As I’ve gotten older, the appeal of being deliberately obscurist has worn off, or at least the “being obscure for obscurity’s sake”. All the really good little record stores in the area are dead and gone, so I have to go to Best Buy for my CD-purchasing (I could do Amazon online, but it depends). When my cousin worked for the local college radio station and I’d sit in on his show, it was hard to find much nice to say about a lot of the subpar indie stuff that was mandatory for playing. So to say that music is more “authentic” because it’s on a smaller label…sometimes that’s true, sometimes that’s a load of crap.

So it’s bad to complain without giving a solution, I realize that. Ergo, my answer: eliminate money, and there will be no need for big record labels. If we lived in a Star Trekkian, purely Marxist/Engelsist (I so made that word up) utopia where there was no need for capital, art like music could be distributed freely and without limitations. So there ya have it: let’s go commie and share music.

Realistically, though, corporations are never going to go away because the way our society works is too grounded in them; and unfortunately, this means the best way of getting your art out there is being with one of them. So art, namely music, is always going to gravitate there in order to be fiscally successful.

BUT

There is an argument to be made for defining “success” in different terms. If your only goal in the music you make is to touch souls, and you do that by playing for nothing at a coffee shop, you win. You did it. You are a success. If the soul purpose of writing the song was to get some bad breakup joo-joo off your chest, and you feel it leave you as you play the chords or whatever, you did it. You’re a success. I hope what I’m trying to say *here* makes sense…

Alright, I’m just going to stop now before I hurt myself (or someone else).

Lee: Maybe my working for a school district made me think it was actually more unbelievable that he would have been *fired in the first place* than his getting rehired later. I find (and have been witness to) a striking and depressing parallel between how teachers and aids get shuffled around from school to school instead of fired when something scandalous happens to when priests get caught in molestation fiascoes and get transferred to different churches.

So on a related vein, oh BOY could I say so much about Polanski and related celebrity criminals and such… But I’ll save it for the podcast discussion, since it’s all, no doubt, going to be discussed by y’all.

In a less ideological sense, though, there’s the perception that major labels are more interested in presentation than substance. Since the origins of the modern music industry, there have been those “cookie cutter” bands who succeed solely because they are marketed correctly. Major labels are often nothing more than image brokers, caring little for actual talent.

Also, there’s the financial aspect. When you buy from a major label, a much smaller percentage of the price is going to the actual artist, compared to the smallest labels (such as Righteous Babe, Rising Son, Philadelphonic) which are typically just the biggest name performer and half a dozen or so of their pet projects/closest friends. Also, larger labels tend to lock an artist down into a long-term contract, which can end up being hazardous to their creative health.

Then, swinging back towards the ideological side of things, there’s the contingent of people who *always* choose small, independent ventures over giant corporations, whether it’s for groceries, music, or whatever.

Mainly, I think the issue is that smaller labels offer greater creative freedom, because the larger the corporation, the more intricate the bureaucracy… and the more people’s opinions you have to take into account, the less authentic the music. Generally.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/WireStory?id=8684404&page=3

@Trevor: are people still pissed at Kanye? Perhaps, but he’s definitely fading back to his normal level of notoriety. Check out Google Trends:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=kanye+west&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0

Oh yeah, just watched Dollhouse. Two BSG actors in one episode, duking it out! :O But I can’t remember, did Alpha *die* at the end of the finale? I was sort of looking forward to more of him this season.

Oh, and Lee, this isn’t the first time cheerleaders walk around in their uniforms in a filmed depiction of high school. Given some of the other aspects of “everyday life” at their high school in the show that need to be disbelievingly suspended, I’d say that’s kind of small potatoes. BUT, I do see a GENDER argument against it, naturally. After all, the cheerleaders are always dressed as if they’re about to go to a game, but the football players don’t walk around in their pads and helmets every day. IIRC, a jersey may be worn every now and then by the guys, but it’s with some jeans and without pads or anything like that. I noticed *this* differentiation pretty early on. Ahem.

One thing I can recommend to my bibliophilic friends is “Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records”, which I saw reviewed on the Onion AV Club and decided to buy so that I can review it myself for the local newspaper I work for. One caveat; before this book, I wasn’t aware of there being such a thing as “Merge Records,” except maybe noticing now that their label is on the back of my Neutral Milk Hotel and Arcade Fire (and She & Him) CDs. I’d always felt at a disadvantage in my formative years of music snobbery (circa 1997-2000) because it seemed like all the cool independent labels either died before I was aware of them (Factory Records) or co-opted by “the Man” (A&M, IRS). Alas, one state border over there existed a hip, cool record label that didn’t implode and is in fact still going strong. Based solely on my NMH/AF/S&H portion of my record collection, I can say with some certainty that I will get something out of this (like a book review when I finish it, but also a greater sense of what an indie music label can do given sound management and an ability to ensure the loyalty of acts without screwing them rotten behind closed doors).

That’s all I got, really.