Success breeds same old stuff on the airwaves

By Mark Brown, News Popular Music Critic
Rocky Mountain News, November 9, 2002

For a lot of fans depressed by the state
of pop music, Tom Petty hit it on the
head in a recent Rolling Stone interview.

"You don't hear any more of, 'Hey, we
did something creative and we turned a
profit, how about that?' Everywhere we
look, we want to make the most money
possible," Petty said.

"This is a dangerous, corrupt notion. That's where you see the
advent of programming on the radio, and radio research, all these
silly things. That has made pop music what it is today. Everything
- morals, truth - is all going out the window in favor of profit."

Many fans have complained of the corporatization of music and
art, and Petty's latest album, The Last DJ, gives a larger voice to
those complaints.

Petty and others lament that radio programming is increasingly
done with marketing tools and fan surveys rather than an ear for
art.

"That lowest-common-denominator thing, that theory that keeps
big corporations going, . . . the energy tends to dissipate. The
market for it is a little bit less every year," says Steve Van Zandt,
guitarist for Bruce Springsteen and host of a growing syndicated
rock radio show, Little Steven's Underground Garage (10 p.m.
Sundays on 99.5 The Mountain).

"It's silly for me to second-guess it, because obviously it works,
but I think you can take these marketing surveys and at a certain
point it can just be taken too far. That
lowest-common-denominator mentality will show up in a test
short-term, but it isn't healthy long-term."

Both radio programmers and concert promoters used to have
much more freedom to mix up styles of music, but those days are
long gone.

"I don't think we can go back to those days. We were so innocent
and so open. It was all new at that point," Van Zandt says. "We
ain't going back there."

"People are just not as adventurous. And the local promoters just
don't have the ability to put on differing styles of music," says
Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar magazine. "Now it's 'Here's
the production, take it or leave it.' "

"I think people have started to take things for granted. They're
taking radio for granted, they're taking live performance for
granted. People aren't participating as much as they used to. It
isn't as important in their lives as it used to be," says Van Zandt.

With such short attention spans, artists don't get a chance to
develop. Under today's market conditions, the likes of The Beatles
and the Rolling Stones would never have gotten the chance to
develop, many say.

It leads to a sense of desperation in the industry. The result is a
need to go further and further to create an impact, especially if
you've already painted yourself into an artistic corner that's
become passé.

A good example of the latter is the new, sexually explicit Christina
Aguilera video for Dirrty. One viewing of the former Mickey
Mouseketeer and you wonder whether any amount of soap will
make you feel clean again.

Most go with the safe and predictable, and it often works. Carlos
Santana's new album, Shaman, repeats the co-stars formula of
Supernatural, and it made its debut at the top of the charts.
Cookie-cutter acts abound.

Again, it's nothing that we've not seen before.

"There's nothing that's really new. Backstreet Boys were predated
by New Kids on the Block, who were predated by the Partridge
Family," Bongiovanni says.

"Everything has become much more homogenized. Success
always breeds imitators who always take one shade off of what
works and see if it works for themselves."

What cracks up some industry insiders is bands that have such a
hard, rebel image yet ape what other bands are doing and are
willing to do anything the record company says to get airplay and
sales.

"There are few genuine artists who are basically 'This is who I am
and you either like me or you don't.' Then there are those who
carefully craft everything they do based on the image they're
marketing themselves to the public as," Bongiovanni says.

"Then you have the Marilyn Manson-type shock-rock stuff. Alice
Cooper was doing that long ago. He kinda lost his credibility in
that area when he started playing golf with George Burns. It was
just a show, but a lot of people took it seriously. The threat that
Ozzy Osbourne was to the world has certainly diminished in many
people's minds."

Mountain West Music 2002