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CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.
But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.
And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.
We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.
We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.
There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.
Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).
It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.
Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.
As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.
When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.
They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.
Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.
TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.
ELSEWHERE:
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY:
WORKIN’ IT: I-Spy, the sanitized-for-your-protection DJ club in the former Weathered Wall space on 5th, has started an ’80s-rock night on Tuesdays called “Raygunomics: An ’80s Experience.” Among the attractions on the event’s premiere week: That recently moderately-popular fad, “New Wave Karaoke.”
I think the concept could be extended even further, into “Seattle Rock Karaoke.” You could have Chris Cornell karaoke, Scott McCaughey karaoke, even Carrie Akre karaoke….
METROPOLITAN LIVING magazine had a good, if superficial, March cover story about our ol’ pal Alex Steffan and his crusade, as current head of the civic-advocacy group Allied Arts, to keep Seattle “funky” and human-scale.
Revealing just the mindset Steffan’s up against was the back cover ad, displaying the rear end of a gaudy Cobra penismobile at the Pike Place Market with the slogan, “Not your average groceries. Not your average grocery getter.” The image defines the Market’s as no longer a funky working-class value venue, but as just another upscale-gourmet-emporium-slash-tourist-trap.
JOHN CARLSON, KV-Lie demagogue and an old personal nemesis of mine, is running for governor. For the past decade, Carlson’s either been the instigator or principal cheerleader for almost every regressive piece of legislation or initiative measure in Washington state. Perhaps a high-profile personal campaign will finally publicly expose just the kind of shallow-but-slick, self-serving operator he really is.
BACKSTAGE MUSIC & VIDEO in Ballard closed in early March. It marks the end of two local-biz institutions. It was the last remnant of what had been the Peaches Records chain. In recent years, it had been owned by the operators of the Backstage music club on the same block, which shut its doors circa ’97.
IN CASE YOU switched from cable to a satellite dish and haven’t been able to watch, the local public access channel has been running in tape-only mode this past fall and winter. The access studio up by 98th & Aurora has been undergoing a much-dragged-out remodel and refitting. This meant, among other things, that many cult-favorite access shows (Bend My Ear Seattle, Don’t Quote Me On This) have been in rerun mode or off altogether, and that lefty journalist-types who wanted to comment on the WTO debacle had to do so in prerecorded fashion; no live reports or studio call-in shows were feasible.
But the city (which is taking over a larger share of control over the channel from AT&T Cable) has announced the access studio will finally reopen to producers. The date, appropriately enough for much of the channel’s fare, is April 1.
TOMORROW: Another cool space in transition.
IN ALL KNOWN TRAVELOGUES about historic U.S. Route 66, the traveler is always driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Never the other direction.
In books such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the old “Manifest Destiny” ideology, in the legacies of Reagan Republicans and Beverly Hills Democrats, and in the history of the entertainment biz, the movement American economic, political, and cultural activity, of the nation’s overall zeitgeist, inevitably moved in one direction–from Northeast to Southwest.
Everybody who was anybody moved to L.A. or wanted to, as proclaimed in the Go-Gos’ song “Our Town” and the last verse of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
L.A. was the dominant pop-cultural force of the whole world, and the model of commercial and residential development for the nation, for better or for worse.
Whenever certain folks saw something developing in Seattle they didn’t like, from sprawling subdivisions to traffic jams to cookie-cutter chain stores, they publicly bemoned that Seattle was “becoming another L.A.”
But while nobody up here was noticing, L.A. ceased to be the unchallenged icon of American inevitability.
The region’s aerospace and defense industries have been shrinking, and much of what’s left is now controlled by Boeing.
With the single exception of Disney, all the major Hollywood entertainment giants are now under the thumb of conglomerates based in other cities or other countries. Those highly hyped “new media” outfits are more likely to be situated in northern California, the Northeast, or the Northwest.
Educated young adults across the continent are clamoring to move into “real” neighborhoods and communities, not SoCal-style sprawlsvilles.
The image of a “Southern California Lifestyle” once romanticized in movies like L.A. Story and TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 has devolved into the more dystopian depictions of Tinseltown seen in Showtime’s Beggers and Choosers (filmed in Canada!).
And we won’t even get into southern California’s increasingly lousy reputations for race relations, education funding, and police corruption.
Among all this bad news, word recently came that Times Mirror, parent company of the L.A. Times, would be merged into the Chicago-based Tribune Company.
The L.A. Times, just like the Chicago Tribune, used to be known as a financially prosprous but editorially weak paper, a mouthpiece for its owners’ right-wing opinions. But both papers learned to get more respectable in recent decades, while their respective parent companies expanded into other media ventures. (The Tribune Co. owns Seattle’s KCPQ-TV and operates KTWB-TV under a management contract.)
Now, Times Mirror (the “Mirror” in the corporate name refers to an L.A. evening paper that died in the ’50s) will fold its papers, TV stations, book companies, and assorted other endeavors under Tribune’s control.
Some commentators have bemoaned the loss of local newspaper ownership as a sign of L.A. “losing its civic identity” (sound familiar?).
Los Angeles used to collectively think of itself as The End of the Line; the inevitable receiving place of all America’s energies and dissemination point for all America’s entertainment. All roads led, like Route 66, to L.A. All eyes and ears were attuned to Hollywood product, as signified by the RKO logo’s radio tower beaming one signal to the world.
It’s not just that L.A.’s not the End of the Line anymore, but that there’s no more “Line.”
TOMORROW: Some short stuff.
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW what it’s like to be constantly mistaken for someone who knows absolutely everything about absolutely everything.
Phone calls in the wee hours from obsessed acquaintances demanding I relieve their self-made mental torture by telling them the answers to obscure conundrums I’ve never considered.
Couples spotting me from a block away and chasing me down, yelling at me to tell them the directions to someplace I’ve never heard of or the name of the best sushi restaurant in the neighborhood.
Guys in bars enlisting me to settle burly drunken men’s disputes over the most arcane sports or movie trivia; as if I (1) knew the answer, and (2) wanted to make either burly drunken guy mad at me.
For the record, let it stand that I do not know everything.
If I did, I sure wouldn’t be stuck with some dorky little website now, would I? I’d be independently wealthy from prescient stock trades and/or sports bets, which I’m most assuredly not.
(Okay, I did have one dream three years ago that focused on the office tower of a major company that, upon wakening, turned out to have suddenly announced a big merger; but that’s never happenned before or since.)
So, here’s but a very partial list of the many, many, many things I don’t know:
(On the other hand, I have known most of the answers on that TV show, even the toughies. I keep calling the hotline but I never get the random call-back. Oh well, maybe I can still learn day-trading….)
TOMORROW: Retro-progressivism.
IN OTHER NEWS:
ONCE UPON A TIME in the ’80s, when cable TV was just starting to grow and most of its customers still lived in rural areas, the Grand Ole Opry people started The Nashville Network.
It drew on the existing resources of the Opry radio show, the Opryland theme park, and the Opryland TV-studio facility (home of Hee Haw). Because few country acts had made music videos, the channel emphasized variety shows and other live-performance formats.
And it was good.
TNN’s amassed an invaluable trove of performance and interview footage with every major country star active since 1983; its archives contain rare film and video of most every country star who’d died before the channel’s debut.
TNN’s been instrumental in “breaking” most of those “Young Country” stars, and solidified a new, mainstreamed audience for the genre as a whole.
Its influence was proven in the mid-’90s, when the Billboard record charts switched from a survey format to listing actual record sales. The young-country acts were suddenly revealed to be bigger sellers than most of the corporate-rock superstars.
TNN’s Sunday-afternoon NASCAR coverage, meanwhile, had helped make the stock-car circuit into America’s most prominent racing sport.
But in 1997, the Opry’s original joint-venture partner in TNN, Westinghouse Broadcasting and Cable, assumed control of the channel, just as it was merging with CBS (which in turn is being absorbed by Viacom).
The new management saw TNN not for its loyal audiences or its programming heritage, but for the millions of cable homes it reached (almost every cable system in the country carries it).
Hours of original live-music shows were axed from the schedule, replaced by advertiser-friendly “lifestyle” shows and cheap reruns. At first, the rerun shows were chosen for their more-or-less “country” settings (The Waltons, The Dukes of Hazard, Dallas). But now the schedule includes Cagney & Lacy, that two-woman cop show set in New York City. (You should all now yell out like in the Pace picante sauce ad, “New York CITY?!?”)
When new original shows did appear, they were either dorky action shows (of the type clogging the USA Network’s schedule) or trash-sports concepts aimed at teenage boys: Extreme Championship Wrestling, RollerJam, Arena Football, and most recently Rockin’ Bowl.
Last month, TNN dropped its last weekday music programming, a daytime hour of videos, so it could add reruns of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. (Ahh, nothing like faked “funny outtakes” with the stars of since-forgotten 1985 sitcoms.)
The only “Nashville” left in TNN is a three-hour Saturday night block, anchored by a half-hour simulcast of the Opry radio show, and a Biography-like documentary series on Monday nights. Viewers who write or email to complain are referred to to another CBS-owned channel, the video-clip based Country Music Television (carried on far fewer cable systems).
TNN will probably survive without country music. Can country music survive without TNN?
Already, CBS’s Infinity Radio Group, which owned both of Seattle’s country stations, has switched one of them to an ’80s-nostalgia format. We may have seen the peak of commercial “Young Country;” though the more critically beloved (and sometimes even younger) “alternative country” genre appears to still be going strong on its semi-underground level.
TOMORROW: No, I don’t know everything.
BACK IN THE ’80s, it seemed like a franchised Benetton clothing store was opening up every day, in every possible North American shopping district. In downtown Seattle, I could swear there were four or five of the boutiques at once. (This memory could be slightly exaggerated.)
Supporting this vast-growing empire were the ads in every magazine and on every billboard and bus exterior, with the slogan “United Colors of Benetton” accompanying pictures of scrubbed-faced young models sporting wild and wacky earrings, necklaces, badges, and rings atop drab-looking sweaters.
Once shoppers figured out that the Benetton stores were really selling just the sweaters, not the accessories, the number of Benetton outlets markedly decreased.
The Italian-owned company never went away (it still has one local outlet, in the same building as F.A.O. Schwarz). But as its physical presence (what the dot-com guys call “brick and mortar stores”) has lessened, and as a supposedly more cynical young-adult generation has succeeded the supposed Reagan-era innocents, the company’s adopted ever-“edgier” marketing angles.
One part of that push has been the “controversial” print ads, in which fashion-model imagery was replaced by increasingly in-your-face material–AIDS victims, wartime destruction, and most recently death-row inmates–keeping the company and the brand
The less mainstream-media-publicized part of Benetton’s branding push has been Colors magazine, “A Magazine for the Rest of the World.”
It’s published in five bilingual editions (the U.S. gets English and Italian). Its New York-based editors claim, “the magazine is based on a simple idea: Diversity is good.”
Yet it exists to sell a single global brand name to some 80 countries, to get everybody wearing the same sweaters and jeans from Rio to Osaka.
The editors finally got around to exploring this contradiction in the current issue, themed “Monoculture.”
Behind the cover image of Mickey Mouse’s head as a Photoshopped goop of neon-glo goo, the issue has picture after slick color picture of Coca-Cola in Egypt, Shell in Malaysia, Madonna CDs in Tokyo, etc. etc. The WTO protestors would interpret these images as the 666-marks of a corporate beast intent on devouring us all. A reader trained by the protests to see the images that way could easily see them that way.
But the editors insist they’re “celebrating” the rise of a single commercial lingua franca uniting all nations, all faiths, and, yes, all colors under a shared experience of Big Macs (even if the ones served up in India are all either chicken or veggie), Frosted Flakes, Toyota Corrollas, Tom Hanks movies, Barbie dolls, Hershey bars, and at least one certain clothing brand.
The images and the accompanying texts show, even inadvertantly, that we’re losing a lot in terms of real cultural diversity. As Jim Hightower once wrote, “There really is a new world order, but it’s not black helicopters. It’s global corporations.”)
But they also show the world as still having quite a bit still there, diversity-wise. Despite all attempts at imposing a Monoculture, most of these marketers still have to localize their products or at least their brand-images everywhere they go. (MTV, as I wrote here last week, has had to increase its regional versions around the world from 5 to 22, in order to compete with local channels in all those countries that play fewer US/UK corporate superstars and more indigenous pop.)
Before the violent Yugoslavian breakup, advocates of Global Business liked to note that no two countries that both had McDonald’s outlets had ever gone to war against one another. That doesn’t mean globalization has been all peaceful, or all progressive. As some of the WTO protestors noted, corporate imperialism has brought sweatshop labor conditions, environmental compromise, and the end of countless local business ventures across the globe.
Some lefty historians like to recite long histories of cruelties done to folks whose economies were colonized. (What were the tea and opium wars in old Asia, f’rinstance, but the result of intercontinental commerce?)
The marketing Monoculture is different from past colonizations in several ways. Perhaps most important: In older forms of colonialism, the people of the colonized societies made stuff for Global Business to sell. Nowadays, the same folks are also expected to buy the stuff of their lives from these same trading groups. You’re not just picking coffee beans for Procter & Gamble, you’re buying P&G toothpaste. You’re not just mining iron ore to become Fords, you’re supposed to dream of one day driving your own Ford.
Whether that’s really any more “empowering” is a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: The singular joys of single-artist Net radio.
HAD A LOVELY CHAT a few weeks ago with some other local web-writers. Among the afternoon’s hypertextual topics: Our first modems.
Ahh, the good old days. Three-hundred-baud telephone modems that attached directly to telephone headsets via “acoustic couplers.” Text-only bulletin board systems that were run with such now-forgotten software as Minibin and Polaris, on TRS-80s, Apple IIs and kit-built CP/M computers. Real floppy discs, up to eight inches in diameter, holding as much as 400k.
The online world was a much smaller, though not always civil, place. (“Flame wars” and other breaches of sociability were rampant.)
And, like the worlds of science-fiction fandom and computer hobbyists (the real “hackers”) from which it sprung, it was a place teeming with fat guys.
Today’s more corporate online world doesn’t have many fat guys in charge. It has tall guys in charge instead. Lots of tall guys.
You can see them at any gathering of the dot-com hustlers and the Microsoft elite. They’re the movers and the shakers. The fast-talking, hard-handshaking, success-minded gents. The IPO success stories or wannabes. Many of them are tall enough to be Presidential candidates or even late-night talk show hosts.
They know their way around a business plan, or at least can fake it well. They can network and schmooze with the venture-capital gang like all get out.
But the fat guys were a helluva lot more fun to hang out with.
The fat guys knew how to drink and eat and make lovable fools of themselves. The tall guys are usually too self-conscious for that; too obsessed with making the right impression toward someone (often another tall guy) who has, or might one day have, money.
In the March Harper’s, Greg Critser has a cover essay (not available online) concerning “The Heavy Truths About American Obesity.”
“In upscale corporate America,” Critser writes, “being fat is taboo, a surefire career killer. If you can’t control your own contours, goes the logic, how can you control a budget or a staff? Look at the glossy business and money magazines with their cooing profiles of the latest genius entrepreneurs: to the man, and the occasional woman, no one, I mean no one, is fat.”
Critser’s piece depicts the oft-reported “obesity epidemic” as a potential conspiracy by the corporate elite, so big food companies can get rich off of lower-caste people’s addictions–and also so that the elites can easily stereotype and demonize those supposedly lazy couch potatoes who’ll never amount to anything.
He also has nasty things to say against the fat-pride movement and anyone who doesn’t hate obesity as much as he does. (Last year, Critser wrote for the business magazine Worth about his own experience with a new prescription diet drug. Perhaps he thinks if he could go through the ordeal, everyone should be able to and want to.)
Anyhoo, Critser may indeed have a point about why the fat guys who did so much to invent online communication aren’t reaping more of the material rewards from the medium they pioneered. They were great programmers and tinkerers, totally devoted to their projects, and enthusiastic builders of some of the first electronic communities.
They just didn’t have the look of the Lean-‘n’-Mean. (Or the schmoozing or bossing-around skills, or the aura of invincibility.)
But with the old-media monopolists and the stock-bubble hustlers grabbing bigger and bigger chunks of Net “mindshare,” it’s way past time we recaptured more of the BBS era’s homespun, DIY spirit.
Bring back the fat guys.
MONDAY: Benetton, death row inmates, and the Monoculture.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remembering one of the old guard, master computer-journalist Don Crabb.
HERE’S ANOTHER BATCH of mini photo features on recycled and “restored” buildings around town, plus one building that thankfully hasn’t been “restored” to anything, at least not yet.
Almost eight years later, some clueless out-of-towners still expect to find Seattle crawling with the sorts of aimless young slackers and garage-banders they think they remember from Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles–even though the film’s episodic vignettes mostly involved four very clean-cut young adults who were getting real careers underway whilst undergoing assorted relationship misadventures. The movie’s principal exterior location was the Coryell Court Apartments, already a familiar sight due to its prominent location on the #43 bus line.
This utilitarian brick industrial building on Western Avenue was originally a box factory. Then it housed job-printers Frayn Publishing. Then it was a warehouse for Northwest (now National) Mobile Television, a former KING-TV subsidiary that provides remote trucks for televised sports events. Now, it’s luxury condos (with two additional floors of penthouse “lofts” just added on), plus those two additional occupants every non-demolished old Belltown building seems to be getting–a restaurant and an architects’ office.
KIRO-TV was the last of Seattle’s original TV stations to go on the air, debuting in 1958 (a full decade after KING). For its first 11 years, it operated from this former church building atop Queen Anne Hill, adjacent to its transmission tower. During those years, it was a solid #3 in local-news ratings, and depended for profits on network shows and the still-legendary J.P. Patches local kids’ show. The building’s current tenants include an aerobics center and an Italian restaurant.
While the main entrance of the Bethel Temple evangelical church was “modernized” in the 1950s, the rest of the building’s facade (and much of its interior) remains from the building’s original use, a public swimming pool or “natatorium” (it used salt water, piped in from Elliott Bay and heated). The church already sold the land it had owned across the street, where World Pizza and several small galleries had been, for condos; now it’s preparing to vacate its own building. The developers promise to maintain some of the old natatorium facade in the new building; preservation activists want the whole thing saved as a historic site.
TOMORROW: Hedonism as a non-revolutionary stance.
SOMETIME LAST WEEK,MTV claimed to have played the one millionth music video (counting repeats) in the cable channel’s 19-year history.
You probably didn’t even notice. The channel didn’t even bother to plant hype stories the channel planted in newspapers about the “achievement.” (The clip chosen to represent the milestone: Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”)
Once the #1-rated basic cable channel, MTV’s ratings have steadily declined. (A recent, laudatory Forbes article touted the successful launches of localized MTV channels around the world, but tellingly said nothing about the U.S. original.)
What’s more, the channel’s more exclusively than ever drawing teen and young-adult audiences, who (despite being incessantly wooed by every channel from NBC to UPN) proportionately watch far less TV of any type than any other age group.
The problem’s not that ex-viewers like me grew older while MTV didn’t. It’s that MTV has indeed grown old; or at least tired.
Briefly, during its mid-’80s to early-’90s midlife, the channel was known for championing artistically flashy “breakthrough videos,” and also for breaking exciting new acts that threatened to stretch the boundaries of pop and rock.
Back in 1981, MTV had been routinely criticized for its lack of programming diversity. It mainly just showed hard-rock and top-40 acts, with a smattering of British “new wave” clips and almost no R&B or hiphop.
Today, during those hours when it isn’t re-re-rerunning five-year-old Real World episodes or Celebrity Deathmatch animations, MTV almost exclusively plays music from five, very rigidly-defined, genres:
Of course, as an integral part of the mainstream record-industry hype machine, MTV’s decline has parallelled the industry’s. With no real “top 40” mass market anymore, the industry has devolved and retreated into niches where it believes its big-promotion, big-marketing approach can still move CDs–the five genres listed above, plus the easy-listening acts played on VH1 (also owned, like MTV, by Viacom) and the pop-country acts played on TNN (soon to be owned by Viacom once its merger with CBS goes through).
TOMORROW: What’s in a (corporate) name?
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite website:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea.
SOME EVEN MISC.-ER ITEMS to peruse on your real-Washington’s-birthday non-holiday:
THE SECOND ISSUE of MISCmedia, the Magazine should be at subscribers’ mailboxes any day now. Thinking of subscribing? Here are some reasons why you should.
Reason one: If more once-a-month distro-pals don’t start helping out, we’re gonna have to cut back on the delivery of free copies around town.
Reason two: Subscribe during the March issue’s delivery cycle (approximately the next four weeks) and you’ll receive a cute little toy or trinket from our grab bag o’ goodies; including several giveaway doodads from the last High Tech Career Expo.
AD VERBS: The nationwide Azteca mexican-restaurant chain has discovered a shtick for associating its TV commercials with “authentic” Mexican culture of the pop variety. The spots closely resemble those telenovelas soap operas on Univision!
The stoic line readings, the over-drenched color schemes, the tearjerker situations–they’re all there.
The only differences are that the actors are speaking slightly-accented English and the ads are intentionally funny.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Redeye is a thick photocopy zine full of neo hiphop-graffiti style art and lettering, and articles about such popular national young-lefty topics as Mumia Abu-Jamal, “materialism and the lack of consciousness in hiphop,” coming of age in L.A., and Allen Ginsberg.
It’s also got a one-page essay repeating the fun but totally false rumor that the KFC restaurant chain changed its name from “Kentucky Fried Chicken” because the critters it serves up have been so genetically modified as to no longer legally qualify as chickens.
The tale’s gotten so widespread, the company has felt it necessary to put up a page debunking the hoax. The University of New Hampshire, referenced in some of the e-mail versions of the story, also has its own debunking page. Another telling of the story behind the story comes from About.com.
So you can be assured: KFC’s serving real chicken. Real often-greasy chicken, in often-small portions, served up by a global giant currently using a (re-)animated icon of its dead founder talking like a dorky white mall-rapper.
(Another untrue rumor Redeye didn’t know about: the one that claimed KFC’s profits went to the Ku Klux Klan.)
TOMORROW: Search engine fun.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.
But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.
CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.
There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.
Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.
While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.
Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours. “Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime. Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill. “Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime. “You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121. “Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.
“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.
Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.
“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.
“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.
“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).
THE WIRED WEBSITE DIDN’T INVENT the banner ad, despite its official claims to have done so (Prodigy did). And Wired didn’t invent rah-rah way-new business writing.
Elbert Hubbard, Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Steve Forbes’s late dad Malcolm all used to love pontificatin’ and philosophisin’ about industry as the driving force of the human race, commerce as the world’s noblest calling, and the businessman as rightful leader of all things.
All Wired did, and it’s an important little thing, was to marry this motivational pep-talk lingo to the hyperaggressive hipness of techno music and corporate-PoMo design, and to apply it not toward such old-economy trades as shoe selling but toward the Now-Now-Now realm of tech-mania.
But for all its self-promotin’ bluster, Wired never got the mythical sack of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, and had to be sold to the Conde Nast oldline mag empire.
It’s taken a couple of other ventures to morph the concept into something more reader- and advertiser-friendly.
Wired treated the Way New Economy, ultimately, as just the replacement of an old elite by a new elite. Its fantasy-universe was a rarified hip-hierarchy centered in San Francisco and ruled by a clique of aging Deadheads working as strategic consultants to telecom and oil companies.
In contrast, both Fast Company and Business 2.0 depict the “revolution in business” as something anybody can, at least in theory, get in (and cash in) on. Both mags are thick with second-person features on how you and your firm can get connected, shake off those old tired procedures, and rev up for today’s supercharged Net-economy.
Fast Company (circulation 325,000) has become the cash cow of Mortimer Zuckerman’s publishing mini-empire, which has also included U.S. News & World Report, the N.Y. Daily News, and (until he recently sold it) the Atlantic Monthly.
Business 2.0 (circulation 240,000) has quickly become the American flagship of the British-owned Imagine Media, whose other “Media With Passion” titles include Mac Addict and the computer-game mag Next Generation.
Each of the two has its individual quirks, but they essentially play in the same league by the same rules.
And rules constitute the main theme of both magazines–breaking all the old rules, mastering all the new rules, and, with the right pluck and luck, getting to make some rules of your own.
One of the new rules, all but unspoken, is that everything in the reader’s life is apparently supposed to revolve around the ever-more-aggressive worship of Sacred Business. In the shared universe of Fast Company and Business 2.0, nothing exists that doesn’t relate to (1) amassing wealth and/or fame, (2) having adrenaline-rush fun while doing so, and (3) achieving the ideal life (or at least the ideal lifestyle) via the purchase of advertisers’ products.
Wired, for all its elitism and silliness, did and does acknowledge a larger universe out there. It always has at least a few items about how digitization is affecting art, music, politics, sex, food, architecture, charity, and/or religion.
In the world according to the way-new business magazines, however, none of those other human activities is considered worth mentioning even in passing. It’s as if all other realms of human endeavor are merely unwelcome distractions to the magazines’ fantasy reader, a hard-drivin’ entrepreneurial go-getter with no time for anything that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Fast Company (which is slightly less totally business-focused than Business 2.0) did run a cover-story package last November about businesspeople (especially female ones) who find trouble balancing their careers with their other life-interests and duties.
But even then, second-person narcissism ruled the day. It was all about how You (by identifying with the articles’ case studies) could preserve your personal sanity, and hence become an even better cyber-warrior.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last November, I wrote about the hit UK soap Coronation Street, which can be seen on the CBC in Canada (and on some Seattle-area cable systems) but not in the U.S. Since then, the Street has finally made its U.S. debut, on the CBC-co-owned cable channel Trio. The channel’s not on many cable systems yet, but you can get it on the DirecTV satellite-dish service.
FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.
Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.
Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”
Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.
Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.
Imagine a company that had the Beatles.
Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).
And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”
What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.
On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.
On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.
On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)
Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.
What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”
The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”
But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.
Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.
TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….
