The Illiterate

as opposed to mild boxers?

From a New York Times article on e-books:

At Harlequin Enterprises, the Toronto-based publisher of bodice-ripping romances, Malle Vallik, director for digital content and interactivity, said she expected sales of digital versions of the company’s books someday to match or potentially outstrip sales in print.

Harlequin, which publishes 120 books a month, makes all of its new titles available digitally, and has even started publishing digital-only short stories that it sells for $2.99 each, including an erotica collection called Spice Briefs.

The advantage of being a theorist is that you don’t really need to know anything

I started reading Daniel Levitin’s new book, The World in Six Songs, but after 50 pages I had to give it up. I had read some mixed reviews, but I liked Levitin’s previous book, This Is Your Brain On Music (though it was full of questionable ideas, it did have some decent science in it), and this one sounded interesting. That first book was about neurology, though, which is where Levitin’s expertise lies; this one is about songs, and art, and metaphor, all subjects about which Levitin appears to know nothing at all. I should have been tipped off from the first by the bad jokes, almost always a sign that a writer is in over his head, but the first unmistakable red flag came when Levitin bragged that he has never known what “Hotel California” is about (that Don Henley, so sneaky and subtle with his metaphors). He has trouble with Steely Dan, too, which is a little more understandable, but still.

The killer, though, comes when he tries to illustrate how song lyrics are just like poetry (now why didn’t anybody else think of that?). His example, which he obviously considers some sort of masterpiece, is Sting’s “Russians”. Think about that for a minute. Either Levitin doesn’t realize, or doesn’t care, that “Russians” is quite possibly the stupidest song ever written about global politics. Maybe he’s just happy that he understands it (if there’s anyone whose metaphors are more clumsily obvious than Don Henley’s, it’s Sting). If Levitin were writing only about music (though “Russians” is no great shakes in that department, either), his apparent lack of understanding of lyrics and metaphor might not matter. But he’s writing about songs, and the six major lyrical themes that he believes have powered all songs throughout history and may even have helped to create human nature as we know it. Yet he can’t even sort out the meaning of one of the Eagles’ most obvious records and thinks Sting is some kind of lyrical genius. This isn’t just bad taste, it’s a total lack of understanding of the concept. How could anybody trust anything he says after that?

moratorium

I’ve stopped listening to Kanye West.

Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I haven’t stopped listening to Kanye, and I doubt I ever will. But I have stopped listening to leaks from 808s and Heartbreak, which have been coming with ever greater frequency the last two weeks or so. When he first leaked “Love Lockdown” on his blog a little over six weeks ago, after performing it on the Video Music Awards, I thought that was great. It was obviously unfinished (it’s been remixed and remastered a couple of times now, even after it’s official release on iTunes), and I took it as an experiment in audience reaction, even a sort of–pardon a very tired term–interactive way of creating a focus group and pre-testing the record before release. I also like the song–a lot–and was happy to have it.

Then, a couple of weeks later, came “Heartless”, which Kanye put up on his blog, he said, because somebody else had leaked it, even though it wasn’t close to finished (it was officially released this week). Then, about a week after that, came “Coldest Winter”. Again, the leak was apparently not Kanye’s idea, but it was a good song. The album was shaping up, to me at least, as something different from anything West had done before, and possibly the best thing he had ever done, autotune haters be damned. I couldn’t wait for it to come out. With a little less than two weeks to go, I still can’t.

But now the leaks are coming hot and heavy, and I’ve decided to stop listening. Partly out of respect for Kanye, who has authorized none of them, and partly because I don’t want my first experience of the album to be ruined. As eager as I am to hear the music, I want to hear it as part of the album first, not as individual tracks thrown out in random order on blogs and torrent sites. I would even prefer that the official releases, “Lockdown” and “Heartless”, not be included on the album, so that my first listen will be totally unprejudiced by the deeper impression those songs have already made on me. This is wishful thinking, I know. It may be even worse than wishful thinking, it may well be nothing but crass sentimentality–the selfish desire to remain unsullied before the official release brings my mind’s 808s and Heartbreak virginity to an end.

For someone who believes, as I do, that the current reign of the single is a good thing, and that the album as art piece, as major statement, and especially as force-fed marketing ploy, deserves a long and much needed break, this may seem contradictory. But, if you believe, as I do, that in an ideal pop universe each release serves as a form of conversation with an artist’s audience, with simple statements in the form of singles building up to major statements in the form of albums (and if an artist is lucky, even greater pronouncements in the form of entire careers), it makes perfect sense. In this world, unapproved leaks are the equivalent of the guy who, everytime you start to tell somebody else a joke, yells out the next line, or even the punchline, before you have a chance to finish. If you cut the guy off soon enough, you might still be able to make your intended audience laugh, but if you let him go on, at a certain point the joke becomes not only unfunny, but meaningless.

A joke depends on timing and suspense. In the pop universe, a record’s impact depends on much the same thing. Premiering “Love Lockdown” on the VMA’s, Kanye was able to pick his moment and start the conversation leading to 808s and Heartbreak in exactly the way he wanted. Since then, however, the process has slid out of his control, to the point where the whole reason for the conversation, the release of the album itself, can only be an anti-climax, no matter how good it is. Just think of Tha Carter III, an album that, no matter what qualities it may possess on its own, was completely overshadowed by the mix-tapes and leaks that preceded it.

I admit that if this was anyone else but Kanye, I probably wouldn’t care as much as I do. It doesn’t bother me, for instance, that the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift each released a single a week for a full month before their albums came out, and that other pop artists will probably soon be following suit. All that is, after all, is a reversal of what the majors used to do–instead of bleeding an album after release by designating four to six tracks as singles, now they release all the singles first, as a form of frontloaded advertising, and hope for huge first week sales of the LP.

The difference is that I don’t expect major artistic statements from Swift or the Jonases, and would be perfectly happy if they didn’t release albums at all (a single every six weeks or so, followed by some fetishistically packaged compilation every year and a half should be more than enough to keep their fans, and their labels, happy). But from Kanye I do expect something major, and so do the leakers, which is why, of course, they’re giving him so much attention. So there’s the paradox. The same reason why I refuse to listen to the leaks is why the stuff is being leaked to begin with–because we’re all expecting something great, and we can’t wait to hear it. Maybe I’m just more patient, or more respectful, or less selfish. Or maybe I’m just an old LP sentimentalist. At any rate, for a week and a half I can wait. It will be an exercise in self-discipline, like not scouring your parent’s closet or going through their drawers the week before Christmas.

why don’t they do this in America?

I don’t normally post videos, but the stage design and effects for this performance by The Killers at the MTV Europe Awards are so amazing it’s worth spreading around.

The song’s starting to grow on me, too.

spin the black circle–executive division

These days, being a major label executive is something like being a Republican pundit–in discussion, it takes an awful lot of spinning to make the facts come out on your side. So when the head of Universal Music Group, Doug Morris, in his recent Billboard interview, repeats the claim that download piracy is killing music sales, that online video represents a huge untapped revenue stream–therefore justifying Universal claiming not just licensing fees but a stake in any company that streams their videos–and that MTV got rich off the labels’ money, you can take most of it with a grain of salt.

But the spin doesn’t just apply to the present and possible futures, it also applies to Morris’ past. In the longer online version of the interview, Morris talks about his days in the mid-sixties at Laurie Records, where he learned the business and had his first hit record. Morris appears to have a phenomenal memory–at least for business details and business contacts. It was over 40 years ago, but he remembers everybody’s name, from the producers (Kasenetz-Katz, who would later, as the producers behind the Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, bring bubblegum music into the world), to the music director at the radio station that broke the record, to the distribution guy at Laurie who took orders for records from music stores around the country. He also remembers all the details of the deal: how much he paid for the record, what the royalty rate was, and even the catalog number: Laurie 3308.

What he doesn’t seem to remember is the title of the record itself or the name of the performer. He never mentions either one, and consistently refers to the record only by its catalog number (and Billboard, even parenthetically, doesn’t spill the beans). Of course, with that number in hand, it’s not hard to find out what the record was, or why Morris might be a little hesitant to brag about his role in its success. Laurie 3308 was none other than The Barbarians’ classic ode to gender misidentification, “Are You a Boy Or Are You a Girl?”

Could it be that Morris is embarrassed? But why should he be? Everybody needs to start their career somewhere, and the story of how Morris made this a hit is a good illustration of how the industry worked in those days, and, to a certain extent, works now. Besides, Morris says that he “believes” this was a number one record, and why would any label executive be embarrassed by a number one record? Unless, of course, what Morris is really covering up is the fact that, contrary to what he believes, Laurie 3308 didn’t even make top forty (it peaked on the Hot 100 at 55). That was probably because those damned kids were taping it off the radio and passing it around to their friends. Still, it’s interesting how his prodigious memory stops short at anything that doesn’t make him sound like a record industry God.

“Whatever you need, we got it here”

I know this has been brought up before, but here’s a nice video of Obama telling supporters what he has on his iPod:

“We got a little Frank Sinatra, a little Jay-Z, a little, you know, John Coltrane.”

“Where’s the country?”

“Oh, yeah, we got some country. We’ve got everything.”

and there goes half his fan base

Kanye West takes a huge step into cult status by debuting his new album, 808s and Heartbreak (the whole of which is reportedly as spare, raw, and autotuned as the single), at an LA art gallery full of naked women. And finishes up by announcing that he has another album coming out in June. I agree with The Fader–it sounds like he’s carving out a genre all his own.

random nonsense

The Vitamin Song

Time to turn my pee bright yellow
Helps make me one healthy fellow
Urine bright as lemon jello
Swirling round the bowl

Gore Vidal was right…

George W. Bush is now the most hated president in history.

the economics of indie, fig. 1

Lucas Jensen crunches the numbers, both hypothetical and real, for indie touring, and comes up with a negative. The moral, boys and girls? Stay home. The question is, where to now?