The Swarm

July 06, 2009

Debunking the Myth That Michael Jackson Broke Down MTV's 'Racial Barrier,' and Exposing the Hypocritical Media That Reports It: A Daily Swarm Report...

Alex Sherman


Did Michael Jackson really break down the racial barrier at MTV? Or does CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff deserve the credit? How about neither. Michael Jackson achieved breathtaking commercial success during a period of major transformations in media. Indeed, Thriller broke so many records it forever reshaped Jackson’s aura into an unstoppable force. But did MTV really have a racial barrier for Michael to break or was that just part of the hype? Alex Sherman reports:


Former CBS Records President Walter Yetnikoff standing with Michael Jackson, David Geffen, and Lynda Emon on the Victory Tour’s opening night, 1984.


Source.


The day Michael Jackson died, cable news turned away from the turmoil in Iran to honor the passing of a legendary American entertainer. CNN had just earned a new term in the Twitter lexicon for its shoddy coverage of electoral theft, but the #CNNfail hashtag follows it from one breaking story to another for its hagiographic, hypocritical, and self-serving reporting on Michael Jackson’s legacy.

I found myself glued to the TV that day and, like many readers, I’ve pored over countless stories about his legacy over the last week. The spontaneous celebration of his music that erupted in the streets of New York warmed my heart and made me wonder if there will there ever be another entertainer who, in spite of his flaws, had the power to bring so many people together across racial, ethnic, cultural, and political barriers.

But during the wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson’s death, 24-hour cable news repeated ad nauseam the myth that Jackson was responsible for breaking down a racial barrier at MTV. CNN published a story about it as part of its Black in America 2 documentary series chronicling “the most challenging issues facing African Americans,” which it had been promoting heavily in the days preceding Jackson’s passing. The story quoted Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University, who compared MTV to a racially segregated state. “At the time that he releases Thriller,” Neal said, “I always argue that MTV was arguably the best example of cultural apartheid in the United States.” CNN claimed that “MTV didn’t play videos of black artists before Jackson” – a lie – in the “story highlights,” the bullet points at the top of the story for the hurried reader. The article also credited former CBS Records President Walter Yetnikoff with strong-arming the network into changing its “format” by threatening to pull other CBS Records artists from MTV’s music video rotation.


WATCH THE CNN PIECE HERE


The Yetnikoff angle wasn’t really emphasized on TV news broadcasts, but the story has legs and has been echoing through the blogosphere. PopMatters noted the oversight in an insightful list of lessons to be learned from the Jackson coverage:

One point of fact that keeps coming up in his career is that he broke down racial barriers on MTV. In a sense that’s true but it’s much more accurate to say that it was actually CBS Records honcho Walter Yetnikoff – he was the one who told the network that they weren’t gonna get ANY more videos from the label’s artists unless they put Jackson in rotation. MTV caved in and it turned out to be a huge boost not just to Jackson but also to for the network.

In reality, this story continues to be a matter of dispute. In a recent interview with Billboard, former MTV Vice President of Programming Les Garland claimed the story is apocryphal. He said:

Billie Jean’ set the standard that day for what excellence in music video stood for. There was never a question that we were putting it on. There was never a threat from Walter Yetnikoff—it’s folklore. He got more upset because we didn’t play Willie Nelson or Barbra Streisand.

Many who remember those early years at MTV would be skeptical of Garland’s denial. MTV had a narrowly defined rock format that included few African American artists, including Prince, Tina Turner, Joan Armatrading, and the Bus Boys. But the stage was set for a high profile standoff after MTV declined to add the Rick James “Super Freak” video to its rotation in early 1983 and James denounced the channel repeatedly as “racist.”

However, there is considerable evidence that supports Garland’s claim and shows that the network itself was not enforcing a racial barrier.

MTV was launched in 1981 by Warner Amex, a company formed out of a 1979 merger between Warner Brother’s cable subsidiary and the American Express Company in which Amex invested $175 million in exchange for 50 percent of the company. 30 years later, a credit card company’s hefty investment in a cable company seems unusual—why would they drop so much cash into a cable concern?

The merger was precipitated by a series of court rulings and rules changes that made cable TV a suddenly much more profitable business venture. Until 1977, the industry faced major obstacles to growth such as an FCC ban on selling advertising and limitations on what types of sports and movies they could transmit. Their profit margins were small and as a result they could not afford to take on the debt necessary to expand into urban markets.

In a 1977 case brought by HBO and other cable companies against the FCC, the US Court of Appeals decided that those rules were arbitrary. The fall of the advertisement barrier spurred a new wave of investments and mergers, including the Warner Amex deal. Cable started to develop new channels to stimulate demand for subscriptions in areas they already served while urban markets remained the next frontier for growth.

At the time, 90 percent of African Americans lived in cities. But reaching urban customers was blocked by numerous problems. Laying cable under city streets was far more costly and involved than using the above-ground telephone wires in suburbs. Moreover, the process involved piggybacking on public infrastructure for which operators had to pay franchise fees, which were sometimes exorbitant because there was no national standard for the franchise application process, no limits to the fee a city could charge, and common quid pro quo deals at the municipal level of government.

Moreover, there wasn’t significant demand for the service among city dwellers. In the suburbs, there was an adaptive need for homes with bad reception to switch to cable. But in New York City, for example, television owners were well served by the powerful broadcast tower on top of the Empire State Building. Cable operators knew that in order to make the case to subscribe they would have to provide high quality programming exclusive to cable.

The logistical challenges to urban cable penetration were finally overcome in 1984 with the Cable Communications Policy Act, legislation the cable operators had wanted for years. It standardized the franchise process and set a cap on fees at 5 percent. [See Cable TV: From Community Antennas To Wired Cities.] The next wave would be the revolution in programming.

When Warner and Amex entered into their 50/50 deal in 1979, Warner wasn’t just receiving a major cash infusion to make capital investments. It was teaming up with the standard bearer for consumer marketing practices. Amex would benefit from cable’s coaxial two-way transmission lines for credit card transactions on home shopping networks and online banking, functions of the internet we take for granted today. But they were providing their skills as extraordinarily sophisticated consumer marketers who would help Warner fulfill the medium’s potential for niche marketing and narrowcasting. Thomas Dann, a key player in the Warner Amex deal whose career began in network television in the 1950s, told Thomas Whiteside of the New Yorker in 1985:

“When American Express came in with Warner to form Warner Amex as a joint venture it came, in part, because its people understand marketing. Warner didn’t know how to study and apply the demographics of the market the way American Express knows how. When Warner Brothers put a movie into the theaters, it was rolling dice; the public decided right at the box office how successful it was. Well, that’s quite different from the modern marketing of consumer goods. Procter & Gamble doesn’t do things that way. It doesn’t roll dice. It test-markets. It picks cities, marketing areas, it test-markets this, test markets that—it’s done by computer. These corporations understand the future of communications. And, beyond that, they understand how all-encompassing the whole communications revolution is bound to be… It’s public lighting by electricity for the fist time in London, putting an end to the gaslight. This revolution is going to encompass everything you do.”

Thus, MTV came into existence at a time when cable’s duality wasn’t fully understood by viewers because the idea of narrowcasting was in its infancy. MTV was a satellite-based national channel, so it resembled the mass audience-oriented broadcast networks. But it was meant to bypass the mass and cater to the narrow demographic of suburban cable subscribers and defined its programming principles based on those market conditions. (Subscribers to The New Yorker can read the 3-part essay here.)


Early MTV logo

By the time the “Thriller” video came out in 1983, MTV had already played “Beat it” and “Billie Jean” and the album had sold upwards of 10 million albums during its first year of release. But there was a reason why “Thriller” was a kind of entertainment that that nobody had ever seen before. It was a tool to hype demand for cable TV at a moment when expansion everywhere – including cities – was imminent. It was imperative for them to build demand for subscriptions.

Whereas “Billie Jean” and “Beat it” were directed (respectively) by a commercial director who made Miller Lite ads and a music video director who made early clips by the Human League, Adam and the Ants, and Heaven 17, CBS and Jackson tapped John Landis, one of the most powerful young directors in Hollywood to direct “Thriller.” Landis and Jackson conceived of it as a short film, originally distributing it theatrically with the re-release of “Fantasia,” a tactic that would make it eligible for an Academy Award.

When MTV paid $1 million for the exclusive rights for it, the first time it had ever done so, Garland remembered the acquisition in the context of decisions that were made not just at MTV but at other networks owned by Warner Amex. “We owned the Movie Channel at the time and bought movies exclusively,” he said. “We used that as the template.” Then, the network marketed “Thriller” as “event television,” programming it at special times so cable subscribers could invite their cable-less friends to experience the wonders of the black box. The same year, Warner landed its first exclusive franchise in a major African American market in Brooklyn and Queens. The following year, the cable TV lobby finally closed in on the Cable Communications Policy Act, the last barrier to cabled cities, and Michael Jackson went on his Victory tour.

Since “Thriller,” Jackson has found himself frequently in the media’s spotlight for his moral transgressions —either as a the victor of epic moral battles or as its disgraced loser. But he can always be credited with knowing how to play both sides of the coin, as did the media companies who took advantage of the spectacle he never failed to provide.

But today, Michael Jackson’s legacy is being rewritten for the purposes of money alone. The story of Jackson breaking a racial barrier at MTV is part of that revisionist history. MTV showed far fewer videos by African American artists before Michael Jackson than after him, but it’s hard to believe that they were enforcing a racial barrier.

The story has circulated in recent days because it makes for entertaining television. But it has the insidious effect of reinforcing the most basic cornerstone of the cable industry’s strategy for market growth: that cable is a place of events and milestones, and either you’re a part of it or you’re missing out on something important. At a moment when cable looks increasingly irrelevant to a generation of TV viewers who can circumvent subscriptions with Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, and other video on demand services, the importance of that message cannot be overstated.

Michael Jackson, may he rest in peace.


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July 04, 2009

UPDATE: Did Black Eyed Peas Steal Freeland's 'Mancry'?

Todd Roberts

In late 2007, I got a chance to check out Adam Freeland’s newest project, Freeland, as it was coming together. He was still recording a majority of the tracks and had yet to mix and master them. He was most proud of this sort of “interlude” track he had recorded with Tommy Lee on drums, which he hadn’t shared the name for yet. Since then, he continued to build his vision, tweaking and retweaking. Finally, he began to sequence, come up with a theme and visual ideas, which I helped him find design collective, the KDU, to assist with.

The album, Cope, was finally ready late last year and started getting a buzz from early previews. After getting a copy of it myself, I noticed a particularly introspective track called “Mancry” which was a polished version of the track I’d heard before, with Tommy Lee’s drums at the forefront, sweeping synth lines and, our friend, Matt Diehl as the vocal sample.

So when the Black Eyed Peas album came out last month, which recently hit #1 on the Billboard 200 chart as well as the Hot 100, there was one track in particular that stood out, “Party All The Time”. Not because it was such an amazing track, but because it was very familiar. It’s been discussed that the Peas had gone decidedly more electronic and dance-oriented on this new one. (Will.I.Am could even be seen donning a mask and DJing a heavy electro set at last year’s Hard Fest in LA.)

Turns out, Adam Freeland seems to agree that his track was bitten. If you check out the tracks next to each other, as he suggests, it seems very apparent that the Black Eyed Peas have straight up sampled the whole track as a backing to their vocals, and it could hardly even be considered a rearrangement. Check out Lee’s drums as a focal point of the track.

While representatives for the Peas have yet to be contacted about whether they tried to clear the sample, Adam sent a Twitter message earlier today to share that he is more than suspicious as well…

Apparently, no action has been taken Lawyers for each party have apparently been in contact, but compare the two for yourself. You decide. Did the Peas steal Freeland’s “Mancry” for their soon to be sales award winning release, The E.N.D.?

FLASHBACK: Remember when Will.i.am ripped off Daft Punk and got shut down?

UPDATE: Times of Malta

The band reacted to an accusation of plagiarism, with Party All The Time said to have the beginning of Man Cry.

They explained that this was not a case of plagiarism, in that the band’s manager had offered them a beat and it was a case of working together.

“It was a lack of finalising legalities before releasing the record, clearance was not done and that was what it was about.”

Check out Freeland’s original track “Mancry”:


Check out Black Eyed Peas’ “Party All The Time”:



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July 03, 2009

The Great Curators: Rikke Øxner of Roskilde... 'It Is Our Ambition – Our Duty – To Create an Outstanding Festival'...

Adam Shore


While many festivals play to genres, Denmark’s Roskilde proves it’s the best large-scale festival on the planet by simply booking the greatest artists in music. Last year’s line up could have been their peak: Radiohead, Neil Young, Slayer, My Bloody Valentine, Judas Priest, Jay-Z. At one point I met a volunteer who told me he had been to the festival every year since it started in 1971. I gave him a fast quiz: “Yeah, well who played in 1978?” He thought for a moment and his eyes lit up. “Bob Marley & The Wailers.” OK, you win. Roskilde has always been the best.

But it’s more than the bands that make Roskilde larger-than-life. It’s a non-profit festival, where earnings are funneled into the The Roskilde Festival Charity Society which has donated nearly $20 million dollars to organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and Support the War Victims in Iraq. And it’s run by an army of 25,000 volunteers doing every job imaginable. If you volunteer for a day, you get a free pass for the festival. Volunteering at Roskilde has become a rite of passage among Danish music fans and it’s not uncommon to see generations of families working together to support the music and the festival they love.

Last year 110,000 people attended Roskilde. Camping is included in the ticket price, and people start moving in a week before the music starts – which means tens of thousands of people live at the festival for 10 days. With it’s own daily newspaper and radio station, Roskilde is an entire world unto itself. The Daily Swarm sat down with the festival’s head booker Rikke Øxner right before the festival began this week.



photo of Rikke Øxner by Thomas Kjær



The Daily Swarm: What was your history before Roskilde?

Rikke Øxner: My Roskilde in the audience was in 1984. I was only 19 and completely fell in love with the place and the atmosphere. With one single exception, I have been here every year since – although my role in the festival has changed quite a bit in the meantime.

Back in 1984 I had just finished high school. A few years later, as a part of my university studies in mass communication and culture, I was working on study on youth and music culture, and came in contact with the Venue Festival. They offered me an internship, which I accepted.

As it turned out, the chairman of the Venue Festival was Leif Skov, who was the director of the much larger Roskilde Festival. A week later he called me and offered me a a job as his assistant booker. I resisted, saying “why don’t you wait and see how I perform as an intern”. But his reply – typical for his sense of humour – was “No, you’re hired – unless off course, I catch you with your fingers in the till.”

So, in the spring of 1995 I started as an assistant booker, and when Leif Skov resigned in 2002, I became the head of booking.



What was your first experience at the festival?

My first memories are more about the feeling of being there than about the actual acts. Walking across the giant field of grass, all the tents, drinking cold beers in the sun. The extreme cornucopia of music I did not know, hadn’t even heard about – I felt completely exhilarated and blissful and remember getting the chills over and over. I remember lying at the camp site listening to Lou Reed doing his sound check, waiting to get in to the festival to hear his act, feeling completely happy.

Who were the first artists you remember confirming?

I remember booking a very young The Cardigans during my first year. That year I also assisted on the booking of Oasis – who, by the way, will be coming to Roskilde this year as well.

There’s a running commentary in the music media that we are running out of headliners – that there are fewer and fewer acts able to fill stadiums. Do you also see a dearth of headliners now or in the future?

I don’t really see a lack of headliners. This year we have Coldplay and Slipknot on our list of acts, not to mention Oasis, Faith No More and Pet Shop Boys. That’s not lack of headliners.

But, that said, it’s an important point that due to its size and nature, Roskilde Festival, I think, is a lot less sensitive than a lot of other festivals regarding headliners. It’s not imperative for us to have, say, two headliners every day; we don’t need a Neil Young every day. We do need major names, but even more so we need to catch the shooting stars while they’re shooting, and maybe even be part of their ascent. Our audience loves the fact that they had the chance to experience bands like Kings of Leon and Arctic Monkeys before they became as large as they are today. And they will also love for them to revisit, when they have grown into major headliners.

This year they will get the opportunity to experience White Lies and Deadmau5 – who knows, maybe they will be the ones written with the large types on our poster next time they’re here. To the Roskilde-audience it is more about having a full four-day-experience of quality music for every taste than just about headliners.

The festival happens in July. What month do you start booking acts?

We book more or less all year round. As soon as one month after the festival we start looking into potential acts for the year to come. Typically we’ll start out looking into the possibility of booking bands that couldn’t make it to the festival that just ended – maybe because they hadn’t made a release as planned. Also we take out or wish list and start looking at that as a start, not to mention wishes from our audience. They write us year-round, and we take their suggestions quite seriously.

You have some of the biggest artists in the world playing alongside also so many smaller bands from all over the world. Which of the smaller bands were you personally most excited to book, and give some suggestions of smaller bands you think festival-goers should not miss?

FUCKED UP: Canadian, uncompromising, hard core. He is so extreme on stage – Damian Abraham. “The Reverend” as he’s called. He’s so uncompromising.

ZIZEK CLUB: Rumour has it that one of the hottest club scenes in the world is in Buenos Aires. This year we have persuaded of them to pull up stakes to come to Roskilde to show us and share the best.

SHUGO TOKUMARU: A fantastic Japanese singer/songwriter, acoustic pop with folk tradition mixed with a Japanese sound. Most is handheld, lots of percussion, bells, rattles, and bare feet.

PAAVOHARJU: This is Finish Freak Folk! I have never heard it myself, but my co-bookers call it cosmic folk pop. They are known as complete and utter hippies, bordering on psychotic! I seriously hope to get a chance to see them myself.

Also: I hope I’ll get the opportunity (which can be hard due to lack of time during the festival) to explore some of the temporary New York-sound like: GANG GANG DANCE, THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART, and BLACK DICE.

How do you keep up with new music? What are the best and most reliable sources you use?

Most importantly: Don’t think you know it all yourself.

We all have a background, having sprout from a certain environment or grown up in a time or milieu with a certain genre or type of music. That will be an influence. So you need to build a solid network in every part of the music industry, every scene, every genre, and – maybe most importantly – the in all the young, enthused, sometimes even obscure little corners of it. Off course I also read magazines, browse the music alleys of the internet and other publications to get a hold of what is stirring.

Apart from that, we travel, year round, in order to see, listen and experience bands for ourselves. And very important: We go to SXSW in Austin, which is an invaluable source of inspiration.

The Danish krone is very strong right now. It’s making it so you aren’t selling as many tickets internationally as usual (your website explains you’re making a rare exception these year, selling single-day tickets, to make up for this). How does a global recession affect a non-profit festival in a generally economically stable Denmark?

The purchasing power of the Swedish and the Islandic people are heavily reduced at the moment, so ticket sales have been lower than normal in these countries. That’s a shame, because we very much value our Nordic neighbours among our guests. But I can’t say that it has affected us booking-wise. Actually my budget for this year is 12% higher than last year.

Our philosophy is that we need to maintain music as the centre of this festival, and it is our ambition – to me even our duty – to create an outstanding festival for our guests – financial crisis or not.


Does your job ever end? Do you get much of a chance to enjoy the music you’re presenting, or is it all work all the time?

No, my job never ends. I never really get to take part in the party that we have arranged. Fortunately my work is my passion and all my life, and I get to hear new music and see concerts all over all year round.

Have you had any great epiphanies, any great musical moments at the festival you’ll never forget?

SWANS, 1989: One afternoon I dropped by a stage by coincidence – and I was sucked inside the tent because of this specific, dark siren song. It was like being called down on a curse, that luckily still gets to me once in a while…

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, 1989: I had never heard of them, but a friend had recommended this German band. It was late night at “Arena Stage”, I was absolutely dead when I entered the tent, but with a stroke of magic I was set to another world. The band, the nightlight, the atmosphere, it all. I had it all!

PRIMUS, 1989: It had been raining heavily for days, everything was soaked, and the area in front of Orange stage was covered in mud. Suddenly a band turned everything upside/down. The singer, Les Clayton, was out of this world and gave us all hope.

BJÖRK, 1994: I saw this fantastic concert with a fantastic friend. Everything was no less than magnificent. Even though I was forefront inside the tent, I never realized the pushing and moshing – I was just a happy audience member back then, enjoying the music.


What do you think makes Roskilde stand out from the other great festivals in the world?

Roskilde Festival covers it all, it is broadly-based with music from all over the world, representing a wide range of genres. We are not only dependant on big headliners; the new, unknown and upcoming names are widely appreciated by our guests. Many of them prefer the upcoming headliners to the established ones. We have an extremely curious and open-minded audience; here you get to experience bands who have never played in Europe before – with an audience singing along.


Please check out the other interviews in The Daily Swarm’s Great Curators series
Fra Soler of Primavera Sound
Ashley Capps of Bonnaroo
Enric Palau of Sónar


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July 02, 2009

Best All Time Punk Logos? ... FAIL...

Andrew Flanagan

Combining the words “the greatest” in the same sentence as “punk”, as Yahoo did this morning, is generally a fool’s errand. Most basically: there’s no strict definition of what punk sounds like (to blast beat or not to blast beat?), where it came from (The Sonics? MC5? Death?), which bands are punk and which aren’t (Ramones? Napalm Death? Wavves?), and whether or not it’s dead. That is some nebulous shit.

Regardless, people like to parse and sequester the history of punk – whatever it may be and whichever flavor strikes their fancy – probably because they think it’s dangerous (nowadays it’s about as dangerous as Fairport Convention) and kinda cool (it is). So if you’re going to write about something as arguable as punk rock, at least do some research.

Further notes:

-Minor Threat did not start straight edge. They wrote a lyric about not getting drunk all the time.

-The Offspring’s logo is so ugly it doesn’t even work as a mudflap.

-The Sex Pistols were a boy band; constructed and packaged. Argue about The Offspring being punk all you want, but they started their band themselves.

I’ll summarize with this: where the fuck is the Crass logo?

(via Yahoo)


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July 02, 2009

Must See Videos: WhoMadeWho, Elvis Perkins, Bobby Evans...

Todd Roberts

by COURTNEY SMITH

Bobby Evans “Freak-A-Zoid Robotz”

Dangerous, beautiful women who are actually robots enjoy playing 80s arcade games. Didn’t you know?

WhoMadeWho “Keep Me In My Plane”

WhoMadeWho - Keep Me In My Plane from Leroy Hanghofer on Vimeo.

The process of breaking the fourth wall in film is often used to express a comedic aside (see: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Wayne’s World, Annie Hall) but this video uses the actual function of breaking the fourth wall as the comedic relief. In a sort of uncomfortable, Arrested Development sort of way. One of the best day if the life concept videos I’ve seen in ages.

*Elvis Perkins In Dearland – “Chains, Chains, Chains”

This is easily the best quality and highest concept video Elvis Perkins has done and it looks good on him. If the video’s mystic aesthetic seems familiar, that would be because Sean Peckanold (yes, he is related to the Fleet Foxes and directed all their videos) was at the helm.

Art of Fresh – Out Of This World

The Jetsons meets Fat Albert meets The Scooby Gang’s ride meets a reallllllly good song.

Gary Mirabelle “Touch”

There is a certain type of claymation video it is impossible to create without having Peter Gabriel pop to mind. This is one of those videos. That said, it is also a really riveting, metamorphosis of a video.


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