Pod Music for Pod People

Swell post on Joe Carducci’s blog about the roles of Lee Abrams and Jann Wenner in the homogenization of music culture transmissions during the 1970s.  There’s a (predictable) bias against the more synthetic end of music (admitting one’s fondness for same is metaphorically equated to admitting one is gay toward the end of the 2nd graf here), but the overall points are still interesting (feel free to sic what you need to):

Radio didn’t air the music so the first punk albums failed to sell and further adventurous signings ceased. SST released the equivalent of six or seven albums by Hüsker Dü or the Meat Puppets before they were signed by major labels; that’s insane. How many bands even last that long? Midway through their SST careers the bands managed to get the ears of some of the erstwhile music press and that got us requests for their albums from the major labels. They claimed to dig the bands but as realistic, responsible A&R men, they knew they had to listen with Lee Abrams’ ears and those were simply deaf to the era. Black Flag didn’t want to run a record label, they wanted to sign to a major label in 1978! The New York offices signed most of the first punk bands but the LA offices knew the LA bands from that one non-Abrams station, KROQ, and from local press and the early doc, The Decline of Western Civilization (1980). The LA majors also saw that by 1981 The Germs, X, Black Flag, The Adolescents, and others were selling enough records in the greater SoCal market that if you extrapolated out to the rest of the country they’d be going gold on their debut releases! But the major labels also knew that Lee Abrams was there to stop that all from being conceivable.

Abrams was quite clear about the destruction he’d accomplished by 1980. He’s apparently appeared on several Alan Parsons’ albums, the nadir of engineered musique concrte that these numbers guys created while tripping on drugs left behind by musicians — it was pod music for pod people, “lifestylers” in the parlance of SST, the perfect wallpaper for the leather couch. Failing to reach Art, the engineers reached only design. Any doubts Lee might’ve had about shit-canning an entire next generation of rock bands were certainly relieved by every new issue of Rolling Stone magazine in those years (1975 – 1991). Unlike Lee, Jan hasn’t come clean, though he is at least out-of-the-closet now, which probably calls for a revisionist book about the magazine and its effect, updating the Robert Sam Anson and Robert Draper books, neither of which really put the musical wood to Mr. Straight Arrow. And its what happened to music that matters. Rolling Stone followed up on later New Journalism through the seventies but it gave up on music.

As Abrams joined XM satellite radio in 2004 he was happy to acknowledge his crimes in the next context of all the miracles of Art he expected to achieve at XM. Unfortunately the hundreds of channels available allowed him just to subdivide the music further. The bastard-child rock and roll that he initially found as a kid on sixties radio humoring R&B, garage rock, C&W, surf, rod, bluebeat, Sinatra, jug band, blues, acid rock, movie themes, folk, et. al., was dissected, drawn-and-quartered, pulled-apart racially, sonically, stylistically, classwise and other ways and then these have been further subdivided at XM and its former competitor Sirius and then beamed down from satellite with the destructive force of those SDI directed energy weapons, only those were theoretical.

If you care to read more about any of this stuff, I wrote a piece a couple years ago for the music recommendation website Pitchfork on the Abrams-fueled rise of “classic rock,” and the dissipating materiality of (the Abrams-strangled medium of) satellite radio transmissions.  I really should update that thing when I get time; there’s a ton of different directions I could take it.