Oh man, does this excite me.  And it’s so overdue!  Overdue?  Maybe it’s perfectly timed.  He’s also featured in this film.  And in a “to be posted” episode of the amazing “Soul” series.  Those quotes!  “On your way to wonderful, you’re gonna have to pass through all right.”  “I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder.”

Bill Withers is one of those weird dudes who’s written legendary, damn-near standard tunes (”Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Just the Two of Us”) and who is also more or less completely unknown. He came up when he should have, he had a gift for songwriting and a great singing voice, he was good-looking.  But he wasn’t Isaac Hayes or James Brown or Curtis Mayfield.  He wore turtlenecks and sat on a stool to play.  And while Withers’ music was undeniably funky, it was also undeniably folky.  And label executives don’t like to be confused.  Hence the title of this post (Withers made toilets for airplanes, and wrote songs on the side, guys). A brief Withers-inspired auto-bio moment, after the jump.

I discovered Withers senior year in college (either ‘99 or ‘00), after having heard…don’t know if I should admit this, but here goes…”Lovely Day” used in one of those super-dancey, really popular Gap ads we all remember (There was another one with square-dancing to Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”).  I decided to seek out the song, not knowing anything about Withers.  This was pre-Internet for me, so I went with an equally-game-for-this-sort of thing good friend (Josh) to our local Massive Music Store (called CD Warehouse or something), and asked the guy in the walled-off info section in the middle of the store–one of 9 or 10 employees working there–to look up the title in this big, colorful, proprietary, touch-screen computer database thing.  Lean on Me: The Best of Bill Withers: import-only, like 20 bucks.  I split the cost with Josh, and off we went.

The rest, if you’re reading this, is “history,” as it were.  Whoa! “Grandma’s Hands” was the foundation for “No Diggity!”  But just that little sliver of guitar and the “mmm mmm!”  Wow, this was the guy who did “Lean on Me,” too!  I thought that was just a dateless, authorless church standard!  For two guys who loved making mixtapes, the lesser-known stuff was the real goldmine: “Kissing My Love,” “The Same Love that Made Me Laugh,” “Who Is He”: no one knew this stuff but us.

And so: we drove all around the south side of Indianapolis that weekend, stopping into our friends’ apartments and parents’ houses, popping in the disc, playing a few seconds of a song, and waiting for that moment of recognition, which always came–from our music geek friends, and their parents, too.  As we drove around that weekend, we memorized lyrics, picked personal favorites, skipped the lite-jazz middle of the comp.  And sang.  Loudly and fervently.  And, because of Withers’ unique songwriting tics and talents, lengthily and repetitively.  That hypnotic “I know I know I know” sequence in “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and (especially) the 18-second held-note (some sort of achievement, scroll down) on the second word of the “Lovely Day” refrain.  I was a smoker at the time, and could never hold my voice through the whole thing.  Josh could.

I was splitting time between Indy and Bloomington then, working in the former and living in the latter, and my drive back down to B-Town that Sunday afternoon was rife with anticipation.  I couldn’t wait to play “Lovely Day” for my best friend at the time (and still my best friend today, though she’s very far away).  It was her little television I’d seen the Gap ad, and her pen I used to write a note on my palm, and her shared excitement at the awesomeness of that song.  I called her on the way down, (on my massive Cellular One-sponsored cell phone) and told her I had a surprise.  When I pulled into the lot, she was standing out on her stoop, eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream.  As she walked up to my car, I rolled down all the windows and cranked “Lovely Day.”  She let out a loud squeal after hurriedly swallowing a bite of half-melted ice cream, and we both danced around in the parking lot for a few minutes.  Awwwww.

And Withers’ own story–his own Southern modesty and reluctance to put himself too far out there, the equal reluctance of label execs to take a chance on a hard-to-market genius, his subsequent cult status–is what allowed for me and my two best friends to feel the unfettered joy of “discovering” him a decade ago.  It’s one of those ironies of fandom, really: the less well-known an artist was in their own time, the greater the emotional impact they can have when you feel like they’re “yours,” even if just for a quick weekend.

Watch that trailer, and be prepared to get a little choked up at the end, when Withers reacts to Cornell West (yup) asking Withers what he’d like his legacy to be.  Man do I love Bill Withers.

Portia Sabin: I think labels are caught in a cultural bind: No one really wants to know what a label does; it’s like the sausage factory. Even long-established bands have a hard time talking about what labels do.
…
Mac McCaughan: I don’t know. I think that bands are into labels because bands — at least most of the ones we all work with — are music fans. Music fans, like baseball fans, also have a sense of history and an interest in the trajectory of things, not just the current moment. So, when we toured in New Zealand for the first time, I was as excited about meeting the people at Flying Nun as anything.
Chris Swanson: I agree. Music fans want as much information no matter how esoteric it may seem to a casual fan.
Portia Sabin: I agree that bands are into labels; I’m talking about people understanding what labels do. I think there’s a semi-willful lack of understanding.
Chris Swanson: Now that labels don’t run studios as much as they used to, it definitely is more abstract what our role is.

A great roundtable discussion about the future of indie labels–featuring our friend Chris Swanson, as well as Jagjaguwar’s Darius Van Arman–over at Carrie Brownstein’s Monitor Mix blog.  There’s tons more great stuff–including lots more from Merge’s McCaughan and Matador’s Gerard Cosloy–where this brief bit came from.

“Just the other day, I was working out at the gym and the song “One” by U2 came on the sound system. I am not a diehard U2 fan, and yet the song in that context triggered a deep, ineffable pleasure. Hearing a good song that everyone knows in a public setting recharges the spirit in a subtle but meaningful way.

Note that this is not just about me hearing a song I like. I hear a song I like every time I’m listening to a playlist on my iPod. This is about me hearing the song in the midst of other people, total strangers, who also know the song and are hearing it at the same time. What transpires is a communal, connective experience, even without any words passing between those having it.

This effect is the antithesis of a super-fan moment. The connection to the music is casual; it’s a sense of human connection here that provides the frisson of aliveness. Music in this way can offer a culturally constructed way of feeling at one with the world around us.

In a world in which musicians are encouraged, if not forced, to cater exclusively to their most passionate followers, likewise a world in which music fans listen exclusively to music most passionately loved, we lose this important but overlooked capacity to connect. The world shrinks. Something about being human is lost.”

Lots of interesting, crystal-clear ideas in this Fingertips post about the Web 2.0 model of catering to “super-fans” and leaving “casual” fans out of the equation.

Yet part of me wonders if the “old” model of widespread recognition to casual fans is dying not necessarily as a function of the 2.0 model, but because of the broader issue of smallish networked public spheres that inherently emerge from the Internet’s distributed structure. As opposed to the huge mass-mediated one that the top-down model created and which U2 had access to in the 80s and 90s, that is.

Maybe the 2.0 “mega-fan” equation is rising out of this situation? If it is (I think it is), then isn’t it more an issue of examining the soil instead of the wilting plants?

Britt Daniel, on the rawer new Spoon record, to Spinner (also).

2. “’Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,’ says Partridge, ‘and there were all sorts of bad color separations and misspellings and wrong track listings. It was really heartbreaking. They’ve actually fumbled the ball, radically, twice in recent years. During the whole Britpop thing, they didn’t promote our back catalog despite all these bands like Blur, Pulp, and countless others that, to me, were shamelessly attempting to sounds rather like us. Then it came around again a few years later with another wave of bands like Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Hot Hot Heat, Franz Ferdinand, Maxïmo Park, the Futureheads, and Bloc Party. Everybody would come up to me in the street and say, ‘Hey Andy, that band blah blah sounds just like what you did in 1979!’ So Virgin fumbled it yet again, when they should have been promoting our back catalog there.”

Andy Partridge, acerbic as ever, to Wolfgang’s Vault.  A lot of good stuff here for XTC fans. And the good news: XTC reissues soon!  Maybe! (Vinyl plz.)

3. “I have nothing against one person sending a track to another person saying, ‘Hey, check this track out; it’s great!’ That’s like a fan-to-fan thing. But these big websites like Pirate Bay are just another corporation. It’s the future Clear Channel. They have nothing to do with good. They are just evil. It’s the worst. They take our music and put it out for free before we have released it to our record label. There’s no fanfare, there’s nothing, it’s just like ‘Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence. Click Here.’ There’s no sense of jubilation.”

Erlend Øye’s take on filesharing from this Prefixmag interview with Kings of Convenience.

4. “‘From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,’ he wrote. ‘And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.’

John Philip Sousa, railing against those confounded music machines.  Part of a neat little Arstechnica piece about copyright holders’ fears of new technologies. (Further reading: Mark Rose)

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”

This is Scott Plagenhoef’s response (scroll down to the comments) to my response to Maura’s response to that study attempting to causally link downloading habits to other forms of consumption. One of the things I wasn’t really able to get into in the ridiculously quick conversation I had with Maura over IM that afternoon is exactly the quandary that Scott raises above. Which can be answered pretty briefly, actually: The reason that no one really discusses why “people stopped giving a shit about music altogether,” if this is in fact the case, is because the sorts of research that end up in newspapers and on tech blogs aren’t designed, from the beginning, to answer questions like this.

I mentioned this in an earlier post here, but it bears repeating. It’s not an issue of a study being “longitudinal” or not. Both quantitative and qualitative research are both perfectly equipped to conduct research over time. What is the issue at hand is the questions and problems that different forms of research are equipped to address. This particular survey, like others that get picked up by wire services, seeks to place the messy, chaotic activities involved with mundane music consumption within a framework that reifies the market categories that we all find so frustrating to begin with. These researchers, from what I can tell, are interested in making connections between downloading and buying habits, and are thus asserting that those are the most important considerations to take into account when talking about music in everyday life.

Which is fine, don’t get me wrong. There is plenty of utility in this sort of research, namely the capacity to accumulate data from nearly 2,000 respondents in a quick amount of time. But this sort of research also tells us little to nothing about the myriad other functions and roles of music in people’s everyday lives. It tells us nothing about the ways that people engage with music in situations that have nothing to do with market ideologies. We don’t hear the voices of individual Norwegian 15-year-olds, whose responses to questions about what they think of music’s purpose or utility might address Scott’s above question in illuminating ways. But also in ways that don’t necessarily travel well through venues like newsapers and tech blogs, which, even though online, are still burdened by the tyranny of word-count and simple, easy-to-follow facts. Quantitative research travels well because it’s easily translatable into dichotomies, because it can be made to hew closely to simple arguments about right and wrong.

This is a research topic I’m preparing to embark upon in the fall, and a topic I will summarily blog the fuck out of, either here or elsewhere. At this point, I’m inclined to disagree with Scott’s assertion, but only because it’s predicated on the assumption that there’s one particular way to “give a shit about music”, and that it’s also possible for everyone to suddenly stop doing that. Talking to people about what music does for them when it’s mediated through the Web and Internet will hopefully reveal new paradigms through which we can understand how people invest meaning in art that’s become infinitely accessible, replicable, and freshly sedimented in the most mundane of everyday activities (answering one’s phone, for instance).

Scott’s been thinking about this stuff for quite some time, and has even expounded upon his ideas in a very entertaining book. But let’s think about the data he’s using to support his claim:

“dwindling shelf space given to music at big boxes, the number of indie or chain record stores closing, the relative amount and variety of music on U.S. TV/MTV/radio vs a decade or two ago …plus the factual and quite striking shrinking record sales.”

If “not giving a shit about music” means “not buying or engaging with music in the ways we did in the 80s and 90s,” then yes, his point is fine. But it’s also tautological. We need to consider the vast amount of other ways that people are imagining their connections with music, occasioned by the new technologies through which they’re experiencing it. Once audiences have broken an imaginary tether to the traditional musical commodity, what new forms of relationships are going to emerge?

When all the song’s wonderfully subaqueous bottom-end drops away, and that booming, evangelical refrain emerges from a sea of glimmering electronics, it becomes clear that Lennox doesn’t simply want to peace out and and live off the land while making sure his ladies don’t get rained on. No, the first half of the “My Girls” refrain takes a step past, say, “Bro’s”: “I know myself, and I know what I want to do. I’m doing my best, and I want to know, is it good for you?” The first part of that refrain–”I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things, like they’re social stats”–changes this song into something very different, and something very current: self-obsessed protest in the midst of self-reflexive confession culture. Lennox wants to drop out, but he takes the unnecessary, extra step of pre-emptively silencing any armchair sociologists.*

That’s what makes this song personal and political. It’s how “My Girls” is protesting, in its own way, what, say, M.I.A. is celebrating: Neoliberal identity politics. “My Girls” is sweet and glittery, but like Person Pitch’s “Take Pills”, there’s an undercurrent of anxiety amidst the placidity. Like the star of his own zombie film, Lennox wants to escape the necessity of imagining himself in the same way that corporations do: as part of a social sphere set up like a market. His language betrays what he wants to escape–speaking statistically, in the same way that brands do.

Sure, “My Girls” is also, let’s be frank, this. But let’s not forget: If you’re Noah Lennox, your work and public image are thoroughly sedimented in the everyday practices of thousands of rabid fans, who feel like they know what’s best for you (man), and your career has been forged within a social realm which breeds a new understanding of intimacy between performers and audiences, and which thus breeds more opportunities to lose control of other non-material possessions (as in, your digital music, or your bandmate’s identity [that's not tape-trading, folks]).

I think Lennox is passionate and sincere on “My Girls”, and I don’t fault him one bit for looking over his shoulder when he tells us what he wants to do when he grows up. He’s just a simple guy, after all, who wants to try and make sure that what he’s sending out is the same as what gets picked up. A different kind of “controlling the message,” sure. But also, probably, a bit of paranoia.

*(All of which would be irritating as hell if the song didn’t also happen to be gorgeous. Like Screamadelica gorgeous–that kind of gorgeous. The kind of gorgeous that makes wilding-out indie kids bump into arms-folded dudes at concerts [the indie refrain of 2006, btw] because they’re dancing like hippies.)

“People choose what they pass along to other people. The content matters. If something is viral or memetic, it’s caught or coded into DNA, not chosen. “Viral” and “meme” are broadcast ideas, where the all-powerful content producer forces the weak consumers to enjoy and propagate something.”

and making crucial distinctions between modes of media engagement. As above, boldness is my addition:

“Companies exist in a world that’s all about money, but fans typically participate in gift economies. When companies try to “monetize” fans…they run into problems because fans don’t operate that way.”

Word. But then she compares F.O.E. to what was discussed at the conference for professional organization MIDEM, the disconnect becomes crystal clear:

“With a very few exceptions I heard very few people at MIDEM asking the question ‘how can we provide value to our audience?’ Instead I heard them asking ‘how can we get money from our audience?’”

Blerg. Baym tries to set them straight, though, with her own presentation, which she posts in full at her blog. Reblogging her own blurb below, because it’s so OTM:

Of course, the flip side to fans’ empowerment is what seems a lot like disempowerment to those who’ve been able to control music production, distribution and coverage. It’s natural to respond to this with fear. The threats are real. Those in industry may want to stop fans from: Criticizing them, spreading their music, using their name, bootlegging their shows, discussing their private lives, writing fantasies about them, spreading misinformation.

But getting control back is not an option. That genie is not going back in the bottle. The power struggle and the tensions it raises will continue for the foreseeable future.

The relationship between fans and artists is less and less like a business relationship in which artists and industry set the terms and audiences either buy or don’t, and more and more like a social relationship in which bands and fans have to negotiate terms together.

They are independent, they have their own goals, and they will do things you don’t like. They can also help you.