Creative Class

Yesterday I posted my two part interview with CIUT’s David Peterson.  Here’s a link to a fascinating discussion with David, Andy Frank, Kate Adach, and Lynn Harrison. Best of all it includes a wonderful new song by Lynn, “Just the Kind of City I Am,” inspired by these themes. Enjoy!

Eye Weekly’s ever witty Marc Weisblott really made me smile tonight. We’re in NYC to do a segment on the CBS Early Show tomorrow AM, and I came across his new piece (with requisite, though mainly recycled, “zingers”) titled “Sunshine Statesman.”

When my brother Rob and I formed our first band in the mid-1960s, trying our hand at Jimi Hendrix, Cream and other power rock staples, we practiced hard for our first gig - the annual Cub Scout shindig. We thought we’d found a great name - Flagg - with those so strategically place double gs.

But our Dad, who headed our local troupe, told the organizers to call us “The Sunshines.”

I hadn’t thought about that for nearly 40 years, but Weisblott and Eye brought it all back - the image of our youthfully mortified red faces on the stage of Queen of Peace Elementary School’s cafeteria cum Cub Scout meeting hall/ performance venue. And for that I am ever so grateful.

Doing lots and lots of media for Who’s Your City and here’s one folks might especially enjoy. I’m on for TWO whole hours today with Matt Galloway host of CBC’s Here and Now. Matt and I will talk about the book, but you’ll also get to hear four or five of my current favorite songs - including hopefully this NPR song of the day by recent CCG alum, Jesse Elliott of These United States.

Click here to stream. Enjoy!

Taste is always subjective and fame-fleeting, but I could not agree more with NPR’s Carrie Brownstein on this:

This afternoon I went to the Spin party to see X. The band played
all of the hits, from ‘Los Angeles’ to ‘We’re Desperate’. John Doe,
always the storyteller, told the audience that ‘Nausea’ was how we’d
feel after the amount of beer we’d all been drinking and that ‘Motel
Room In My Bed’ is where we’d be when we woke up feeling sick … Before X were Vampire Weekend, who I saw yesterday at The Parish. It’s a shame so many people left after Vampire Weekend and missed X’s show.

To my ears, X were one of the very best bands of their era.  Doe is a terrific lyricist and the male-female vocals as good as any this side of Jefferson Airplane.

The New York Times:

Over its four days, SXSW, as the festival is called, is like MySpace moved to the physical realm: more music than anyone could possibly hear, freely available and clamoring to be heard.

Hmmmmm …

The Financial Times, John Gapper:

The late 20th century was a very good time to run a studio or a
label in a media company. Apart from having a lot of freedom and being
paid a lot of money, executives and producers could hang out with
artists and feel creative themselves.

Things are now tougher for studio executives and A&R (artists and repertoire) people at music
labels. The digital revolution and the end of the DVD boom and the CD
era means that there is less money to throw around. They are being
thrown out of their jobs instead …

First, creativity flourishes in small groups rather than big organisations.
There are sound reasons why media companies maintain labels, studios
and, in the case of book publishers, imprints. It is why GlaxoSmithKline,
for example, groups its drug discovery work in specialist centres
rather than making its scientists work in big, amorphous laboratories.

Second, talent spotters and producers have skills that someone who works in
finance does not possess. Mr Hands and EMI’s suits would probably be
lousy A&R people. They would not be able to spot promising but
inexperienced bands, get them to sign and guide them through the maze.

Over at Strange Glue, Aidan Williamson writes:

You’re playing your first big gig with your band, looking out, you see
reams of suited-up middle-aged men, sweating in their anxiety to access
their blackberry’s without the scum touching them.

This is the future of the music industry as EMI head Guy Hands
sees it. He launched into a stinging attack on the A&R division of
the label during a conference with staff at a London cinema. He went on
to scorn the life of the typical A&R employee as regards his work ethic.

“[He] gets up late in the day, listens to lots of music, goes to
clubs, spends his time with artists and has a knack of knowing what
would sell.� Hands wants to place the emphasis on the selling
part, which he feels executives are much more equipped to do. The
central tenant of the message being, ‘We will sign any load of crap
that we want to, and you will buy it. The demographic surveys say you
will’. Wait… what’s changed again?

What does this mean for good music? EMI have just dropped LCD Soundsytem,
artists extraordinaire who were responsible for one of the greatest
albums of 2007. He told music managers that only 3% of the acts on
their label are making a profit and he intends to lay off nearly 2,000
more people this year as part of his coffin nailing.

How exactly the label fails to make a profit despite each artist
being required to pay most of the expenses involved in an albums
production remains to be seen.

After turning around the music industry, Hands intends to
deal with the aviation industry where he wants to phase out pilots,
letting the air stewardesses take on the role in-between trolley runs.
After that he will tackle the financial burden of global terrorism by
providing cardboard cut-outs of towns for the suicide bombers to target.

The question of my favorite bands came up recently. Herewith a core dump. Lots more but these are the ones that came top of mind. After the jump, of course…

Punk/ New Wave:
Gang of Four
Talking Heads
Pistols
Pixies
Pretenders
Police (I know …)

World:
Susana Baca
Youssou N’ Dour
Alejandro Fernandez
Les Nubians
Bob Marley
Gilberto Gil
Angelique Kidjo

The Austin American-Statesman reports that (pointer via The Street):

The South by Southwest music, film and interactive festivals and
conferences pumped approximately $95 million into the Austin economy in
2007, according to a new economic impact report commissioned by SXSW …

According to the Angelou report, attendees for the March 7-16 events
included 21,000 badge holders, 7,300 musicians and 7,600 wristband
holders, or nearly 36,000 people. In addition, the report factored in
the impact of 87,000 attendees who bought individual tickets or spent
money at music showcases, film screenings, the Town Lake Stage free
concerts, the Flatstock poster convention and the Screenburn video
arcade.

In Flight of the Creative Class I wrote that the (dirty little) secret of American competitiveness was stealing - I mean attracting - the world’s best and brightest - from Andrew Carnegie and Albert Einstein to the Google guys.  I even had a little ditty on how so many sports stars playing in America now come from around the world -take another look at those “New York” Yankees … Anyone watching the Oscars quickly found out that all the top acting prizes went to non-Americans.  So how about popular music?

[O]ur top foreign music stars were all over the map - everything from the loud guitar sounds of Nickelback and Three Days Grace to the indie-rock stylings of Feist, the swing vocals of Michael Buble and the infectious R&B of Corinne Bailey Rae, Joss Stone and multiple Grammy
Award-winner Amy Winehouse.

We limited our search to still-active recording artists who first
established themselves in their local markets before breaking out in the U.S.
That meant excluding pop stars like Rihanna and Avril Lavigne. While they hail
from Barbados and Canada, respectively, both are primarily products of the
American recording industry because they enjoyed their first taste of commercial
success in the U.S., not in their home countries.

The list is from Forbes (h/t: Al Mair).  Here’s another list of the best-selling music artists:

• The Beatles, UK
• Bing Crosby, USA
• Elvis Presley, USA
• Frank Sinatra, USA
• Michael Jackson, USA
• A. R. Rahman, India
• ABBA, Sweden
• Alla Pugacheva, Russia
• The Bee Gees, UK
• Celine Dion, Canada
• Cliff Richard, UK
• Elton John, UK
• Julio Iglesias, Spain
• Led Zeppelin, UK
• Madonna, USA (moved to UK)
• Nana Mouskouri, Greece
• Pink Floyd, UK
• Rod Stewart, UK
• The Rolling Stones, UK
• Tino Rossi, France
• Wei Wei, China

From the looks of this seems like the hey-day of US pop music hegemony was the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The Beatles and the “British Invasion” really signal a change in the popular music landscape. Come to think of it a variety of scholars list 1964-65 as the time when U.S. overall economic dominance started to weaken.

Your thoughts?