Wading in the Velvet Sea

If you look at the charts over the last few weeks, 50 Cent has sold an obscene amount of records, and this was with audio files leaks in Kazaa and widespread bootlegging preempting the release of the record itself. Clearly, the mandate is clear---the RIAA needs Dre and Eminem to produce every single record and sales will rise again. Seems pretty clear to me. Eminem’s first record took off sound unheard, largely because it has the words ‘Produced by Dr. Dre’ on it. Even Eminem knows this. In ‘White America’, he raps that,

…and kids flipped when they knew I was produced by Dre,
that's all it took,
and they were instantly hooked
right in, and they connected with me too
because I looked like them…

Eminem rode the wave of credibility that Dre brought to the masses, but here’s the key thing, he actually lived up to the hype. By the time ‘The Marshall Mathers Album’ came out, Dre’s role was important to the album but minimized in the minds’ of the audience---they were buying an Eminem record, not a Dre-produced record.

People may have been led to the album without an understanding of the content, but stayed once the record actually held up. And this is the crux at why Napster was allowed to get so big in the first place----nobody wants to buy a full album of material by a single artist anymore. The technique of ‘put a few hit singles on a record, and fill up the remaining 23 minutes with crap they won’t even play live’ has always been around, but seemed to reach an apex from the late 80’s through the end of the millennium. The cookie cutter method of record-production reaches its absolute nadir with the hair metal movement, which had ‘Two anthemic rockers, plus a power ballad, plus’oh, whatever, just don’t blow all the cocaine in the first week in the studio’ as its boiler plate.

Now, you have 10 years of people paying $15 for essentially 3 songs. The only decently big sellers are ‘Now That’s What I Call Music!’ which are essentially a glossy version of what I used to do as a kid---sit by the radio, and tape every song that I liked. The people behind this collection knew what Napster could not anticipate----most people only like one song by a particular artist. Your typical Nickelback fan is really in fact a ‘You Remind Me’ fan, and if they like that song, they’re gonna like that song by The Calling as well. Slap them all on a CD< and boom, profits.

Now, for the non-high speed internet access set, this was fine. $15 for at least 10-12 songs that you liked seemed worth it. Napster and their offspring took it even further---the possibility of a jukebox of every song you could ever think of, pretty much whenever you can think of it. The music industry’s worst nightmare came true two summers ago, where I was at a party where literally, people would call out for a song, and the host would download it and have it ready to go before the currently playing song (a downloaded version of ‘Informer’, cuz really, who ever bought an album by Snow’) was through.

Now, you ask, why bring up Napster now’ Isn’t it a dead horse’ (Maybe.) Do you have writer’s block again’ (Always.) So whaddup, g?

Well, I, like many writers/music fans, have been wondering what the back-to-back Grammys for ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’’ and ‘Come Away With Me’ mean. Both are ‘Record of the Year’ winners. Both have sold millions of copies. And neither received very much airplay. (‘Brother’ especially, and really, only ‘Don’t Know Why’ was played on the radio. This song got played more than me in high school, trust me.) What these two records also have in common, I feel, is a return to the idea of an entire album of good songs, sans padding, that feel coherent. People have been so blown away that they actually tell their friends and family about this diamond in the rough. They, in turn, buy the record, can’t believe it’s actually good from start to finish, and THEY tell friends. Word of mouth will never be replayed by sheer airplay---I’ve heard ‘Jenny From the Block’ 172 times on KISS108, and that’s only this week, and I still don’t like the song, damnit.

The reason, I think, that a lot of high school kids start getting into older acts is the revelation that, once upon a time, you could listen to an entire album all the way through without songs absolutely sucking. Kids are so used to the concept of a singles-driven industry that they get hold of ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ and lose their minds. While in a sense is also a public posture (‘Yo, I’m hip, I own ‘Eat a Peach’, you pop-loving loser. I’m soooo deep and into the roots of music, man’’), it does speak to an innate need to want a musical piece that sustains itself longer than the length of a catchy song. The Norah Jones phenomenon is not derived from her one song, it’s derived from the album, and that’s the crucial part here.

Hopefully, the music industry gets the message---if there indeed is a message to be received. I think there is; people are willing to pay for CDs, they just, God forbid, want them to be good. Or produced by Dre.