John Bon Jovi (Saturday, April 30) recently joined John Mellencamp (Sunday, May 1) on a porch, where they now wave their canes at the young whippersnappers. “Pull up your pants!” “Stay off my lawn!” “Slow down!” Bon Jovi is the latest to blame the state of the music industry on the mp3. “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business,” he said in the Sunday Times Magazine. Steve Jobs didn’t do anything but pick up all the money that the record industry threw away. He gave the essentially law-abiding music fans who wanted the songs they liked but not the albums they came on a legal way to get them – something the labels stopped doing.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV1XWJN3nJo[/youtube]
Recently, I attended the EMP Pop Conference in Los Angeles, where Chris Molanphy gave a talk that addressed this subject by examining the Billboard Hot 100. Singles were historically more popular than albums and represented greater sales – originally, a single went gold when it sold a million copies, but an album went gold at half of that number – but not greater profits. By killing the single, labels forced buyers to spend $15 for the albums that contained the one song they wanted by Natalie Imbruglia or Chumbawamba. Driving the casual consumer out of the marketplace or into the arms of Napster killed the record industry; Steve Jobs simply figured out how to make the industry’s stupidity work for him.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H5uWRjFsGc[/youtube]
At the conference, incidentally, one of the other high points was critic Greil Marcus talking about the song “Money Changes Everything.” The talk was, by the standards of Marcus presentations I’ve seen, slightly slack, referencing a song I don’t remember and the Gang of Four’s “Damaged Goods” in what seemed like a warm-up to his main event – the tug-of-war Tom Gray and the Brains acted out with Cyndi Lauper (Thursday, May 5) over the song Gray wrote. Marcus heard new meaning and harrowing emotional drama in the same song with each new performance of it. The key verse is the opening one:
She said I’m sorry baby I’m leaving you tonight
I found someone new he’s waitin’ in the car outside
Ah honey how could you do it
We swore each other everlasting love
She said well yeah I know but when
We did – there was one thing we weren’t
Really thinking of and that’s money –
Money changes everything
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPSq4PyYDD4[/youtube]
In the Brains’ version, Gray’s the true love who finds out his girl is faithless, but when Lauper sings it, she steps into the role of the girl and owns it. She’s blowing him off because money changes everything and she’s not apologetic. Marcus then tracked subsequent versions and the readings that could be gleaned from them, but one he missed that seems relevant was the live video of the song that came near the end of She’s So Unusual‘s time on the charts. In it, we see the emotional cost of her stance as her manic performance alternates between exhausted resignation and a tantrum, eye makeup running down her cheeks. And at that point, she was living that truth, having gone from a bar singer to someone being carried over her arena audience in a garbage can.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVkCjX1WTL8&feature=related[/youtube]
