Pitchfork's Jayson Greene on what he's cleverly calling Music's Nostalgia-Industrial Complex - a tag that here describes the consolidation of song catalogues by legacy artists in money-minded hands looking to maximise every conceivable form of earning back on their huge investments in publishing rights.
One way is to instigate the interpolation of hooks from these bits of prime musical property into songs that become Top 40 hits. Like this one:
"After clocking the 1987 smash’s internet infamy, Primary Wave acquired a percentage of the rights to [Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"].... then pitched the idea of an interpolation to Yung Gravy’s manager. At the same time, a member of Shukat’s team reached out to a producer who worked with Gravy. “Within a day, we literally had a track to listen to, and Gravy rapped over it two days later, which was fucking dope,” Shukat says over the phone. He was less enthused by the original track’s name—“Get Pussy”—and requested a rework, which was obliged. The song went on to peak at No. 30 on the Hot 100 and currently has more than 200 million plays on Spotify. When I observe that Shukat is describing a role more akin to a music producer than a publisher, he says, “I’m comfortable with that. We’re producing on a daily basis.”
Primary Wave's chief of marketing is involved in the work of "'“artist re-development.' His team assembles three-to-five-year marketing plans for each new acquisition, and then presents a pitch deck to the artist or their estate."... Primary Wave treats their catalogs the way powerful record labels treat their star artists—except all of the publishing company’s talent is either dead, a legend, or both. And when you own the rights to some of the most important American popular music ever recorded, opportunities have a way of presenting themselves in perpetuity.
It's the wave of the (no-)future - retro-necrosploitation of golden oldies with proven hookability and nostalgic triggers in-built.
"In the past few years, Primary Wave has been joined by what Shukat estimates are more than 20 similar companies. He points directly to the pandemic as the cause for the catalog stampede, which erased touring income from everyone’s ledger sheets for nearly two years. Now it feels like a week doesn’t go by without a major artist’s catalog getting scooped up."
Alongside Primary Wave, a company called Hipgnosis (unrelated I assume to the record design company) are big players in this field.
"The rise in catalog acquisition helps to explain how we’ve arrived at a moment when the pop charts are littered with chunks of old intellectual property. Nicki’s “Super Freaky Girl” and Yung Gravy’s “Betty” are just two high-profile examples; you don’t have to look far for more. The Santa Clara, California rapper Saweetie’s “P.U.S.S.Y. (Powerful, Utopia, Supreme, Sacred, Yummy)” samples Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit,” the basis for Biggie’s “Juicy.” Atlanta’s Latto double-dipped Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” famously sampled on Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” for her song “Big Energy,” bringing in Mariah herself for bonus points."
"... In some ways, the Hot 100 right now feels as recursive, all-encompassing, and allergic to new input as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. "
6 comments:
I don't see how this is nostalgic - there doesn't seem to be any sentimental aspect to any of this, quite the opposite.
I think that there is a progressive blind spot in operation here - the assumption that any adoption of the old or the bygone is a symptom of weakness, of fear of the future. But the people undertaking this kind of project seem to be the most clear-eyed and cold-blooded people imaginable.
We probably need a new word or term for the process of exploiting the past unsentimentally, like a coal baron continually looking a new seam. "Cultural fracking", or something like that.
"Cultural fracking" - love it!
Oh yes, there's nothing nostalgic about the businessmen actually doing this exploitation
But I think it's part of the vague, deja entendu pull of the interpolated or sampled bits on the listener's ear. Even those too young to have actually heard the original song in its original time, will likely get a faint whiff of old-timeyness from a lot of the samples. But that isn't necessary for the process to work - on another level, it's just another hook that works now just as well as it did in the original pop cultural moment.
Retro in its purest form (pastiche, citation, etc) is evacuated of nostalgia - it's just blank. There's no algia, no ache.
I actually think nostalgia is more defensible than that kind of empty recreation / pattern work. Because nostalgia is intrinsic to the human condition (at least in the modern era) and none of us will escape it. All kinds of art and literature have been about temps perdu, etc etc
I don't necessarily have a problem with nostalgia per se.
As for fear of the future - that seems more of a logical, justified response to the way things are going, with each passing year.
"The Nostalgia-Industrial Complex" and "Cultural Fracking" are both fine coinages.
May I also proffer "Mechanically Recovered Music": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanically_separated_meat - when flogging a dead horse is not enough.
This is the end state of music as intellectual property, as asset to sweated. An asset that doesn't even depreciate over time but becomes more valuable instead. Presumably you could also sell derivatives based on your underlying assets - kinda CDOs for music.
Mechanically Recovered Music - love it.
So that's like when they suck meat-goo and pink slime out of every crevice of the carcass? Euuuuu
I wonder if there could be a music-listener analogue to Spongiform wossname, you know, mad cow disease. Music, fed out of bits of old dead music, creating a kind of mind-virus, a pathogen that rots out the brain.
In Retromania's conclusion, I ventured an analogy with derivatives in the financial sense with derivative-ness in the recycled-rock sense, it was ever so slightly strained, postulating a similar sort of Big Collapse as to what happened with the financial system at the end of the 2000s.
This also seems to be part of the nascent ur-phenomenon of AI gradually destroying the career structure of the managerial-administrative class. I haven't read Burnham's infamous book, so I don't know if he directly connected popular culture with managerialism, but the pair of them do seem to have risen to prominence hand-in-hand. I think post-war pop culture was more of a white collar than a blue collar phenomenon, so what we are possibly seeing here is the artists being wiped out at the same time as the consumers.
It's also an example of Jacques Ellul's old point about technology being "vectored"; that innovations in one area can spawn hitherto unimagined innovations elsewhere, thereby making technological expansion impossible to anticipate and so unstoppable. Clearly here we have a process that is almost entirely self-driven and impossible to reign in, heading towards the-machines-only-talking-to-the-machines.
There's a New Age theory doing the rounds at the moment that society is going to bifurcate between the people who remain in thrall to the technological spectacle and those who reject it entirely, who go "back to the land" as it were. I can actually see a point where the artificiality becomes unsustainable, where the strain is too much even for the most immersed/credulous/indoctrinated, but how this manifests and what the consequences might be, I have no idea.
"I haven't read Burnham's infamous book, so I don't know if he directly connected popular culture with managerialism, but the pair of them do seem to have risen to prominence hand-in-hand."
Burnham's book was published in 1941 so I doubt it explicitly does so (I've not read it either). A managerial-administrative class really starts to emerge after WW1 - as the mass manufacture of complex machines like automobiles requires greater skills than simply being a foreman. Recently I've developed a fascination with the work of Peter Drucker - an interwar Viennese intellectual who moves to the US becomes first a chronicler and then a consigliere to America's business elite. From what I have read, Drucker has little interest in popular culture and nor do his business contacts - they are conservative white men from America's. And this managerial-administrative class starts to come under attack in the 70s when the economy sags and corporate raiders see opportunities to acquire and then sell off poorly managed companies. AI is simply the last of a long line of tools and techniques that seek to abolish middle managers - computers, ERP systems, BPR, six sigma, outsourcing/offshoring, agile, etc.
I think post-war pop culture is partially a product of the prosperity that mass production combined with widespread employment brings. As that system gradually collapses, pop culture also collapses - or at least falls apart.
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