I wrote the below to post on the blog over at
The Fall Collection, whose Crown Point festival I'm helping curate this fall. It seemed a bit cravingcake appropriate, but Christiana can feel free to yell at me for the cross-post if she so desires.
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My life in both work and play is deeply intertwined with music, and as such I’ve found it plagued by two issues as of late.
The first is by now no secret, but for some reason its still considered “news.”
Every morning when I read the Billboard news delivered to my inbox, there’s yet another story about how CD sales are down or about how another label has downsized.
The music industry is suffering; it seems that this is still a surprise to some.
At the least, and to put it mildly, it’s quite the bummer.
As someone who does work in music, I’m also bombarded daily with releases by new bands. Press release after press release, CD after CD. I try to listen to them all, and that can sometimes be the most disheartening of all. To listen to something that doesn’t evoke feeling, make you think, or inspire you – and to do so multiple times a day – can be what really breaks you in the face of an industry decline. If you’re going to bust your balls for something, it should be worth it, and I want something that sounds worth it.
Patti Smith is such a legend in her own right that she could record an album of cooing baby noises and still be praised for her innovation. Frankly, it would probably still sound amazing, as her power lies even more in what she can do with her voice than what she can do with her mind. Seeing her life is a fusion of everything that the Fall Collection stands for. It’s a throwback to a time when artist communities were thriving and encouraged in NYC; it’s both a theater performance (don’t try to tell me Smith isn’t an actress, and an amazing one at that) and a rock show. It’s art at its best. At base, Smith is a poet heralded almost by chance as a punk. Her new album Twelve is a carefully selected mix of covers, brought to life in such a manner that they sound as natural as Smith’s originals. She played a mix of these tracks with a couple of old favorites (namely “Gloria”) thrown in – from “White Rabbit” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, every song was majestic, and every song gave me goosebumps.
And if it doesn’t give you goosebumps, what’s the point?
Every night of the Crown Point Festival aspires to be an event in the manner of a Patti Smith show – music, film, theater and art are meant to come together like this. It all comes down to one voice, projecting over the audience. If we can even gesture towards what she does, we’re in the right place, and the fact that performances like this can exist gives me hope in music, and hope in the arts.
At the same time, Smith’s Bowery Sessions represented a compromise between the music itself and the business side of affairs. The problem that underlies all these daily Billboard stories is something like this: we’ve made the first step in acknowledging that the model the industry is based on is no longer working, and we have the sales numbers to prove it. What we haven’t done is make room for a new way of measuring success and making a new structure altogether. Every ticketholder for Smith’s Bowery shows also received a copy of her new album. Rather than being a clever marketing ploy to get Soundscan numbers up (see Prince’s Musicology tour, a move so admittedly brilliant it was banned shortly thereafter), Smith put it very simply: “You’re buying the record, and getting me for free.”
If you want people to pay for music, make it worth it: give them an experience that can’t be measured in dollars or downloaded from Limewire. It’s the kind of very simple marketing that we’re currently lacking, and its message is equally simple. Let’s give people something worth getting excited about.
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