The Illiterate

top ten update–keeping score

Four new entries in the top ten this week, the first time that’s happened since the first week of March last year, and, in an interesting twist, Lil’ Wayne features on three of the new arrivals, T-Pain on two, and Kanye West on two. Like the old cliche about not be able to tell the players without a program, it’s getting hard to figure out who has the most presence on the charts without a scorecard. So, in the interest of keeping everything straight, I’ve created one. The math is simple enough: a performer gets three points for being the primary artist (PA) on a track, two points for being a featured artist (FA), and one point for being sampled in a prominent manner (SA). M.I.A., for example, gets three points for being the primary artist on “Paper Planes” and one point for being sampled on “Swagga Like Us”, for a total of four, while The Clash, who get one point for being sampled on “Paper Planes”, get none for “Swagga”, because their presence isn’t really felt on that record–even though they get writing credit. Understood?. Ties in points are broken by chart placement (i.e., M.I.A. places above Kanye, even though they have the same total number of points, because “Paper Planes” is higher on the chart than either of the records he features on). Otherwise, chart placement makes no difference in the final score (if the scorecard extended beyond the top ten I might give higher records more points, but here the difference doesn’t seem critical).

One other rule: featured artists whose presence is obviously responsible for the record being a hit receive a full three points, while the primary artist on such records receives only two. This is a moot point this week, and who knows if I’ll ever do this again, but believe me, if “Dangerous” was still in the top ten, Akon would get the full three points, and Kardinal Offishall would be lucky to even get the two.

’bout time

I was waiting for someone to make this joke.

this is what you can do…

…when you have tons of promotion money, no sense of shame, and an overwhelming belief in your own importance. My only question is why U2 didn’t think of this first.

is this a system?

Just before Atlantic put Estelle’s Shine back up on iTunes, I was considering a post estimating how much money they were losing in this particular gambit. Now that they’ve given up, Billboard has done the math. Their estimate: a loss of $146,000 over the last three weeks. Somehow I don’t think anyone will be trying that again anytime soon.

nice try, fellas

Atlantic records has apparently caved on their great experiment in audience gouging: Estelle’s Shine, including “American Boy”, is back up on iTunes.

“No one buys the thick”

Apparently there are limits to how much of their music collection people are willing to carry at one time: Apple has announced that they’re discontinuing the 160GB iPod. And here I was hoping for a 320 for Christmas.

bumbering along

Bumbershoot was something of a bust for Jaq and I this year–we were busy finishing up our move to a new place, which meant a lot of hauling of stuff up and down stairs and cleaning, leaving us almost incapable of movement, much less shoving our way through crowds of people younger and more energetic than ourselves. But Bumbershoot seemed to be a bust in general this year: not a great lineup, worse art than last year, and worse food, too (at least from some–Ziegler’s Brathaus? Never again). At the same time it felt more crowded than ever before, with longer lines, and ever more draconian security for the stadium shows.

We didn’t even go on Sunday, only showed to see the Old 97s on Monday, and caught only five acts altogether: the 97s, Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, Estelle (the first four songs–she really needs to learn to stop talking so much between numbers), and Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby.

Williams was probably the best that we saw, with the Old 97s a close second. Her new stuff sounds rawer than anything she’s done in years, and her cover of AC/DC (which is reportedly on the new album), suggests that she’s more interested in rocking out than anything else right now. I still have problems with Neko Case. It goes without saying that her voice is gorgeous, but I wish she didn’t feel the need to make every song such a statement, or to be so tasteful and stately about everything (if Emmylou Harris is the Joan Baez of alt-country, Case is Judy Collins). I only liked a couple of songs off of Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and the new stuff she did on Saturday sounds like more of the same. It would do her a world of good to loosen up and raunch it up a bit, the way Lucinda has.

Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric have the opposite problem. Eric’s willful incompetence schtick isn’t quite as forgivable in his mid-fifties as it was 30 years ago, and Rigby is one of those rare singer-songwriters who pens real pop music, which is one of the reasons I love her so much, but it’s also why she really needs a band to get her songs across. Other than Eric’s old standby rabble rousers, they sounded best when they varied the instrumentation, adding keyboards and even some laptop percussion. I also have to admit I worry about what this partnership, personal and professional, is going to do to Rigby’s songwriting. The new songs they played were funny and even witty on occasion, but they were good jokes, nothing more (not that that’s a small thing). As great as Little Fugitive was, there were signs that Rigby had tapped out her inspiration. Perhaps teaming with Eric is just the blast of loose punk air she needs to revive herself, and who knows what her grace and wit might add to his music. Right now I’m more than willing to give them a chance, but I’m also wary.

everything can be replaced, know what i mean?

I’ve been growing slightly irritated lately with Stereogum’s constant stream of stories about bands covering other bands, but this one is really ridiculous. Gosh, Wilco and Fleet Foxes covering Bob Dylan? Who could have imagined such a thing? Very next post: Neko Case covers Nilsson at Bumbershoot. But no mention of Lucinda Williams covering AC/DC at the same show. C’mon guys, catch up!

missing the boat

Chris Molanphy has an interesting post up on Idolator about Atlantic Records’ bizarre decision to pull Estelle’s album, Shine, off of iTunes just as “American Boy” was about to crack the top ten. The idea, obviously enough, is to try and pull off the same trick that Kid Rock has managed with his album Rock n Roll Jesus and the hit single “All Summer Long”: forcing people who want the single to buy the album by refusing to make the single available any other way.

Chris hits all the important points, and his history of the decline of the single through the 90s is fascinating, but there’s also a note of paranoia that I don’t think is justified. It isn’t that I don’t believe the major labels would love to kill the single, and iTunes in the process, if they could manage it, it’s that the ship has already sailed, and they have no chance now of stopping it. Kid Rock’s success with “All Summer Long” is a fluke: an established artist playing to the nostalgia of his core audience in as obvious and abject a manner as he can manage, while at the same time striking a hypocritical no-downloading stance that he tries to make sound like a way of standing up for the little guy when what he’s really doing is fleecing him.

Meanwhile, the market as a whole moves more and more toward downloading, and even if Apple continues to refuse to sell LPs as complete units instead of individual tracks, stories like Kid Rock’s are going to be rare. You can’t blame Atlantic for trying the same tactic with Estelle, but she’s a totally different case: a British hip-hop singer with no US fan base, whose single has been slowly building for over three months now and was finally poised to make the top ten (she wouldn’t have made it this week, though, not with T.I. and P!nk leaping in ahead of her). But, thanks to Atlantic, she’s now barely in the top forty, her album sales have dropped, and her radio airplay has stalled.

Atlantic claims that they’re doing this based on their reading of the audience, but treating Estelle’s audience the same way as Kid Rock’s shows how little they know about either. They’re also disregarding the fact that the audience’s buying habits are rapidly mutating. A year ago, when Billboard changed the formula they used to calculate the Hot 100, it seemed as if they’d created a bulwark against digital sales making the singles chart look like a free-for-all. Since then, though, digital has grown so much that records are once again bouncing up and down like ping-pong balls (the Ting Tings “Shut Up and Let Me Go” has dropped out and re-entered the Hot 100 so many times I’ve lost count). Kid Rock and Atlantic can brag as much as they want about his CD selling a hundred thousand copies a week, but the fact is that three or four years ago, a hit like this would have had him selling twice that number, and airplay alone would have put his single in the top ten.

Record company machinations, especially such bald money grabs as this, are always to be deplored, but it’s obvious, for now at least, that history is not on the major label’s side. Instead of adapting themselves to the new environment, they’re trying to rig the game. The odd thing is that they’re doing it right out in the open, where everybody can see them cheating. If they’re that desperate, you know they’ve already lost.