The arguments over free downloading and its effect on
musicians and music lovers have, once again, flared up on social media. Judging
by the clogged comment boxes on reposts of essays by veteran "indie" musicians Steve
Albini and David Lowery, it’s clear that many are worried about the state of
the music industry today. Clearly it has transformed in the last decade—for
better or worse? And, if for worse, what can be done to make it better? Can
independent (non corporate sponsored) musicians navigate this new technology to
our benefit? And, if so, how? Although
the arguments tend to get reduced to click bait, the contrasting positions of
these two musicians are a good place to start to consider this controversy that
doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.
On the one hand, Albini optimistically speaks in defense of
fantastic new developments the internet affords both fans and musicians, while
others dismiss his arguments as Randian. On the other hand, Lowery pessimistically
criticizes these developments and is derisively dismissed as “an old fogey, or
someone who won’t let go of the past.” (Culture
Crash, 104). While both men appeal to the lesser-known musician and music
appreciator, Albini supports today’s status quo, while Lowery searches for
alternatives to it. In 1993, it was Lowery who embraced the status quo while
Albini argued against it. Revisiting the “indie rock” world of that 1993, as
well as the 80s underground music scene from which both these men emerged, may
help illuminate today’s debates.
For many, the early 1990s period was/is seen as a golden
age—and, in retrospect, perhaps the last golden age-- of grassroots independent
American musical culture if compared to the developments of the subsequent two
decades. It is during this era when Albini and Lowery achieved their biggest
success in pop-culture. Perhaps Albini’s biggest success came with producing
Nirvana’s In Utero, while Lowery’s
had come as lead singer of “indie rock” band Cracker. These can serve as two
contrasting examples of how independent musicians negotiated with the demands
of a corporate dominated industry while still maintaining the
alternative/street or “college rock” cred they achieved during the 80s (whether
through Big Black or Camper Van Beethoven).
Albini, as a producer, could always keep at least one foot
out of the coopting corporations (“one foot in the door, the other foot in the
gutter/ the sweet smells that you adore, I think I’d rather smother!” as Paul
Westerberg would put it). With his recording studio day job, Albini wasn’t dependent on the whims of the
corporations. If the corporations turned away from indie rock as they largely
did by 2000 (with a rare White Stripes exception here and there), Albini could
remain grounded in punk’s low-fi jam-econo alternative economy and held onto
aspects of the DIY aesthetic in a kind of recession proof field. I remember
working with him in 1999 and applauding as he bragged that he could gouge the
bands on the corporate labels, and then take that money and charge independent
bands less—he represented a kind of heroic Robin Hood figure in this regard.
David Lowery, on the other hand, achieved more mainstream
success in his own band’s name during the early 90s. In Cracker, his persona as a musician did
still partake in some of the quirky, smart-ass, yet cute California laid-back,
cow-punk defiance that characterized his 80s band Camper Van Beethoven (whose
most famous song, especially after Bowling
For Columbine was “Take The Skinheads Bowling”).
In both cases, whether fronting Cracker or producing
Nirvana, both Lowery and Albini had managed to make the transition from the
smaller clubs and college radio scenes of the 1980s to the increasing
Winner-Take-All (or All-Or-Nothing) corporate run music economy. The difference
between the 80s and 90s, from this perspective, parallels the difference in
rock music between the 60s and 70s; Cracker was to CVB what the arena rock band
The Faces were to the Small Faces, or Led Zeppelin to The Yardbirds---both
aesthetically and in the way they were distributed. Also, from this perspective
Cracker, unlike Camper Van Beethoven, isn’t strictly speaking “indie rock,” but
rather (as Wikipedia puts it) alternative
rock.
If viewed from the perspective of mainstream culture, the
early 90s seemed like a cultural opening (both Big Black and Camper Van
Beethoven were non-entities in the era of Madonna/Michael Jackson and the Big
Hair Bands), no wonder so many claimed that, in crossing over, WE (the
underground, including hip hop) WON! As Scott Timberg puts it:
"The ‘90s saw the flowering of indie, or ‘alternative’ rock,
and (commercial AOR) radio---which had been locked in a restrictive, repetitive
‘classic rock’ format enforced by unadventurous programmers for at least two
decades—had the chance to open up.” (Culture
Crash, 95). The corporations had finally seen the light, and now we could
have Lollapalooza (just as the baby boomers had Woodstock, which was really
just an advertisement for the more expensive, white suburbs and the
bigger-is-better society of the spectacle the corporations benefit by).
Yet, for every one celebrating Nirvana’s cross over success
and claiming WE WON, there was another one calling Cobain a sell out, or a
victim of forces beyond his control. Amid the debates of this time, Steve
Albini published his seminal essay “The Problem With Music” in 1993. In that
essay, he urges fellow musicians to avoid signing with a major corporate
label—not on any particular moral “sell-out” grounds, but because the
label-industry of the time was inefficient, exploited musicians and led to sub
par music. He was arguing out of enlightened self-interest.
By contrast, Lowery was enjoying the most successful,
biggest selling album of his career (both before and since) released on Richard
Branson’s Virgin Records (which had been sold to Thorn EMI a year earlier). At
the time, Lowery clearly was optimistic about the “free market” and appealed to
the post-Nirvana wave of youthful optimism that characterized this time in the
lyrics to one of Cracker’s biggest hits:
Yeah, we ain't got no government loans
And no one sends a check from home
And get this, we're just doin' what we wanna—
Cracker, “Get Off This”
Albini and Lowery were both letting their own hedonistic
freak flags fly (though Cracker was certainly tamer, and more in line with a
conventional rock band formula than Camper Van Beethoven was, and Albini’s
production of Nirvana was certainly no Rape Man!), and express a cockiness that
could stick it to the man! The main
difference being that Albini was mostly criticizing the large corporations,
while Lowery, who was working for Virgin/EMI, mostly went after the government.
Meanwhile, the grassroots scenes that made both hip hop and punk
(or ‘indie’) so vital in the 80s was being undercut; the ground was crumbling
or eroding beneath the well-hyped success stories---thanks to the corporate co-opting and colonizing that narrowed
out the range of options (marginalizing “conscious hip hop” as well as the
quirkier white indie acts from the select choice cuts it put forth as
commodity). While Cracker crossed over, the weirder Monks Of Doom, the other
members of Lowery’s storied 80s band, Camper Van Beethoven, languished in
obscurity; while Dean Wareham’s Luna crossed over to an extent, the other 2/3
of Galaxie 500 didn’t; while Albini made money off Nirvana and Robert Plant,
that didn’t mean his own band Shellac crossed over (not that he needed it). The
underground, indie, college radio culture, with its more eclectic and
democratic playlists that had nourished both Albini and Lowery’s career, became
decimated as “commercial alternative” stations sprung up. And by 1996, with the
passage of the telecommunications act, which both consolidated corporate
ownership of radio, and paved the way for iPOD culture, this window (of
opportunity) was shut again, just like the coffins over the corpses of Kurt
Cobain and Tupac Shakur.
After the corporations had succeeded in destroying, for
many, the viable ‘jam econo’ strength in numbers scene that Azerrad and others
justly mythologize, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as Timberg puts it, was
“a gift to corporate consolidation, and especially to Clear Channel
Communications. ‘Radio’s Big Bully,’ as the journalist Eric Boehlert had dubbed
the company, swallowed hundreds of stations and standardized their playlists;
other consolidations followed suit….now any possibility of a fresh sound on the
air was gone. If a song took too long for test audiences to recognize, it was
eliminated---so the range of bands that listeners heard narrowed.” (95).
Cracker’s 1996 album, ironically called The Golden Age, and many others like it as a result bombed when
corporate controlled pop came to dominate the late 90s (for instance, the
corporations could borrow the image from the “chick rock” phenomena to
transition people from Alanis to the Spice Girls to Brittney Spears thus making
the pop music of 2000 very similar to the pop music of 1990 as if Nirvana or PJ Harvey, to
say nothing of Public Enemy, had never happened).
In this sense, Albini’s 1993 essay proved to be all too
true, and the optimistic sentiments expressed in Cracker’s “Get Off This” seem
more and more naïve. Lowery may not have directly needed a government loan to do what he wants to, but he, and other
indie and alternative rockers, did need government regulations. College radio, which had played a large part in
developing his reputation during the 80s was created by government
intervention. These stations, serving the public interest, were also run on a
volunteer economy, often by students who themselves needed government loans to
attend college. The corporations wanted control of the entire airwaves (and
since the telecom act, with some insidious dealing, they have come closer to
achieving this---see, for instance, the case of Entercom;’s crafty maneuvering
to crush San Francisco’s KUSF in 2010).
And, once these corporations were deregulated in 1996, there was no room
for bands like Cracker, to say nothing of the weirder Camper Van Beethoven.
Considering these lyrics to “Get Off This” in light of
Lowery’s passionate activism 20 years later against the 21st Century
Technopoly may very well reveal the tragic hubris many shared in the early 90s,
especially if we contrast what has happened to Lowery to what has happened to
Albini in the same two decade period. While Lowery, and many others like him,
“have been hit especially hard by the meltdown of the record industry”
(Timberg, 88) since 2001, Albini has not suffered---in large part because he
didn’t put all—or even most—of his eggs in that corporate basket. Lowery’s
career, by contrast, had already been on the decline before iTunes came along.
Yet, the Telecommunications Act didn’t simply kill old
models of production, it also, at first, seemed to offer new possibilities that
could make up for what was lost for independent musicians. Both Albini and Lowery,
in their different ways, embraced these new technological possibilities: “We
thought we’d make more money through disintermediation and selling music
directly to fans,” Lowery claims (Culture
Crash, 114) Lowery, however soon found that cutting out the record-label as
middle man just created a new, bigger, middleman. “We brought [Facebook] all our
fans, and now they’re selling them back to us. That’s classic exploitative
re-intermediation. But we should have
seen this coming—the people with the biggest computer servers, the biggest
marketing budget, will win.” (Timberg 115)
Thus, David Lowery, 20 years after “Get Off This” has
changed his tune, and is one of the most vocal proponents of government
regulation of the free market. In the process, he has aligned himself with the
RIAA labels, those who Albini calls “the administrative parts of the old record
business,” who seem like the little guy compared to the Telecom Monopolies that
have been made possible by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Albini, by
contrast, sees the internet as an extension, a continuation, and even a
culmination, of the “old underground” from the 80s in which he, as well as
Lowery, cut their teeth. Albini thus maintains his optimism about the
internet—in part because he’s not interested in making money through selling
recordings as Lowery is, and assumes that music listeners have money for the
more expensive technological gadgets.
Albini considers the RIAA labels “the framework of an
exploitative system that I have been at odds with my whole life” (Face The
Music), but neither does he argue for the government to regulate them. He can
still brag he needs no government loan, and just does what he wants to. He
believes the internet has both benefitted fans as well as musicians through the
very cutting out of the record label’s middleman that Lowery had come to
realize he was duped by. “The internet has facilitated the most direct and
efficient, compact relationship ever between band and audience. And I do not mourn
the loss of the offices of inefficiencies that died in the process.” (Face The
Music)
By contrast, Lowery shows how the new model hurts both fans
and bands. He likens filesharing and free downloading to “looting” and claims
that “Verizon, AT&T, Charter, etc etc. are charging a toll….to get the free
stuff…..you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400
Samsung tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In
fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music….and none of that money goes to
the artists!”
Both Albini and Lowery make excellent points and both are
right from their perspective, and even though they appear to be on opposite
sides of the debate over the deregulated free file sharing culture of the internet
today, it’s reductive to simply argue that Lowery prefers the “old system”
while Albini prefers the “new system” especially if we consider the ways in
which the pre-internet “indie” or underground world of the 1980s from which
both came was opposed to what both
refer to as the “old system” (the corporate system that dominated during the
80s and 90s, pre-internet era in which the CD dominated).
In his keynote address at the Face The Music symposium in
Melbourne, Albini describes why this 80s underground/independent model was
better than the old corporate model Lowery seems to want to defend. In the
1980s, “bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the
type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and
simpler….”
This doesn’t mean that it was a bed of roses:
“Local media didn’t take
bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could
basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely
locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors….So
these independent bands had to be resourceful. They’d built their own
infrastructure of independent clubs, promoters, fanzines and DJs. They had
their own channels of promotion, including the beginnings of the internet
culture that is so prevalent today – that being bulletin boards, and
newsgroups. These independent bands even made their own record label. Some were
collectives and those that weren’t were likely to operate on a profit-sharing basis
that encouraged efficiency, rather than a recoupable patronage system that
encouraged indulgence.
That’s where I cut my teeth,
in that independent scene full of punks and noise freaks and drag queens and
experimental composers and jabbering street poets. You can thank punk rock for
all of that. That’s where most of us learned that it was possible to make your
own records, to conduct your own business and keep control of your own
career….And there was a healthy underground economy of bands making a reasonable
income owing to the superior efficiencies of the independent methods. My band,
as an example, was returned 50% of the net profit on every title that we
released through our record label. I worked it out and that earned us a better
per-piece royalty than Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Madonna or
any other superstar operating concurrently. And we were only one of thousands
of such bands.” (Face The Music)
Although both Albini and Lowery cut their teeth in this
non-corporate pre-internet music economy, neither of them go so far as to use
their voices or influences to argue for trying to recreate it, against both the RIAA and Tech profiteers.
Albini thinks the internet is at least as good as what was lost, while Lowery
seems more interested in reinstating the RIAA’s dominance and imposing
regulations on tech companies to stop the bleeding. Both, in the differing
ways, are fighting for the right of the individual rather than of the scene.
Indeed, since they both “developed reputations during the label era,” they thus
“don’t need the same kind off publicity support and investment some labels used
to offer.” (Culture Crash, 111).
That’s the point that needs to be emphasized for the
independent musician (of any genre, not just “indie rock”) who is trying to
develop a reputation today, or for the fan of music who values being part of a
contemporary independent music scene at least as vital and self-sustaining as
the scene Lowery, Albini, and many others first emerged from. Can people unite
today, and be as resourceful, as we were in the 1980s? If so, can Albini or
Lowery bring their not inconsiderable clout to this larger cause that could
benefit the music culture? Perhaps….but ultimately it’s probably more important
to look at what they did (then), and not what they say (now)…and, put down our
privatized iPod and try to bring the word “independent” back to the collective
meaning it had back in the 80s if not the more individualistic one it has had since the corporate-dominated 90s.
Chris Stroffolino
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