Ask wide-eyed popster Britney Spears about the future of the
music business and you're likely to elicit a vacant stare.
But within the span of seven days, I happened to hang with two
cultural icons: author/futurist William Gibson (a music fan who
coined the term "cyberspace" in his 1984 novel "Neuromancer" and
just had his excellent sixth novel, "All Tomorrow's Parties,"
published) and rap/hip-hop leading light Chuck D, whose band Public
Enemy arrived in the mid-'80s, mixing aggressive political and
social commentary with sophisticated audio collage techniques. PE
pushed the boundaries of what a hip-hop record could be. "We
[encouraged] people to think for themselves and not be programmed,"
Chuck D told me.
Neither man pretends to know what the future will bring — and
that's a sure sign of their intelligence and savvy. There's nothing
sadder than a futurist who gets it wrong. But they do have some
thoughts about what might happen and the news is both good and bad.
Sitting in his upscale hotel suite in mid-October, Gibson
elaborated on an idea that shows up for about a nanosecond in the
midst of "All Tomorrow's Parties." In the book he writes: "Bohemias.
Alternative subcultures. They were a critical aspect of industrial
civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where
industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious
R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would
have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a
substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at
odds with those of the culture at large ... But they became extinct.
... We started picking them before they could ripen ... Authentic
subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more
backwaters. ..."
"I'm a big fan of Bohemia," Gibson said in the hotel room. "But I
don't see how we can really grow them anymore because the mechanism
of commodification is so voracious and scorpion-quick. In my own
lifetime, I've seen a mechanism of commodification grow. To
recommodify what was happening in the '60s counterculture took a
while for people. We had to grow a mechanism. We really didn't have
one.
"Then punk came along, and it took about a year," Gibson
continued. "And that was the last one we had until maybe whatever
happened in Seattle. And those guys went from playing the corner to
being imitated on the catwalks of Paris in about two months. And it
just died. Seattle was drowned in wannabe guitar players with frumpy
flannel shirts. The ecology of the thing collapsed under the
stampede to be part of it, which was brought on by that cool-hunting
'What are the kids doing that we can sell back to them as units?'
urge of late-20th-century capitalism."
This is not good news for those of us who thrill on the
underground, who have looked for art and inspiration in the pockets
of low-profile artists (think San Francisco in the mid-'60s, New
York in the mid-'70s, Athens, Ga., in the early '80s, Seattle in the
late '80s and Olympia, Wash., in the early '90s) that have sprung up
from time to time.
Luckily, Chuck D has a different perspective. Chuck D, who has
embraced the digital-music revolution, released his group's most
recent album online for download months before it was available in
stores. More recently, he launched a cutting edge hip-hop website
(www.rapsation.com), and he thinks that downloadable and/or
streaming music are ways for unsigned bands to deliver music to a
worldwide audience.
Not only that, he thinks a kind of parallel universe is coming
into being (actually, already exists) of artists who don't sell
millions of albums, but still are able to build a fanbase, albeit a
small one, for their own idiosyncratic work. "I look at MP3 as no
different than if you had a tape recorder and wanted to tape FM
radio," Chuck D told me recently. "You gonna tell FM radio, 'don't
play my record'? It sets you up for more exposure. So what if they
have a copy?"
Chuck D, of course, has benefited from the music business
machinery. The marketing and promotion arms of Def Jam and Columbia
Records brought Public Enemy's message to the attention of kids who
then bought in. Today, if PE were a new band pushing some MP3 files
onto the Net, the group might remain a secret shared by few.
But Chuck D believes that having been signed to a major label
allowed him to learn how the industry really works. "You can't
attack the monster or reinvent different ways [of doing business],
if you don't know what the monster's about," Chuck D told SonicNet
reporter Chris Nelson earlier this year.
But while most musicians dream of having their music heard by
millions, the hard truth is that for most, that wish remains a
fantasy. Pre-MP3, a local band was just that — a local band with
little hope of reaching fans outside its community.
The Net has changed that. Because the MP3 format has been adopted
by kids throughout the world and because it makes it easy for a band
to get its music online in a quality close to that of a CD, it is
currently the format of choice — and having spent weeks listening to
MP3s on my portable player I can tell you that, with a decent pair
of headphones, the sound is good enough for just about anyone but an
audiophile.
Interestingly enough, Gibson says it was his son who hipped him
to the MP3 revolution. "I bought my son a Rio for his birthday last
month," Gibson noted. "He asked for it and I hadn't realized
actually what it was. When I saw how that worked I thought, 'Hey
this MP3 thing is really gonna change [things].' "
(SonicNet's parent company, MTV Networks Online, owns a
portion of RioPort.)
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