I can’t remember not having a subscription to the "New Yorker".<\/p>\n
But that doesn’t mean I read it.\u00c2\u00a0 That doesn’t mean I don’t miss many articles encased between its covers.\u00c2\u00a0 I originally subscribed because of Pauline Kael.\u00c2\u00a0 You could feel her passion.\u00c2\u00a0 You knew she wanted to like movies, there was nothing better than a great pic.\u00c2\u00a0 If one sucked, it was an offense.\u00c2\u00a0 This was before "Star Wars" turned the equation upside down.\u00c2\u00a0 When grossing a hundred million dollars obliterated all critical analysis.<\/p>\n
That thinking has infected the music business too.\u00c2\u00a0 We focus on the winners.\u00c2\u00a0 Also-rans are no longer important.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re the detritus left on the side of the road, cared for by their creators but almost no one else.<\/p>\n
But what if it was as easy to acquire the detritus as the hit?\u00c2\u00a0 What if it cost just as much?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the promise of digital music. That for a low sum you can have access to, experience just about, everything.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d be richer as a culture for it.\u00c2\u00a0 But this is anathema to those presently in power.\u00c2\u00a0 Why Doug Morris and Edgar Bronfman can’t see that the success of the iTunes Store will marginalize them is unfathomable to me.\u00c2\u00a0 You can’t have people picking tracks one by one, you’ve got to feed them a smorgasbord, and then follow them based on their likes.<\/p>\n
That’s what’s happened online.\u00c2\u00a0 Netizens surf until they’re satiated.\u00c2\u00a0 Going deep into issues they’ve never been able to get enough information about previously, just glancing at headlines for the stories they’re not really interested in, so they can be up to speed during cocktail party discussion.\u00c2\u00a0 This is completely different from the way news has been delivered previously. There’s been a filter.\u00c2\u00a0 Call it the "New York Times".\u00c2\u00a0 Or CBS News.\u00c2\u00a0 These outlets compact the news into a neat little bundle and that’s all you get.\u00c2\u00a0 But no longer.<\/p>\n
I’ve been living in a prototype Internet world for my entire adult life.\u00c2\u00a0 You see I subscribe to every magazine known to man. Everything from "Sound & Vision" to "Newsweek" to "Ski" to "National Geographic Explorer" to "Mac\/Life" to the aforementioned "New Yorker".\u00c2\u00a0 To read every word would be an impossibility.\u00c2\u00a0 But I turn every page, looking for that one fascinating element, the same way we used to punch the buttons on our car radios looking for a hit.\u00c2\u00a0 And when I stumble upon one I scurry down the rabbit hole, devouring the words ever more slowly, for fear they might end.<\/p>\n
Which they always do.<\/p>\n
But my mind keeps contemplating the concepts.<\/p>\n
I was reading the October 20th issue of the "New Yorker" and became riveted by a story about a writer.\u00c2\u00a0 It drew me right in.\u00c2\u00a0 To such a degree that I had to look to the top of the page and see who’d written the article.<\/p>\n
Malcolm Gladwell.<\/p>\n
Yes, he of the "Tipping Point".<\/p>\n
Gladwell’s got a new book, "Outliers".\u00c2\u00a0 And this article in the "New Yorker" was an excerpt from it.\u00c2\u00a0 The question was pondered… Does genius have to come at a young age?<\/p>\n
In other words, do our stars have to be twenty years old?\u00c2\u00a0 Could we have a fifty year old Bob Dylan?\u00c2\u00a0 Someone we’d never heard of before?<\/p>\n
According to Gladwell, yes.\u00c2\u00a0 He used Cezanne as an example.\u00c2\u00a0 Cezanne was lousy at a point in his life when Picasso was already a star.\u00c2\u00a0 But eventually Cezanne got there.\u00c2\u00a0 Via nurturing.\u00c2\u00a0 Via…<\/p>\n
That’s the story of "Outliers".\u00c2\u00a0 How genius is nurtured.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m looking forward to reading the book.<\/p>\n
But what fascinated me was how I couldn’t get enough information about "Outliers".\u00c2\u00a0 Just now I read a long story in "New York" about Gladwell.\u00c2\u00a0 And then it hit me, this is the way it used to be in the music business.<\/p>\n
The records had substance.\u00c2\u00a0 And when you read an article about the work, or an interview with the creator, you were riveted. You wanted more.\u00c2\u00a0 The musicians weren’t selling the music, they were selling their ideas.<\/p>\n
I don’t read record hype anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 I know the formula.\u00c2\u00a0 I was in a bad place, I worked with someone new and now this is the best record I’ve ever made.\u00c2\u00a0 And did I mention that I couldn’t do it without my manager and my label?<\/p>\n
These articles read like press releases.\u00c2\u00a0 For products we’re uninterested in.\u00c2\u00a0 It seems strange that we once cared what our musicians had to say.<\/p>\n
But that was when an artist could have a discussion with someone like Gladwell.\u00c2\u00a0 When artists were not only superior in their own fields, but could wrestle with ideas.\u00c2\u00a0 The label heads can no longer wrestle with ideas, how in the hell do you expect the artists to?<\/p>\n
Yesterday I had lunch with Jim Guerinot.\u00c2\u00a0 He told me on his first trip to New York for A&M Records Gil Friesen called him down to the hotel lobby for a chat.\u00c2\u00a0 Jim reported all the meetings he’d gone to, all he’d accomplished.\u00c2\u00a0 But Gil was incredulous.\u00c2\u00a0 He was in New York and he hadn’t gone to a play?<\/p>\n
This moment stuck with Jim.\u00c2\u00a0 And its lesson.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s more to life than business.\u00c2\u00a0 Gil always asked Jim what he was reading. Because it’s what you do in your outside life that inspires your work.<\/p>\n
Sure, I want my body to move.\u00c2\u00a0 But I want to stretch my mind too.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s nothing wrong with thinking.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody wants to be rich, but no one wants to do the work.<\/p>\n
That’s what Gladwell says.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to put in 10,000 hours of practice.<\/p>\n
That’s why Gladwell’s a star.\u00c2\u00a0 He may have interesting ideas, but it’s the writing that makes his books work.\u00c2\u00a0 All the rest of the business tomes are essentially unreadable.\u00c2\u00a0 There might be great ideas, but they don’t work presented in a book.\u00c2\u00a0 Because you read a book!<\/p>\n
We live in an information society.\u00c2\u00a0 But statistics without theories, without analysis, deliver nothing but a scorecard.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve been functioning in the entertainment business solely based on the scorecard.\u00c2\u00a0 Is it any wonder movies and music are considered by so many to be emotionally and intellectually bankrupt?\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re creating based on the scorecard, if you take no risks, if you hew to the line, you deliver no excitement to the consumer.\u00c2\u00a0 People move on to video games like "Grand Theft Auto", which deliver a visceral experience that music does not.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, the tutorial in "Rock Band" is hipper than each and every record company press release.<\/p>\n
It’s not like there’s a lock on creativity.\u00c2\u00a0 You don’t have to do it the way it’s always been done before.\u00c2\u00a0 And you probably won’t do it well unless you’ve dedicated a lot of time.\u00c2\u00a0 Like Gladwell says, the Beatles were so great because they spent all that time in bars in Hamburg.\u00c2\u00a0 You wonder why today’s acts make a splash and then fall flat?\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no background, there’s no context! The songwriters for hire have more experience than the kid performer du jour.\u00c2\u00a0 But they’re inured to a system that rubs off the rough edges.\u00c2\u00a0 Without the rough edges you’ve got no way of hooking the audience.<\/p>\n
I want to be hooked.<\/p>\n
Right now I’m hooked by Gladwell’s book.<\/p>\n
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