If I get one more e-mail from some holier-than-thou hipster who believes he’s got his finger on the pulse of music who ogled babes and got within spitting distance of Madonna at Coachella I’m gonna hunt down Randy Phillips and the Goldenvoice team personally and slit their throats so this festival can never take place again.<\/p>\n
Coachella is a brand name.\u00c2\u00a0 THAT’S what Goldenvoice did best.\u00c2\u00a0 They created a festival with such cred in the art\/indie\/future rock world that they can sell tens of thousands of tickets advertising NO headliner.\u00c2\u00a0 They call this concert promotion.\u00c2\u00a0 They DO NOT call this MUSIC!<\/p>\n
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a crisis of exposure in the music world.\u00c2\u00a0 For every asshole agent crawling clubs looking for new acts he can sell to Mr. Phillips and Michael Rapino there are tens of millions of Americans who are completely out of the loop and don’t give a shit.\u00c2\u00a0 This IS NOT the eighties.\u00c2\u00a0 When MTV blew up some band and they sold out arenas.\u00c2\u00a0 Ever notice that the bands selling out arenas on a regular basis are all in excess of ten years old?\u00c2\u00a0 And that those that do sell out for a brief period, like the Spice Girls, like Coldplay, leave a bad taste in your mouth?\u00c2\u00a0 Come on, admit it, that last Coldplay CD was mediocre, if you hear Chris Martin’s voice one more time you’re gonna scream and if you see another picture of Gwyneth and Moses and Fruit and whomever else is in the brood you’re going to go postal in your SUPERMARKET!<\/p>\n
On one hand we have overexposure.\u00c2\u00a0 If anything catches fire the record labels and the media flog it ad infinitum, just THRILLED that people want it.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t give a shit that it’s good, they don’t give a shit that they’re burning it out, they just want to get paid\/get good ratings TODAY!\u00c2\u00a0 FUCK tomorrow.<\/p>\n
On the other end of the spectrum we’ve got MySpace.\u00c2\u00a0 Where wannabes, people with no traction, like to build friend lists and garner plays of their tracks to prove that somebody actually cares, even though most people DON’T!<\/p>\n
And in between?\u00c2\u00a0 WHO THE FUCK KNOWS??<\/p>\n
Coachella is not Woodstock.\u00c2\u00a0 What blew everybody’s mind with Woodstock, why hundreds of thousands of people went, was because they had ALL the bands.\u00c2\u00a0 You just couldn’t believe it.\u00c2\u00a0 And, music drove the culture.\u00c2\u00a0 If the shit at Coachella drives your culture you’re a drug-addicted dancer or you spend so much time in boutiques shopping for clothes you HAVE no life.<\/p>\n
Recapping, there AREN’T enough mainstream headliners today to have a Woodstock-style festival.\u00c2\u00a0 God, you’d have to include bands going back FORTY YEARS before people would scratch their asses and say I’VE GOT TO BE THERE!\u00c2\u00a0 Coachella is niche.\u00c2\u00a0 And there’s nothing wrong with that.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that it’s being trumpeted as something quite different.\u00c2\u00a0 With all the press coverage you’d think it’s mainstream, it’s the future of music.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, it’s not.\u00c2\u00a0 God, they had to add Kanye West and Madonna to the bill because they were lacking headliners?\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t that like driving a busload of white teenage do-gooders and a van of grandmothers to Compton so the police will patrol the city?\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t that like putting Lauren Bacall and Ben Kingsley in "The Sopranos" so the oldster and hipster demographics will be enticed?\u00c2\u00a0 Oops, they did that, and although you might have laughed, that was the series’ creative nadir.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like Kanye and Madonna was Coachella’s creative nadir.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t GIVE A SHIT how much money you made.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t GIVE A SHIT that you featured new bands.\u00c2\u00a0 How did it work ARTISTICALLY?\u00c2\u00a0 How does it fit into the musical landscape of America?\u00c2\u00a0 THAT’S what’s interesting to me.<\/p>\n
I know that may be too much for you dollar-hungry pricks who believe the buck triumphs over everything to comprehend.\u00c2\u00a0 I believe artists want to get paid, but that DOES NOT mean they only do it for the money.\u00c2\u00a0 Shit, despite his denials, even GENE SIMMONS isn’t only in it for the money.\u00c2\u00a0 This year’s Coachella has about as much meaning as a doorknob.\u00c2\u00a0 It broke no bands.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s irrelevant to the musical landscape at large.\u00c2\u00a0 God, "High School Musical" means more than Coachella.<\/p>\n
Hell, listen to some of those "High School Musical" tracks.\u00c2\u00a0 Stuff like "Breaking Free".\u00c2\u00a0 God, there’s melody.\u00c2\u00a0 The singers have good voices.\u00c2\u00a0 The music’s PALATABLE!\u00c2\u00a0 And blowing out at retailers everywhere while aging dicks who e-mail me needing to believe they’re hip are purveying ever more outside stuff.<\/p>\n
It’s a murky world out there.\u00c2\u00a0 No one knows exactly where it’s going.\u00c2\u00a0 Used to be there was a bar.\u00c2\u00a0 You got over the hurdle and you had made it.\u00c2\u00a0 What is making it today?\u00c2\u00a0 Being on TV?\u00c2\u00a0 PLAYING Coachella?\u00c2\u00a0 Shit, a lot of these acts can barely WORK outside of Coachella.\u00c2\u00a0 Unless it’s clubs.\u00c2\u00a0 And there’s nothing wrong with that.\u00c2\u00a0 But don’t think because somewhere between 50 and 100,000 pricks gather in a polo field in the middle of the desert a band is broken, that people care.<\/p>\n
Same deal with SXSW.\u00c2\u00a0 So you saw some old friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Drank a bit of beer.\u00c2\u00a0 Heard some left-field act.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, you don’t even have to LEAVE TOWN for that.\u00c2\u00a0 You went on vacation.\u00c2\u00a0 Good for you!\u00c2\u00a0 But is there cultural significance for those who didn’t attend?\u00c2\u00a0 NO!<\/p>\n
Oh, there used to be.\u00c2\u00a0 SXSW was where you got a toehold in the popular consciousness.\u00c2\u00a0 It spread from there.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sure ANY prepackaged event put together by the usual suspects can have this effect anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 It appears that buzz is created on the Web.\u00c2\u00a0 But we’re not exactly sure how this is done.\u00c2\u00a0 What sites matter.\u00c2\u00a0 How to gauge interest, never mind success.<\/p>\n
It’s a cable TV world.\u00c2\u00a0 But worse.\u00c2\u00a0 In cable, there are 300 channels vying for one’s attention.\u00c2\u00a0 In the music world, instead of 5,000 albums being released a year, now it’s closer to 60,000.\u00c2\u00a0 And, the Arcade Fire proved that those acts on indies you used to ignore, maybe some of them are good.<\/p>\n
Are we building a healthy mid-level business.\u00c2\u00a0 Acts that can sell out theatres?\u00c2\u00a0 Is the Wiltern gonna be filled every night of the week?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, this is DEATH for LiveNation and AEG.\u00c2\u00a0 They need to sell out ARENAS!\u00c2\u00a0 They need to have FESTIVALS!\u00c2\u00a0 So they can make the BIG BUCKS!\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe there just won’t be big enough acts TO DO this anymore!\u00c2\u00a0 Just like hit network TV shows used to get a thirty plus rating and now they almost never break twenty, with all the eyeballs glued to a myriad of cable channels.<\/p>\n
Yes, it’s a long tail world.\u00c2\u00a0 There is demand for everything.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe there’s just not a big mainstream anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 THAT’S the interesting question.\u00c2\u00a0 What it takes to reach critical mass today.\u00c2\u00a0 And how you achieve this.\u00c2\u00a0 And how do you massage\/manage your career to SUSTAIN this.\u00c2\u00a0 Questions which those in power seem to not give a shit about.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is why the meek SHALL inherit the earth.<\/p>\n
Coachella was not "Sgt. Pepper".\u00c2\u00a0 It was not "The Godfather".\u00c2\u00a0 It was CERTAINLY NOT Woodstock.\u00c2\u00a0 It was more like an aging NBA club struggling to win a championship one more time before the team falls apart and everybody loses interest.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, AEG\/Goldenvoice has got it all down, they’re firing on all cylinders.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just the MUSIC that’s a question.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe in the next twelve months new headliners that will insure this festival’s future success will emerge.\u00c2\u00a0 But I highly doubt it.\u00c2\u00a0 Because it appears that the new superstar acts are going to take A VERY LONG TIME to develop, to reach critical mass.\u00c2\u00a0 And there are going to be A LOT fewer of them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I get one more e-mail from some holier-than-thou hipster who believes he’s got his finger on the pulse of music who ogled babes and got within spitting distance of Madonna at Coachella I’m gonna hunt down Randy Phillips and the Goldenvoice team personally and slit their throats so this festival can never take place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-shows","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-6B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}