Is The Party Finally Over?

With the advent of the Internet popular music has found itself in crisis. No longer would a listener have to shell dollars out to buy albums, now they could just download it for nothing. Online sites such as Napster threatened the industry of its revenue by simply giving the music away for nothing at all. With lawsuits and court battles the site was forced to shut down. As it stands consumers could download music on their ipods and MP3 players and pay per song. That stopped the bleeding somewhat however as Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel writes in the August 10th Wall Street Journal it's too little too late. She says “Today's music industry is either moribund or dead, depending on whom you ask. Downloading has destroyed it, and no one in the business is smart enough to figure out how to fix it.”.

Wurtzels thesis is two-fold. One is the end of an era. The second is cultural and economic. For the first thesis she begins with the story of Pete Yorn an artist who makes music writing for movies and has reached the billboard charts. Yorn makes a pretty good living however in the good old days of the 70's, Wurtzel writes, Yorn “would be a multiplatinum artist living in a Malibu mansion with mountains of cocaine on every horizontal surface, lithe, hippie-ish blonde groupies with names like Veruschka...” and this is a bad thing, she continues: “You may feel that this in no great loss. But these rock stars were fun, larger than life people with real talent-and bad habits. Now all we have left are the bad habits. All we've got left is Britney Spears.” There's a bit of an old fogy in Wurtzel here. Certainly Ms Spears may not have the kind of talent as a Jim Morrison but the same was probably said about Morrison not having the same talent as Frank Sinatra in the 60's. Aside from that to say that Mr Yorn is deprived of mountains of cocaine and a large following, and more disastrously, teens looking to emulate his lifestyle, is certainly nothing to get nostalgic about. If musicians had made a modest profit the likes of Yorn are making now, perhaps Janis Joplin, Morrison, and many others who lost their lives because of lavish living would still be with us.

As for her second thesis Wurtzel makes a compelling case that with consumers buying individual songs instead of albums, the genre of popular music is being taken over by one-hit wonders rather then “consummate musicians”. This is a development that is hardly new. Popular music by its nature is a departure from true musicianship. The songs that we have grown up are constructed with just a handful of cords repeated over and over again, the rest of an album is much of the same. This is not an indictment on popular music, it has a simple formula that works. But to say that the demise of the whole album format is akin to the loss of virtuosity doesn't hold much water. Technology is producing a change in music much the way AM radio or vinyl recordings had done in the past. Certainly artist will adapt as they had done before. The worst part of Wurtzels argument is a call to government action. Could there be a more wrongheaded prescription?

Popular culture is an export the United States has, as Wurtzel points out, conquered the world. Because of the the ability to download this industry is in trouble and along with that, of course, are jobs. Wurtzel cites impressive numbers to point out just how big and influential this industry is in economic and cultural terms but then again the demise of the horse and buggy was a shock to the system as well. Capitalism, its been said, is the process of creative destruction. The more successful economies don't improve on the light bulb they replace it. As for the cultural dimensions to her argument lets just say once and for all, for all its virtues, American pop culture is somewhat of an embarrassment. Instead of being a light form of true art it is America's art. America has yet to produce one Mozart. Of course Mozart is a hard act to follow but we could at least settle for a Berlioz. But these were serious musicians writing the sort of music that doesn't produce the kind of celebrity and fortune of pop music. For the few who cherish classical music and shun pop music, the notion that new technology will threaten the latter may feel that the chickens have come home to roost. Indeed with the prospect of diminishing influence of popular culture Wurlitzer's points out that the fine arts are making a resurgence and she cautions that “This is antithetical to the American mission. I have nothing against all the great fine artists this country has produced, but they are a carryover from Europe. They are Old World.” Well excuse me.

Art and culture, if we are to believe Wurtzel, are in a state of dramatic change and hopefully for the better. For all the good it has done no other genre of music has had a more destructive influence on the young as had popular music. True art may be “old world” to Wurtzel and because of mid-20th century technology and youth culture it has fallen by the wayside. Now that a newer form of technology threatens this all we could say to Wurtzel is simply get with the times baby.