$ELL YOUR MUSIC WITH PROSE!

BY OLIVER HALL, ILLUSTRATIONS BY T. SHEPPARD SHANKS


In the 1990s, the manufacturing cost of a compact disc was a little over a dime. It had cost four times as much to manufacture a vinyl album, meaning that the industry-backed switch from vinyl to CD slashed operating costs for record labels large enough to own the means of production. At the same time the major labels cut their own costs, they doubled and then tripled the wholesale price they charged record stores for CDs. A 1995 article in the New York Times reported a “2,000 percent markup” between the pressing of Rod Stewart’s latest CD in WEA’s Pennsylvania plant and its sale to retailers at $10.72 to $11.20 per unit. Only in America!

As the record industry continued to increase its profit margin, internet file-sharing provided a compensatory adjustment in the consumer’s favor. Capitol Records set the list price of Garth Brooks’s Scarecrow (2001) at $18.98; a competing distributor, the internet, valued it at $0 (“the Nice Price”). This development did not, as you might have expected, immediately disemploy all persons in the music-marketing business. However, it has somewhat amplified the pitch of despair that is the keynote of sales text.

We know how hard it can be to break into the fast-paced world of music marketing and master its strange language, so we have created this helpful guide to selling your new music—with prose!


JOBS ON THE LINE

Anxious to keep Steely Dan on ABC Records, label president Steve Diener wrote liner notes to Aja (1977) that were addressed as much to the band itself as to the prospective consumer: “Steely Dan is at another level; a very special place both personally and professionally that is again demonstrated by the recorded music that is not far from these words which they have asked me to write.” (Diener’s remarks uncomfortably followed Becker and Fagen’s own sleeve notes, attributed to fictitious journalist “Michael Phalen,” who accused the band of unspeakable atrocities; in later years, it came out that one of Phalen’s encounters with the Dan had ended with the paramedics coming “to stop the bleeding.”) At the time, Diener told Cameron Crowe, writing for Rolling Stone, “I hope they stay with the label. I have a lot of respect for these guys. I really mean that… They are a very special breed of cat, and that includes their producer, Gary Katz.” Ring-a-ding-ding, baby, I’m hip! MCA acquired ABC (and Steely Dan) in the first months of 1979 and soon shut the company down, leaving Diener president of his dick.

There has always been a subliminal note of despair in music sales text: It is the prose style of jobs on the line. You will want to use its rhetoric in your own writing, to make it appear that you have a job. Make your claims with breathless urgency, as if you are calling the hospital to be admitted for immediate quadruple-bypass surgery. This “long-awaited,” “highly anticipated” debut of a “buzzed-about” band is dropping to “worldwide critical acclaim”—“YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS IT!” The music should sound like everything the audience likes yet lay waste to the conventions of its own and other genres. Say it “breaks free from the mold of pop” and is “devoid of [genre] clichés or pop tendencies that most bands use as writing crutches.” If we are talking about a band of old people who once approached something like success, then the new album is the best since their “breakthrough” release, though it must not seem to be only as good as the old favorite. No one wants to hear that history’s shit heap just became one album richer. The band returns the same as before, but different, “with even more life and energy this time around,” “exploring new frontiers,” “stepping outside of their comfort zone to create the next chapter of the band’s growing musical evolution.”


NAMEDROPPING

The following excerpt from Columbia Records publicist Billy James’s sales pitch, “Open Letter to a Friend,” which appeared on the back cover of the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man (1965), illustrates another useful device. “The rock-and-roll musicians—Major Lance, Little Richard, teen-types Sonny and Cher and a few others—made it into Ciro’s in Hollywood when the Byrds were there, and they dug that something new was happening. And Jackie DeShannon dug the way they did her tunes; Mary Travers looked beautiful dancing to ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’… Then there were Lloyd Thaxton, Mitch Reid… a great-looking chick named Mary Hughes and, of course, the ‘in’ crowd’s method-actor comer, Michael Pollard.”

It is rare to find a press release that does not use this ancient technique, though today the names are more likely to belong to Hall of Fame catalog artists than celebrities of the moment. New music on sale almost always “nods to” “the likes of” the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Sex Pistols, Prince, Beethoven, Jesus Christ, or whomever is demographically appropriate. Records, like the dollar itself, are nearly worthless, and so are reputations. Everything must go! Throw as many big-league names as you can into your sales pitch. Take the press release for Lisa Hilton’s Nuance, a police auction of famous names, many of them belonging to the sainted dead (Séance might have been a better title): Ira Gershwin, Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver, Dave Brubeck, Brad Mehldau, Thelonious Monk, Quincy Jones, and Stan Getz all shone a little of their glory on this record, and why not? They and their estates have glory to burn. Maybe if you listen hard enough with a good pair of headphones, you can even hear Buddy Bolden himself blowing along on the choruses.

The writer of this release also helpfully illustrates a related device, pejorative name-dropping. He or she blames the failure of Hilton’s debut, Seduction, to sell more than, in Hilton’s words, “like 2 copies,” on terrestrial radio, which “loomed large at that time, when Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey ruled.” It had some good years on the streets—even made lieutenant—but now this bullet-torn argument, the argument from cultural disenfranchisement, first hopefully marshaled in favor of punk, metal, and hip-hop acts that styled themselves revolutionaries, has retired to Malibu, where it sells smooth jazz at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price ($13.98).


60s 70s 80s 90s

Conceive of decades not as arbitrarily delimited historical periods but as shorthand for pop styles, so that decades themselves become musical genres, or better yet mere adjectives (as in “totally 80s”). As today’s documentary filmmaker knows to set stock footage of Vietnam War protests to the kind of wah-ed out fake-Hendrix leads Guitar Center employees sell by the yard, so today’s PR writer knows to set his or her familiar libretto to notes that resonate deep in the reader’s idealized, subjective past. Put the buyer where you want him, stranded in this vast territory of myth and feeling where the individual ego finds itself defenseless, ashamed, naked, and invisible. As he cowers in terror and regresses to infancy, you pitch him a record album that feels like “a summer breeze,” “the warmth of a hand on your back,” “the lights of a little house up ahead,” a bubble bath, and a blowjob.

Don’t pitch to the buyer’s taste. Appeal to his or her memories: Conjure those golden hours, when the world still seemed new, before the feds confiscated grandpa’s racist pamphlets and burned down his testicles. Extrapolating from this season’s press releases, the pop consumer’s ideal 2010 record sounds like Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Love, Neil Young, the Replacements, the Fall, Orange Juice, the Smiths, the Cure, and the Byrds “filtered through contemporary favorites Grizzly Bear.” This last move is crucial. You must, however grudgingly, pay the ineluctable present moment its due, lest the cash- and credit-poor shopper salve his or her nostalgia with oldies radio instead of your certified grade-A new product. Try these: Your album “feels both intimately familiar and astonishingly new,” or “sounds at once familiar and exciting,” or “traffics [illegally?] in a kind of nostalgia that’s always in style.”


EMOTIONS AND THE CATACHRESTIC PITCH

According to a recent press release about a debut album that “has sunshine seeping through every note,” the members of the band that made it “evoke a grand sense of nostalgia with their heartfelt melancholy.” These guys don’t just hope to take your money to make you feel sad, they really feel like shit about it! Hey, can they crash at your place after the show? Believe it or not, there are millions of young men and women eager to throw what funds they can scrounge, sponge, or sp’ange at the nearest person with a ratty sweater and a reedy plaint, but you first have to convince them that your singer is a total emotional basket case. Generally this is because a) the singer is so pure in heart but b) the world is so fucked-up.

One thing you will notice about the emotional sales pitch is that it tends to express itself in mixed metaphors. Do not ascribe this to carelessness on the writer’s part: The emotional pitchman knows by instinct that a series of unlike images cascading before the mind’s eye, dissolving one into another with terrifying, uncontrollable rapidity, mimics the mental state of religious ecstasy, as well as that of suicidal depression. As the pitchman spiels, Lucy’s kaleidoscope eyes spin faster and faster until they turn into bottomless vortices that bore holes through hell: sale!

The press release for Damien Jurado’s new album starts out by comparing Jurado’s music to his old house “down the street,” only now with an “exhilarating” new coat of paint that “makes the whole neighborhood shine.” Though the musicians in his band must be tired after getting up early to ride the bus to his shit neighborhood, putting a fresh coat on his house, and huffing all that exhilarating paint, they prove a solid bunch of bros since next they one-up our Lord and “create a sky for the songs to fly in.” Meanwhile, Jurado is a volcano (in the old house down the street? RUN!!!) spewing projectiles far more terrible than the ash of Eyjafjallajökull or the lava of Vesuvius, “words… full of hope” (RUN!!!). These words are so full of hope that the volcano undergoes a psychotic break, splitting into “two halves of himself” that have a dialogue in song about wanting to know what it is like to float. The producer then “ferries Jurado across the river, where the metamorphosis occurs” (which one?), “then ferries him back,” where the ferryman produces a lens through which “we see Jurado not as a folk singer, but as a mystic.”

After I finished reading this release, I spent four days and nights “relaxing” at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.


ADJECTIVES

Most of the adjectives used to describe music are devoid of meaning, so they can be used interchangeably and without fear of internal or external contradiction. Usage laws are remarkably progressive at both state and federal levels in the USA, except in Delaware and Texas, where solecism is a crime punishable by hanging. Here is a short list of adjectives to get you started.

Acclaimed, angular, art-punk, awesome, Beach Boys, beautiful, brilliant, brittle, buzzed-about, buzzsaw, catchy, caustic, C86, celebratory, chugging, chunky, complex, contemplative, dark, deep, dense, eclectic, edgy, electric, electronic, emotionally charged, engaging, ethereal, evocative, explosive, expressive, exuberant, familiar, feathery, fierce, fractured, frenetic, friendly, funky, genre-busting, gorgeous, groundbreaking, gritty, hard, hard-hitting, haunting, heartfelt, heavenly, hip-shaking, honest, hook-laden, howling, impressionistic, indie-tronica, infectious, insane, intense, introspective, joyous, knotty, laid-back, lazy, legendary, lo-fi, luminous, lush, luxurious, melodic, mind-bending, moody, Morrissey-esque, off-kilter, organic, passionate, pensive, perfect, personal, playful, poignant, powerful, provocative, psych-electro-folk, psych-pop, pure, quirky, radiant, raw, refined, rich, rollicking, rough-hewn, screeching, seminal, shimmering, sinuous, snappy, soft, soothing, soulful, sparse, stirring, stripped-down, sultry, summery, swaggering, taut, tense, thundering, tight, timeless, tortured, trademark, twee, twisted, upbeat, usufructuary, visceral, warm, wistful, wrenching.


(Vice exclusive: Independent research by the guest editor of this issue has discovered a new adjective developed by market-research laboratories to promote Health’s latest release. The PR industry’s secret weapon this year is:

“BRANK”

(For example, you might say: “Lil Wyte’s ‘Leanin’ off Dat Yurple’ is set apart from the pack by angular rhythms, shimmering tones, and unabashedly brank hooks.”)