edition–as stand-alone clips accessible from the DVD Extras menu.
Similarly, the narrations and quotations should be shunted off to an optional audio track.
That leaves the heart of jazz, and of Jazz–the music itself.
This proposed special edition would contain all the tuneage of the series, with each song played to its full length. (That would require more of the beautiful old-movie footage and historic still photos (did anyone else notice the three-second shot of a Louis Armstrong marquee sign outside Seattle’s Showbox?), but Burns probably has those piled up to his reed hole.)
This version wouldn’t preach at people, especially kids and teens, about how important jazz is.
It would simply let them hear and see for themselves how great it is.
A Final Thought: Jazz, like all the really great American music and culture, had and has just about nothing to do with that stoic-middlebrow PBS-ian (or Ken Burns-ian) voice of mellow authority. Real jazz (like ragtime, western swing, swamp blues, Gospel, rockabilly, R&B, bluegrass, disco, Ramones-era punk, Melle Mel-era hiphop, etc. etc. etc.) is music of cultural mongrelization and cross-pollenization; of life and lust and passion; of pain and loss and joy and the will to go on.
That’s why the music will survive long after dumb TV shows about it have been deservedly forgotten.
NEXT: Should we pity poor Belltown yet?
FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.
A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.
A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.
As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.
Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.
(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)
So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.
The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.
Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.
A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.
(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)
But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.
The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.
TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?
ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that’s washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.
All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.
It’s been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It’s been done with thriller and romance novels. It’s been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It’s been done with superhero comics and action video games.
How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn’t matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)
There’s one genre out there that hasn’t yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It’s got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.
I speak, of course, of pornography.
But the ol’ American puritan hypocrisy thang’s prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I’ve been able to find.
A simple web search of the word “Christian” with “porn,” “erotica,” or “sex” will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming “sex addiction,” and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).
But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.
The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook’s recent essay “Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer.” “God is a caring top,” Brook writes, “not a rapist.” Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one’s spiritual potential and exploring one’s sensual potential.
Similar thoughts are promoted on the “Christian Sex” pages of Poppy Dixon’s Adult Christianity site. That’s the same semisatirical site that’s got The XXX-Rated Bible, the “good parts” chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.
So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?
It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity’s historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and “pagan” mating rituals).
This genre would not be “anti-family,” or contradict Jesus’s real teachings, by any means. There’s much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one’s surrounding world; and there’s plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.
MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.
MANY ARTS AND THEATER PUBLICATIONS have come and gone, nationally and locally, over the years.
The local attempts have mostly foundered or struggled on a lack of cash flow. Artists and artsy-type folk are often considered insufficiently upscale for advertisers to bother with. Already-strapped funding organizations have had other priorities than merely documenting whatever visual or performing projects are already out there. That’s left these would-be documentors to work on an all-volunteer basis, with the personal-burnout rates and marketing weaknesses built into that concept.
One local outfit thinks it has the answer. Their magazine’s aimed not at artists, nor even at the bulk of their audiences.
Instead, Arts Patron (whose third issue should be out this month) is aimed squarely at upper-crust good-life-livers who (as a common stereotype goes) “Support the Arts” partly out of a good-works motivation, partly for the tax breaks, and partly for social status.
It’s mailed free to addresses on the fundraising mailing lists of ten participating theaters, museums, and hibrow-music ensembles. The rest of us have to read it online. (Thus keeping those downscale painters and actors and other assorted boho types from lowering the print edition’s advertiser value).
Seattle didn’t used to have very many of these patrons. Certainly not enough for a slick nine-times-a-year magazine to be aimed just at them. But post-Bill Seattle apparently has enough for publisher Jonathan Nichols to give it a shot. (If the concept works, Nichols may try to expand it to other towns.)
Should us non-gazillionaires care about the whole endeavor? From the looks of the first two issues, yes. Editor Douglas McLellan (who briefly was the best thing that had ever happened to the P-I arts section) has gone beyond mere PR hypeage for the mag’s participating institutions. Sure there are big pieces about the new Bellevue Arts Museum and the John Singer Sargent show at the Seattle Art Museum. But there are also big pieces about the Total Experience Gospel Choir, filmmaker Sandy Cioffi, the alterna-art space Howard House, and local mural-preservation advocate Roger van Oosten. McLellan himself contributes an important item about a UW study showing ballet dancers can have careers as short and injury-prone as pro football players (at far lower salaries).
So go to the site. Let its makers know you like it, and that you deserve the chance to see it in print even if you’re not a gazillionaire.
IN OTHER NEWS: Loyal reader Danny Goodisman writes, “Rumor has it, Paul Schell may run for re-election. To help him along, here are proposed slogans for Paul Schell’s re-election:
10. Still not a wimp.
9. Support international child labor.
8. Affordable housing for the rich.
7. Once a developer, always a developer.
6. Give corporate welfare a chance.
5. Blacks and Hispanics ‘raus.
4. Known round the world.
3. More ugly architecture for the Center.
2. King County multi-billionaires agree: Paul Schell for mayor.
1. Leadership which can bring tears to your eyes.”
TOMORROW: How to revive any waning popcult genre–make it Christian.
Better Listening Through Research
by guest columnist Ilse Thompson
RAYMOND SCOTT–recognized these days for compositions adapted for Bugs Bunny cartoons–spent the first half of his musical career as a pop figure.
He was an acclaimed and formidable band leader, composer and pianist through the ’30s and ’40s. In the ’50s, he led the house band on the TV show Your Hit Parade, all while writing bouncy ad jingles for everything from Sprite to IBM–allowing him to fund his secret, and very private, life as an avatar of electronic music.
This is the Raymond Scott–inventor, pioneer, visionary–Basta Records pays homage to with Manhattan Research Inc.
Left to its own devices, this two-CD set of Raymond Scott’s previously unreleased electronic compositions evokes a transcendental catatonia. Played on instruments of his own invention (the Clavivox, Circle Machine, Bass Line Generator, Rhythm Modulator, Karloff, Bandito the Bongo Artist, and his baby, the Electronium) these pieces will shift your foothold.
So… enough about the music, already.
Scott’s recordings are hardbound to accommodate a lavish 144-page set of “liner notes,” edited by Irwin Chusid–WFMU radio mainstay, director of the Raymond Scott Archives, and author of the recently released book, Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music.
In his introduction, Chusid says that “throughout Scott’s career in the public spotlight, there were occasional reports of an alter ego–the inventor, the engineer, the professor in the lab coat, the electronic music pioneer. But little of this work received public exposure.”
In order to remedy that, Chusid has compiled a collection of interviews with Scott’s contemporaries, including Robert Moog; historical essays, including one on Scott’s trippy collaborations with Jim Henson; articles written about Scott from back in the day; photographs of Scott and his musical equipment; patent designs; private musings and correspondence; promotional material; advertisements; detailed descriptions of each piece included on the CDs; and a wealth of fascinating ephemera.
As Chusid says, MRI is “a chapter of electronic music history you won’t find in most existing books on the subject.”
“In the music of the future,” Scott writes in 1949, “the composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized conception of his music. His brain waves will be picked up by mechanical equipment and channeled directly into the minds of his hearers, thus allowing no room for distortion of the original idea.” These glimpses into Scott’s mind make the listening experience deliciously disorienting.
If Chusid’s compilation were simply an academic thesis on the subject of electronic music or a plain old biographical essay, I could take it or leave it.
It is essential as an accompaniment to the CD set, however, because it reveals Scott as a downright visionary–a man who collaborated with his machines and was driven by more than a simple desire to make wicked new sounds.
He was trying to ignite an evolutionary leap in music, technology and even consciousness.
TOMORROW: The ol’ WTO-riot-anniversary thang.
THE YEAR’S BIGGEST local news story, the one with the most potential impact on our lives, didn’t have a single big event at its heart.
It’s the decline (and, in some cases, collapse) of dot-com stock speculation. It made its presence felt in small-scale ways (office closings; layoffs; fewer and sparser “networking” soirees; and a slight but accelerating slowdown in real-estate hyperinflation).
(Its related story, the possible Microsoft bust-up, had its spectacle elements take place in Washington, DC courtrooms.)
But several big here-and-now events did take place here which had an impact beyond their immediate sights-‘n’-sounds. Here are some of them.
1. The Kingdome Blows.
After Paul Schell cancelled the official, public New Year’s, Paul Allen staged a great pyrotechnic celebration during Spring Equinox week (the ol’ pagan New Year’s). It was also a half-minute rife with symbolism; deconstructing the onetime triumph of the pre-MS Seattle’s attempts to Go Major League (on a budget, and without needless ostentation).
2. The E.M.P.-ire Strikes Back.
Mr. Allen taketh away; Mr. Allen giveth. The Experience Music Project is almost all needless ostentation, a whole quarter-billion worth of it. It doesn’t really represent the spirit of Northwest pop music (its cocktail lounge doesn’t even have Rainier, let alone Schmidt!). It does represent the spirit of the new regional powers-that-be, who’ve got gazoods of dough and want to show it off as show-offy as can be.
The museum’s opening weekend was a big, mostly free, bash of all the top touring acts Allen could afford (and he could afford a lot of them), plus a nearly-complete local all-star lineup. (The biggest nonparticipants: Pearl Jam, who still have this beef with one of Allen’s former properties, Ticketmaster.)
3. End of Jem Studio Galleries.
Gentrification hit arts spaces hard; knocking out one of the city’s oldest and largest visual-arts workspaces (and First Thursday ground zero).
The Jem artists went out with essentially a four-month-long party of exhibitions, installations, performances, DJ events, live-music shows, etc., ending on the last night with a going-out bash that included a coed nude body-paint wrestling match.
4. Ralph Nader “Super Rally,” KeyArena.
The post-WTO Way-New Left had its biggest show of strength when about 10,000 paid real money to see the first real liberal Presidential candidate in 28 years and assorted celebrity guests.
5. Daily Papers Go Scab.
The JOA-married bombastic voices of the civic establishment, which had been proclaiming for so long about how things were just so great here and could only keep getting better, got a dose of reality. Just as the Times was running a huge feature series about the winners and losers in today’s concentration-O-wealth thang, the papers’ editorial and ad employees rejected a pitiful contract offer that wouldn’t help them keep up with housing costs.
The Times and P-I instantly turned into waify simulacra of themselves. Thin papers, bereft of their usual interminable “analysis” and huge feature series (and of their regular writers and photographers, and of the previous evening’s sports results, and of arts reviews). Papers that, had they been produced by competent people, would’ve been improvements on their prior bloated formats.
TOMORROW: A Dot-Com Christmas Carol.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
BLACK ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION was seldom among the proudest examples of African American cultural achievement.
Its schedule relied heavily on music-video blocks, including a lot of the gun-totin’ and woman-dissin’ gangsta minstrels manufactured by L.A. promoters for mall-rat consumption. Its original shows were heavy on the kind of self-deprecating comedy acts that Spike Lee savages in his new movie Bamboozled. And it ran as much as 12 hours a day of infomercials.
But black audiences were often willing to give the channel at least a little grudging respect, because it was “their own.” It was officially owned by a black entrepreneur, Robert Johnson. (Even though its financing and ultimate control came from TCI’s Liberty Media subsidiary.)
But AT&T, which now controls Liberty, has been involved in some major corporate reorganizing; while Johnson’s tried to start a new commuter airline.
So BET will soon disappear as a nominally independent entity, to become just another of Viacom’s many cable properties.
Some commentators have mourned that the only black-owned national TV channel’s going to be just another piece of a media conglomerate.
What they’re not fully considering is that a Viacom-owned BET just might be a more effective voice for black America. Not just with more and costlier original shows, but with a more respectful atittude toward its core audience.
Viacom’s MTV and UPN channels have certainly traded in the kind of jive talk and booty shakes vilified by BET’s critics. But its Showtime pay-TV channel has commissioned perhaps the most respectful black-middle-class show since Cosby, Soul Food (and its Hispanic counterpart, Resurrection Boulevard).
These shows, along with HBO’s The Corner, expand the notion of “TV Worth Paying For.” Those with just plain old broadcast reception get Af-Am role models limited to over-the-top sitcom mugging and Oprah. Those with basic cable can also see Li’l Kim’s cleavage, Wyclef’s loverboy posturing, and CNN’s Bernard Shaw.
But for the adventures of more-or-less ordinary black families with more-or-less ordinary relationship and career problems, ya gotta pay extra.
Maybe, just maybe, that’ll change.
TOMORROW: Bjork’s dander in the dark.
Generation S&M, Part 2
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began musing about the ’90s revival of bondage fetishism in pop culture, and some of its possible sources. Her conclusion: A generation had come of age after growing up with Catwoman and Emma Peel.)
MY GENERATION was the first generation raised in front of the television.
Suddenly there were shows geared just towards us. Our moms bought us the new TV dinners, then set us in front of the tube while they went to their ESP development class.
And it wasn’t just The Partridge Family and Leave It to Beaver reruns we ate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. We’re talking some pretty heavy sexual-revolution morsels from the ’60s. Things even too risque for today’s TV.
I’m talking Catwoman, in full dominitrix gear, playfully torturing Batman. Sure, she was evil, but she was sort of doing Batman a favor by punishing him. I was five and I understood that.
Then there was I Dream of Jeannie, a scantily clad Barbara Eden dressed like a Turkish concubine who called a guy “Master.” (Impossible on today’s television.)
On Bewitched, Samantha was cheesily nice, but did you ever catch her evil twin sister Serena, the dominitrix? Between changing Darren into various livestock, she always had something vicious to say to her sister and just about anyone else around.
Emma Peel, in tight leather, karate-chopped men and always had the upper hand on Steed.
These were the women who raised me while my mom was at work. Me and my friends couldn’t swear by oath because it was against our religion, so we would say, “Do you swear to Catwoman?” If you lied on that one, we all knew you would go straight to hell.
In the ’70s, suddenly schools couldn’t make us cut our hair, pray or even insist we pledge allegiance to the flag. Just when we wanted Catwoman for a teacher, gone was the enticing restraint of the ’50s. All that work from the women’s libbers paid off, too; they couldn’t stop us from joining the army, cutting our hair, wearing pants and completely desexing ourselves.
We could do anything we wanted, and boy were we bored.
Our parents were all divorced and “finding themselves,” repeating Stuart Smalley-type self-affirmation mantras in the bathroom mirror, or smoking a joint; so they were too busy to give us any discipline.
In rebellion, my classmates starting getting born-again all over the place, finding the rigid moral confines of the fundamentalist church comforting.
In comparison, punk rock and S&M were sane alternatives. Not only did S&M give us something to bounce off of for once, but it made sex illicit, exciting, unnatural, and deviant. We could finally get that disapproving look from our society that we had waited for all those years.
The end of S&M as we know it: Now, of course, it is not so risque to be a dominitrix. it’s no longer considered deviant. In fact they even have advocacy groups and support groups.
In the ’80s, as a sociology student, I watched a “sexual deviancy” film. There was the prostitute, the nymphomaniac, the transsexual etc., and of course, the dominatrix. She was pitifully tame. Nowadays they would have to take her out of the film.
And the ’70s have come back into style–not only clothes-wise, but suddenly the 20-year-olds stopped wearing makeup and everyone thinks they have ESP or are a witch. N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys are singing some really sugary-sweet stuff that is as barfable as Barry Manilow. Madonna traded in her tight leather corsets for that flowy polyester look.
Sex looks boring again; or at least I wouldn’t find it enticing to do the dirty with the anorexic, bell-bottom-wearing, self-loving, and self-affirming teenyboppers out there. I mean, do Ricky Martin and Matt Damon really look at all dangerous?
I guess I will just have to wait 20 years or so to have any fun.
Or maybe I’ll just ignore that S&M is no longer chic.
That would be SO Catwoman of me!
TOMORROW: A blowhard gets his comeuppance and refuses to admit it.
IN OTHER NEWS: The three U.S. news magazines often share the same cover-story topic, but rarely have Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report all used the exact same cover image, with two of the three using the same banner headline.
IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I did an all-list column, but this and the next will be such.
Today, in a post-Thanksgiving gesture of sorts, are as many Things I Like as I can think of right now (just to placate those readers who falsely complain that I never seem to like anything), in no particular order:
(Though there’s also much to be said for daydreamt fantasies involving Adrienne Shelly in a private railroad car with piped-in Bollywood movie music and a few cases of Reddi-Wip.)
(The new “Imagined Landscapes” show at Consolidated Works includes a group of three hyperrealistic paintings by NY artist Peter Drake based on ’50s nudist-mag images, only with suburban front yards for backgrounds instead of open picnic grounds.)
(If this amused you, there’s also a separate Things I Like page on this site, which duplicates almost none of the items on this list.)
MONDAY: Another list, this one of people who aren’t really better than you.
IN OTHER NEWS: Thursday saw a skinny scab-edition P-I but no Times, at least not in the downtown, Capitol Hill, and North End neighborhoods of my holiday travels. Today will likely see no Friday entertainment sections; causing movie-time-seeking readers to grab for weekly or suburban papers. What will the Sunday Times look like, aside from preprinted feature sections? We’ll find out.
IT’S BEEN A SHORT WHILE since the announcement that Napster, the profitless dot-com that’s become the symbol of file sharing, DIY music trading, and anti-corporate crusading (and the target of a massive record-industry suit) “sold out,” if you’re to believe the email and chatroom remarks of many disgruntled users.
Since the initial announcement that Napster would accept an investment from the German media conglomerate Bertlesmann (owner of one of the global Big Five record-label groups that’s sued Napster), and would use that money to establish an “enhanced” music-downloading service with yet-unspecified features and a yet-unspecified user fee, the conventional wisdom has been that the party’s over.
Napster’s supposedly caved into industry pressure (and the lousy dot-com investment climate). It’s going to become just another soulless adjunct to the corporate media oiligopoly.
The Napster we’ve come to grow and (except for record-biz sharks) love, in which their computers served as e-matchmakers between users who had song files and users who wanted them, would soon disappear, according to this scenario. It’s sure to be replaced any month now by a pay-to-play setup with all the features corporations like and users dislike (copy-protected files, limited listening periods, limited compatibility across different computer platforms, track and artist selections subject to the priorities of corporate machinations, tons-O-cash going to the companies but not to the artists).
But the Napster folks now insist that ain’t necessarily so.
In an FAQ list about the deal, management claims the current Napster system will remain as long as the courts allow (and they’ll continue to defend the service in those courts). And the current Napster system will continue to be free.
The for-money Napster Plus, or whatever they end up calling it, will provide “an enhanced service that you’ll find even more valuable and that will allow us to generate revenues to be able to make payments to artists and songwriters for music files that our users share with each other.” Details are to be announced later, but might not resolve some of the current Napster setup’s built-in inconveniences (tracks that are sometimes misidentified, improperly converted, or choppily edited; song selection limited by what other users happen to have online at the moment).
In any event, no matter what happens to Napster, free file sharing’s here to stay. Napster happens to have the easiest-to-use file sharing procedure implemented to date. Others, such as Gnutella, do away with Napster’s centralized matchmaking system. The substitute search mechanism, at least as currently implemented, can be slow and inconclusive. But they can, and undoubtedly will, be improved upon. As they get easier to use, the major labels might eventually wish they still had an identifiable and sueable entity like Napster to deal with.
Which may be what’s really behind the Napster/Bertelsmann deal. Napster offers a common user interface and experience, a brandable identity, to song-sharing.
The labels (or at least Bertelsmann) can deal with that, in ways they’ll never be able to deal with the likes of Gnutella and its future incarnations.
MONDAY: The bon Target.
IN OTHER NEWS:The one neighborhood of (or just adjacent to) Seattle that hadn’t been taken over by the gentrifiers has, alas, just been discovered–in an article ostensibly bemoaning its down-and-out status but really inviting real-estate speculators to come-‘n-get-it.
SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with another dare received on an email list.
A WILD BORE: Nickelodeon recently debuted Pelswick, a cartoon series created by our favorite Portland paraplegic satirist John Callahan. Its hero is a 13-year-old boy, who just happens to use a wheelchair.
One emailer on one of the lists I’m on noted that, not too long ago, such a character situation would never have been deemed an appropriate topic for a children’s light-entertainment series. This correspondent also asked if anyone could “name a subject that isn’t at least potentially entertaining.”
Here’s what I came up with:
(On the other hand, a drawn-out, never-concluding Presidential election is about as much fun as one can have with one’s garments currently being worn.)
YOU ROCK, ‘GRL’!: Media reaction to the ROCKRGRL Music Conference, Seattle’s biggest alterna-music confab in five years, was nothing if not predictable.
Before the conference, the big papers described it as an attempt to get a “women in rock” movement back on track after the end of Lilith Fair (which was really an acoustic singer-songwriter touring show, and which had included almost no nonsinging female instrumentalists).
During the conference, the papers tried to brand everyone in it as reverse-sexists, out to denounce “the male dominated music industry” and anything or anyone with a Y chromosome. Many of the speakers and interviewees, however, declined to fall in line with this preconceived line. Some at the panel discussions took time to thank husbands, boyfriends, band members, and other XY-ers who’ve supported their work. Others in interviews insisted their musical influences and life heroes weren’t as gender-specific as the interviewers had hoped. (Even at the discussion about violent “fans,” someone noted that stalkers and attackers can be anyone (cf. the Selena tragedy).)
And as for the music industry, it’s not built on gender but on money and power games; games which routinely prove disastrous for maybe 80 percent of male artists and 90 percent of female artists. (We’ll talk a little more about this tomorrow.)
THE END OF SOMETHING BIG: Saw Game Show Network’s hour-long tribute to Steve Allen a couple weeks back. Was reminded of how, seeing one of his last talk shows as a teenager, he was briefly my idol. He did silly things; he always kept the proceedings moving briskly. He also wrote fiction and nonfiction books, plays, and thousands of songs.
Of course, nobody remembers any of the songs, except the one he used as his own theme song. And the books and plays were essentially forgettable trifles. His main work was simply being funny on TV, and he was able to do it on and off for nearly 50 years.
As for his latter-day involvement with a right-wing pro-censorship lobby, you have to remember he was the son of vaudeville performers and was steeped in the old American secular religion of Wholesome Entertainment. To him, the past two or three decades’ worth of cultural bad boys and girls probably didn’t really represent a “moral sewer” but a mass heresy against what, to him, had been the One True Faith.
THE MARKETPLACE-O-IDEAS: The NY Times reports about some American leftist economists (including James Tobin, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bruce Ackerman) who’ve found an appreciative and excited audience for their ideas–in Europe.
You can think of it as the socio-philosophical equivalent of those U.S. alterna-music bands that could only get record contracts overseas.
You can also think of it as another of the unplanned effects of cultural globalization. Even avid opponents of a world system ruled by U.S. corporations are taking their ideas from Americans.
TOMORROW: Apres Napster, le deluge.
