Tuesday, 4/15/97 Don’t blame the fans for bands’ failures
Corporate hopes for wealth, heavy rotation pressure many groups
I was having a conversation with a friend recently about music.
He was running down a list of CDs he had ordered from one of those
music clubs – you know, the ones responsible for making Rolling
Stone and Spin twice as heavy as they normally should be with those
annoying magazine inserts. Anyway, one of the discs he had recently
purchased was Green Day’s "Insomnia" – not only its last release
but the reason it falls under that stupid category of "sophomore
slump." Green Day left the Billboard Top 200 chart a loooong time
ago, and "Insomnia" didn’t hang out on it as long as record
industry insiders (who deserve to be paid for what little they do
just as much as those needless parking attendants at Magic Mountain
do) expected it would. I have the album, because I think it’s a
cool album (despite what all my friends think of Green Day). Thanks
to the usual suspects (KROQ, MTV, Spin, record labels, etc.),
overexposure and high expectations have brought Green Day and other
artists critical degradation, commercial failure and uncertain
futures. When radio and MTV decide to put a song or video in "heavy
rotation," they are risking the band’s longevity, in a way. When
groups are put in "heavy rotation," huge pressure is put upon a
band to sell their product, leading the way to that God-awful term
"selling out." Listeners don’t change the station when the
overplayed song or video comes on, and they become sick of it,
defeating the purpose of radio and MTV exposure. When Green Day
comes up in a conversation around me, someone somewhere makes some
nasty crack about its extremely young fan base and dismisses it as
crap. Green Day sold over 8 million copies in the U.S. alone with
its major-label debut, "Dookie," which you probably have, love and
bought as soon as "Basket Case" was played on KROQ every hour on
the hour – but you still won’t admit it to your friends. The band
went on to sell a respectable 2 million plus copies of "Insomnia"
and got whipped by the media for not re-creating the phenomenal
success of "Dookie." Green Day isn’t the only one falling because
of these huge corporate companies who think the bands are
responsible for shaping pop culture and music. Take Hootie and the
Blowfish. Yes, the biggest selling band of 1995 sold around 15
million copies of "Cracked Rear View" and sold out arenas
everywhere. This is a band who worked hard for six years, never
lost its integrity, always made sure the fan wasn’t getting screwed
and made an honest living. After KROQ stopped playing them because
they got "too big," Star 98.7 had "Hold My Hand" (which I will
admit is a cool song) and "Let Her Cry" on the airwaves damn near
every hour, nauseating even Hootie fans. When its second album,
"Fairweather Johnson," came out, it debuted at No. 1 and fell hard
after that. Two million copies later, and Hootie is synonymous with
the low-talent, too big, sellout type. Like Green Day, it also has
the "sophomore slump" categorization over its head. What happened?
Those record executive wankers will tell you it’s because of the
weak record sales. The media will tell you it’s because of new
musical fads, like "electronica" (please). What annoys the shit out
of me is that the fan is always the first to be blamed. Pearl Jam
fans haven’t all come out to buy their last (and perhaps best)
release, "No Code." Korn’s prepubescent appeal and fan base keeps
the older crowd away. No Doubt’s immense following requests "Don’t
Speak" and the like too much. But the listeners are only responding
to the industry hype machines – the media and the labels. The most
recent music business "atrocity" is the very unstable No. 1
position. In the last nine weeks, everyone debuting at No. 1 but
Notorious B.I.G. (understandably so) stayed there for a week. Then,
sales dropped suddenly. This really began in the summer with Pearl
Jam, continued with R.E.M., Counting Crows and Prince, and has now
claimed "victims" like Live, Scarface, and even the immensely
popular U2. These bands collect flack because they couldn’t stay
No. 1 for more than week, or post bigger first-week sales. The
business was stunned to hear that Pearl Jam didn’t sell over
850,000 copies in the first week, like "Vitalogy" and "Vs." did. It
only sold about 350,000 or so (as did U2). While this may be a
surprise, it should not be such a "disappointment." Some bands’
entire music catalogs will never sell more than that. Surely more
will follow. I eagerly anticipate Alanis Morrissette’s new record
just to see if she is played on the radio ad nauseam and gets raped
by the press, just like Hootie and the Blowfish. Upon already
hearing half the campus groan when the name "No Doubt" is
mentioned, I’d like to see what happens to its image in six months.
Oasis, the British band most Americans have a great deal of
pleasure of hating (OK, if we are talking strictly about lead
singer Liam Gallagher, I can understand the negativity), is
expected to take a slide in the sales for its upcoming album, due
in August. And last but not least, if the Chemical Brothers don’t
sell more than 500,000 copies of their new album, "Dig Your Own
Hole," will "electronica" find its early grave here in America?
Whether one likes Green Day, Alanis and Hootie or not is of no
significance. The music industry must stop pinning the monotonous
radio play and "lackluster" sales of CDs on the fans! I don’t blame
people for hating No Doubt because now six songs from "Tragic
Kingdom" have been played over and over again on the radio for the
last year. I don’t blame people for not buying R.E.M.’s stellar
"New Adventures in Hi-Fi" because of all the negative press it got
for not selling over 300,000 copies the first week (surely it must
suck, right?). And I don’t blame people for being shy to U2’s new
masterpiece, "Pop," for some people aren’t used to the techno-rock
sound of its big single "Discotheque." But the industry and the
media aren’t the only ones placing unfair expectations on bands.
Not buying an album because of bad press and overexposure may be
excusable, but hating a band just because it gets popular is not.
The punk and Britpop crowd, for example, just love to make fun of
any band that makes it big, especially when one of their own, like
punk’s Green Day and Britpop’s Oasis, finds radio play and
multiplatinum sales. My goal is to personally slap every ex-Oasis
fan who can’t stand the fact that "Wonderwall" was so big. It was
big because it was such a great song! And who cares if Green Day is
now more pop than punk? I dare not venture into the whole
"labeling" area. I’m not saying people can’t have an opinion, but
if you’re gonna have one, don’t base it on some rock magazine’s
predictions or on album sales, like the industry has done lately.
Trashing music due to a group’s popularity is really superficial,
lame and sometimes hypocritical. A lot of the time a band can’t
help that its pimpish record label pushes for insane exposure.
Sure, a few bands shamelessly promote themselves to the point of
utter disgust, but most bands are victims of the business’
cutthroat tactics, and the music acts themselves appear to be the
ones at fault. But before you go slagging Green Day and the like,
remember they aren’t the DJs or the writers for Billboard magazine.
They are pawns on the board much like us, save the radical pay
difference, who often have no real control over their contract
holders. Prevatt is a third-year history major.