Is There a Correlation Between Music’s Popularity and Its Shittiness?

So a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing my Grammys post-mortem with my pal Max and he asked me a question, inspired by my assertion that, statistically speaking, a Grammy-nominated band will be a shitty band. That question was, “Do you think music’s popularity and its shittiness are somehow correlated? And if so, why?”

I gave Max a short answer (“Not as much as people think”) but he and I agreed that an in-depth discussion of this topic might make a good Bollocks! post. So that’s what this is.

The first thing you have to get out of the way in any discussion like this is the (obvious to me) fact that this is all dependent upon taste. One man’s dookie is another man’s donut and all that. If you like a lot of really popular music, you would probably say that there’s a correlation between its popularity and its greatness. And that’s fine.

But Bollocks! is all about my opinion; for whatever reason, that’s what people come here to read. As I’ve said a billion times (and I’ll say it a billion more), we can love completely different music and still be friends. I promise. But the fact is, I don’t like very much popular music so it might be tempting for me to say that there is a correlation between how popular something is and how awful it is.

But I don’t think that’s the case. There’s plenty of insanely popular music that I like: Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, the Beatles, Cee Lo Green’s Ladykiller, and I could go on all day. I bring this up to provide you, humble Bollocks! readers, with evidence that I never dislike popular music (what the fuck is a Kesha, anyway? I won’t put the fucking dollar sign in her name, either. But what the fuck is she? Who is creating demand for a white trash pop diva?) simply because it is popular.

For purposes of our discussion, I’m gonna divide popular music into two categories: good popular music and bad popular music. Again, this is all based on my subjective experience of music (there is no objective experience of art, no matter what any pretentious asshole tries to tell you. It pleases you or it doesn’t and the reasons why you hate something might be the same reasons other people love it. My wife, for instance, does not like the Screaming Females because they are, true to their name, Screaming Females. On the other hand, this is precisely one of the reasons I love them). I think that good popular music becomes popular because it is just undeniably, universally appealing. This is why a lot of good popular music happens to be in the pop style – that particular genre is almost always on a mission to be catchy. Punk music, on the other hand, is typically designed to polarize and won’t appeal to a broad enough swath of the population to become truly popular if its any good. For “punk” music to be popular, it has to water down its message and attitude and stay vague about its politics. This is why Green Day’s American Idiot (not a punk album in my opinion) is more popular than Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ Shake the Sheets and it’s also why I tend to despise the popular shit that some people consider “punk” today.

Last summer, I talked about The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and his suggestion that stuff has to be “translated” for mass consumption before it can become really popular. At the time, I said that the translation idea was a killer for good music – my exact words were “By the time the raw, beautiful music you love is fit for consumption by everyone, it fucking sucks. Always.” I stand by that assertion, but I have to admit that not everyone likes the purest, rawest forms of music. For instance, you might like John Mayer where I like Chris Whitley or Son House. You can sort of see a tenuous connection between the blues of Son House and the white frat-blues of John Mayer, and Mayer definitely moves more units annually than the late Mr. House. Likewise, the Clash is undoubtedly an influence on Green Day, but fans of Green Day are not automatically fans of the Clash (and vice versa; I love the Clash and I think my feelings on Green Day are pretty clear).

So why does so much shitty music become popular? Well, to be popular, you have to appeal to as wide an audience as possible (duh). That’s extremely difficult to do without compromising your sound quite a bit (“compromising” might be a bit strong of a word, but we use strong words here). If you want to rock like the Screaming Females rock, you have to accept a smaller (though certainly no less devoted) audience than if you want to rock like Nickelback rocks (which is, in my opinion, not at all). Nickelback fits a definition of “rock” that appeals to a whole lot of people, some of whom most assuredly think about music a whole lot less than I do. That’s not a criticism of those people (in an odd way, it’s a complement), it’s just a fact. A lot of Nickelback fans probably want some drums and electric guitar, but they also want a couple sensitive ballads thrown in there for good measure (I, on the other hand, want “Buried in the Nude”) . Some of those folks might even take the commercial success of Nickelback as an endorsement of that band’s talents; “if other people are buying it, it must be good.” And I don’t think the fact that Nickelback sells lots of albums makes them bad; I think the fact that they suck at playing music makes them bad.

Because pop tends to be built around catchier melodies and major chords, it’s easier for someone like Cee Lo Green to become massively popular behind something like “Fuck You” than it is for someone like the Future of the Left to earn an appearance on everyone’s I-Pod with “You Need Satan More than He Needs You.” Snobs like me enjoy Cee Lo because he represents the cream of the pop crop, while I think some people will eat up “Fuck You” because it’s the best song on the radio, which in my opinion is like being the cleanest corn kernel in a chicken turd. So I think how you find music influences how you feel about the most popular stuff. If you don’t wanna work that hard to find music (again, that’s your right), you will choose what’s good and bad from what you hear on the radio – so you’re already choosing from stuff that is kind of popular. I use every resource I can think of to find music and I dismiss a lot of the homogeneous stuff that shows up on the radio because it all sounds the same to me. I’m not saying this stuff because I think I’m better than other music listeners; if anything, I’m admitting to you what an obsessive fucking nerd I am.

There’s a lot more to discuss on this topic, so we’ll call this Part I and continue our discussion tomorrow. Let’s leave it here for now: music that is popular is not automatically shitty. Since it was a Grammy post that started this whole discussion, I want to talk tomorrow about why it is I think the Grammys specifically reward shitty music (it’s to do with how albums and artists get nominated) and hopefully wrap things up by dispelling the myth that only so-called “non-corporate” music is good.

Radius Clauses and Keeping Poor People from Seeing Live Shows

If you ever feel like massaging any latent class-warrior outrage you might have lurking around, I suggest planning a wedding.  If something costs you twenty bucks for the hell of it, that something will cost you two hundred for a wedding. Companies will try to sell you shit you don’t need by guilt-tripping you about “making your special day perfect.” It’s criminal, and implicit in it is the suggestion that poor people shouldn’t be allowed to wed. But if you’re not getting married this summer (I am. In forty-one days. My fiancee and I have managed to plan our wedding on a budget without the purchase of excess expensive bullshit) and you still want to feel shat on for your paltry five-figure salary, why not try to see a cheap concert at a small venue in your city?

Because assholes are making that harder now too. Lollapalooza has a radius clause preventing participating bands from playing “competing” shows within 300 miles of Lollapalooza for 180 days before the festival and 90 days after. Radius clauses are pretty typical of big festivals and I can see the necessity of preventing a band from, say, playing a 1pm set at Coachella and then playing a club in Indio that night. But 180 days is six motherfucking months and what that tells me is that Lollapalooza wants your three hundred bucks and wants to be the only game in town for your concert-going buck. Meaning if you don’t have that kind of disposable bread to throw at a festival (not counting the money you’ll spend on food and water, depending on your festival’s rules regarding coming and going from the concert grounds), Lollapalooza would like you to please go fuck yourself.

To be as fair as I’m gonna be to the assholes who write up these clauses, they do offer exceptions to so-called “smaller” bands on the bill (of course, they choose what that means) but if the festival in question is more indie-oriented, their headliners might be the kind of band you can see for twenty bucks if they’re allowed to play a local gig. Lollapalooza’s clause covers a total of 270 days of the year. That means if your band plays Lollapalooza, they have a 95 day window (96 during a leap year) in which to swing back around through Chicago for a more affordable gig. If that sounds criminal to you, you’re not alone. The Illinois Attorney General’s office is investigating Lollapalooza (an ancient Algonquin word meaning, “Better in the 1990s”) on antitrust grounds.

I’m not sure if Lollapalooza will be forced to change its ways because of this or not, but I want to talk a bit more about what constitutes a “competing” show for a band playing a festival. Because I live in Los Angeles and frequent local shows as well as Coachella (which takes place about 100 miles from here and undoubtedly has its own radius clause, though a possibly less severe one than Lollapalooza), I’ll stick to what I know and use that festival as an example. It’s about three hundred bucks to attend all three days of Coachella. Over those three days, you can see a lot of your favorite bands, many of which will play shorter sets (unless they’re headlining, but I was only interested in one of the three headliners at this year’s festival), but you can also see reunions and special gigs of bands you might not otherwise see (my prospects for seeing De La Soul and Pavement would be slim indeed were it not for Coachella 2010, which allowed me to see both bands on the same day). But again, it’s three hundred bucks for the tickets and then there’s money for food, drinks, souvenirs, etc. And Heineken has a beer monopoly at Coachella, although I complain to them about it every time I go. By way of contrast, I saw a show at the Troubadour (Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. They were fucking awesome) this year for twenty dollars without giving Ticketmaster/Live Nation any money and I could get Guinness at the show. What’s not to like? But my point is that people who can only pay twenty bucks to see a band are generally not foregoing a festival because they already saw the band for twenty bucks. They’re skipping the festival because they can’t afford the fucking thing.  If Jesus returned and ordered ‘em to go to the festival, they’d be damned to hell by their lack of dollars. Generally speaking, you have to buy festival tickets several months ahead of time and if you’re like me (i.e. poor), that money erases any concert-going dollars you have to double-dip on bands, assuming they can squeeze your city into the fistful of days that lie outside of the radius clause for your local festival. So I don’t think too many of these so-called “competing” shows are really competing. For the most part, they’re playing to different audiences. Granted, there are a handful of superfans who will see a band’s local show and festival gig the same month, but festival organizers and club owners should both see that as win-win.

But here’s what really pisses me off about the radius clause: it smacks of cowardice. Yeah, that’s right. If you need a radius clause to protect your monolithic, corporate (i.e. shitty beer) sponsored festival, you’re a fucking coward. In a free market society, which this is (don’t kid yourself – the Market is America’s state religion, largely because we love our stuff and hate our neighbors. It’s getting interesting now because we love our stuff, hate our neighbors, and are really starting to hate things like education and hard work, which means we’re getting ’round to the time where some asshole is going to make a billion dollars because they think they know what plants crave.), you’re supposed to compete for consumer dollars. Theoretically, Lollapalooza should have to go head to head with small clubs to fight for your concert-going dollar. They clearly can’t win on price (although, if you can see enough bands at a festival, you end up paying like twelve bucks per concert – remembering, of course, that they’re probably shorter concerts), but perhaps they can offer you something small clubs can’t. I already pointed out that Coachella, for their part, tries to provide some awesome reunion shows (Pavement was really awesome,  by the way, but this year’s Coachella also featured gigs by Public Image Ltd., Devo, and the Specials. They also provided me with the opportunity to see Mick Jones and Paul Simonon live because they played with Gorillaz who, by the way, couldn’t really do what they do at a small-venue gig) and stuff like that. But the radius clause allows festivals to take the lazy way out (we hate hard work now, remember) by simply choking off the competition instead of offering the consumer a unique experience (i.e. a reason to go to the fucking festival in the first place). My suggestion to the folks who organize Lollapalooza? Organize Ultimate Fighting style cage matches between concert promoters and music industry executives and have them on one of the festival’s smaller stages. If I could see whoever dreamed up the radius clause bloody up (and get bloodied up by), say, an EMI exec who had a hand in killing Dark Night of the Soul, I might just book a flight next summer.