I am always amused when we get onto these Garth threads. It doesnt take
but a few posts before someone is loudly condemning his venality and how
it's ruining good music and so on. And this is simply not true. Garth's
intentions are really no different from all of those nice alt-country or
whatever types that most of us like: he wants to sell a lot of records.
The main difference is that he's much better at it than any of the
others.
There's no difference in this regard between Garth and, say, for
examples, Steve Earle or Lucinda Williams or Jay Farrar or (insert name
of your favorite Artist-With-Integrity here). Steve Earle may say in
print that he makes too much money and so on, but I would bet that if he
were a poor Sugar Hill artist selling only 5,000 units a pop and having
to work a day job he'd change his tune.
When talking about the state of music these days, I find it helpful to
make a distinction between music and musical product. Or another way to
think about that is the distinction between a local musical economy and a
national one.
A local musical economy is what's healthy for music, and in fact is where
it comes from. This means that the people who listen to the music do not
just do it by buying units of product but by hearing it live, meeting and
cheering the musicians whose lives they support, and (most importantly)
playing it themselves. One of the ironies of bluegrass is that though
its origins were commercial, bluegrass has survived and thrived because
it's been based in local music economies around the country.
"Thrive" might seem inappropriate to describe the small bluegrass world
that scarcely ever makes a blip on the charts (though there are of course
noted exceptions), but what makes keeps music healthy is not statistics
from Soundscan. As long as I've been on this list (more than three years
now) a lot of people have been waiting for the first Cinderella
alt-country band to blow a hole in the charts and bring the gospel of
alt-country to the masses, as if this would be proof and a sign that this
music is real and viable and legitimate. Whereas, what makes it all of
those things are not sales but the fact that in Austin and Chicago and the
Triangle and (just) a few other places, you can go hear it live, you can
play it with people -- it is music in which everyday people participate
and contribute (as opposed to musicians with a caital "M", artists who
with some people have almost a priestly status). There are (or at least
were once) healthy alt-country economies in a few cities. The beauty of
indie rock in the 80s was that there were healthy and very unique
economies in quite a lot of cities scattered around the country
(Minneapolis, Athens, LA, Boston, Seattle, Austin, yes, but also places
like Phoenix and Milwaukee and Washington DC).
In contrast to this, the "professionals" in the business are not working
to create music so much as musical product. Musical product is for the
passive consumption of large groups of people, and the problems of
divorcing the music from the locality from which it originally percolated
are the same as all of those that get complained about whenever we get to
the topic of country radio. Commercial radio is lame and unlistenable to
specifically because it is irrelevant and unresponsive to its listeners.
The history of corporate popular music in America is one of taking
wonderful and thriving local music, tearing it from its roots and making a
lot of money off it even as it dies.
Disconnected from the local music economy, the music ceases to be alive;
growth is replaced by "artistic development" and vanity projects. The
music becomes the personal property of the artist as opposed to a shared
part of the community which supports and nurtures it. This is the history
of rock 'n' roll, r&b, soul, and country as we know and love them. (Peter
Guralnick's book "Sweet Soul Music," a terrific read, though not focused
on this, tells the story of local soul music from Memphis, Macon, and
Muscle Shoals and how it slowly strangulated as it became hugely
commercially successful.)
True, some artists seem to be more focused on making an excellent product
than others. Some artists make more moving, trascendent, hard-hitting,
(insert your favorite musical quality) albums than others. The artistry
is more honest. But the problem is not that Garth is venal while Steve
Earle has artistic purity, but that the aims of the economy in which both
participate tends to be at odds with making good music that is alive. The
business of making records is a business about selling units and
generating money, not "artistry." To the extent that corporate music
people care about awards for artistry it's only as a means to making more
money. This is not the realm where music lives.
Sorry to go on so long,
Will Miner
Denver, CO
