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G'nite
Whitey
by Big Rude Jake
This
is a story about a good friend of mine. We used to call him Big
Whitey, mostly because he smokes too much and never goes out in
to the sun, leaving his complexion a rather ashen shade of pale.
Whitey has been my business manager for several years now. He's
a hard-headed survivor of the harrowing, coke-addled '80s. He
used to brag that he had weathered his way through the toughest
of times and that there was nothing he couldn't handle. He was
one of these old-timers who had more crazy tales to tell of life
on the road than anyone I have ever known. But things have changed
for my pal Whitey, and I am concerned for him.
He
called me up the other day and, with a lump in his throat
that he could barely hold down, he explained to me that
he's tired of this crazy business and he wants out. If
I am ever to release another album on an international
label, I'm going to have to do it without him. Whitey
says he just doesn't understand the music industry anymore
and doesn't know he can make a go of it in a world where
it's all about belly buttons and billion-dollar budgets.
As far as he can tell, the music industry has been commandeered
by huge transnational corporations who are only interested
in making enormous profits overnight. Select markets (like
retrophiles) and smaller artists have no place in the
bland world corporate Pop, where the radio stations, television
networks, newspapers, Internet service providers, oil
companies, movie studios and record labels are all owned
by the same faceless corporate blob.
Rest
assured, my friends, I have every intention of staying in the
music biz and doing whatever I have to do to survive. Big Rude
Jake will continue to make music, even if I have to return to
being an independent artist selling CDs out the back of a pick-up.
But as for Big Whitey, well, after three decades in the business,
he's packing it in. The thing that really pains me is that it
was people like Whitey who made the music industry a viable concern
in the first place. Men like him were frontiersmen, blazing a
trail and taking risks back when Gulf Oil and Coca-Cola had no
interest in the music industry. Now the trailblazers have been
squeezed out, and Wall Street has moved in to captain the ship.
But
this is not the end of the story. Although it is true that, in
the battle to seize control of the music industry, the casuality
rate has been high, it is also true that, despite every effort
on the part of the big boys to maximize profits, record sales
have been in a slump for years. You see, the problem with these
corporations is that, when they kill off guys like Whitey, they
also kill off the creative force that keeps the industry vital
and interesting. The modern corporate environment does not reward
creativity. It rewards banality and conformity. They take over
an industry because it is exciting and profitable, and then they
turn it into something that is boring and unprofitable. Once a
product stops turning a profit, the corporations drop it and move
on. Imagine a swarm of locusts descending on a Kansas cornfield
and you get an idea about how the modern corporate environment
works.
I
believe that, eventually, the corporations will drop their holdings
in the music industry, and in other sectors of the entertainment
field because they themselves will have made them unprofitable.
This will be a good thing, because, in doing so, they will make
room for small-timers like Big Whitey again; people who don't
need to make record-breaking profits every single fiscal quarter
in order to feel successful. That means that there will be room
for people to do what Berry Gordy did, when he started Motown
Records and Hitsville USA. Gordy started small and grew slowly,
combining a love of music and solid business acumen to create
one of the most important record labels of all time. There will
be room for men like Sam Phillips, who made small records that
were played on local radio stations, and in doing so, helped to
launch the careers of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison,
Carl Perkins and many others who are now legends in American Pop
Culture. Both Gordy and Phillips became rich, but not overnight,
and they never needed to bend to the wishes or the greed of stockholders
and corporate overlords.
Unfortunately,
the predictable collapse of the Corporate Pop Machine
will not happen anytime soon. Those Wall Street guys are
pretty good at finding new ways of re-packaging the same
old crap to maintain the status quo. They will hang in
there for as long as they can. As such, I think we are
in for an extended wait before Babylon falls. But I don't
mind. It's going to be quite a light show when the whole
system collapses with a loud boom, and you can bet I'll
be there in the front row to watch. I just hope Whitey
is still around to see it happen too.
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