this little piggy went to market
our friends tell us stories in order to get on with it
Let’s imagine that you are an aspiring artist or writer. You work really hard on something. You feel proud of what you made. But it fails to find an audience. It just kind of disappears. What will your friends tell you? Maybe something like: well, look, what you made was challenging and good, and that means people don’t appreciate it because they just want slop.
You take this encouragement to heart and you go to work on your next thing. This one’s a hit! You are initially quite happy, but become aware that a small number of your peers are trash talking you as a “slop producer.” What will your friends tell you? Probably: look, some people just don’t have what it takes. They know they don’t succeed because they’re just not very good.
Which version of your friends do you trust?1
Some of us will probably trust both versions of our friends without thinking about it, the same way we accept it when they tell us all our exes are garbage fires and all the people who got the job instead of us are idiots.2 Sometimes these statements are actually true, but in general, we tacitly understand these conversations to be, not about truth, but about self-worth: just because you didn’t get the outcome you wanted here (lasting love, financial security and / or prestige) doesn’t mean you are a worthless person who deserves to starve to death alone. A smaller number of us, however, will dwell on this question at length until we go insane.3
I think of this combination as an American tic, though probably it isn’t (or if it is, it’s still spread somewhat throughout the world thanks to American soft power). That is, there’s a basic American belief in the sorting power of the market, and there’s a basic American belief in being a maverick, sticking to your guns, and striking out on your own.4 And these are not mutually exclusive, really. It is quite possible to believe both of them without contradicting yourself. But you can see the tension.
I’ve been thinking about this kind of story recently because I picked up Linda Perhacs’s album Parallelograms. The story of Parallelograms is basically that nobody got it on its release in 1970 and Perhacs did not make another album. Over the years, it developed a cult following, such that Perhacs (now in her eighties) has even put out some new music. Understandably, the promotional sticker that came with my copy stressed this underdog success story: look at Perhacs, who was this genius who was also a dental hygienist because nobody got her… until you (implied).
And it’s a great album; that’s why I bought it.
It’s also still super niche, to be clear. It occupies the same cultural level as Connie Converse or Sibylle Baier. But you can see how the story around the album is sort of having it both ways—you know it’s a great album because of market rejection (they didn’t get it!!) but you also know it’s a great album because of market acceptance.
This post has sat in my drafts for a while because I kept hitting this point and I think… so what’s the takeaway here. I am not sure there is a takeaway, honestly. You should probably either believe both versions of your friends (that is, you should care about the intent but not the message) or neither. In a basic way I don’t think people ever avoid believing in the sorting power of the market. It is too terrible to think some element of this is arbitrary, so we don’t. Instead we’re just too good to succeed… until we’re too brilliant to fail.
What makes this question trickier than it looks is that while these statements are, let’s say, in tension with one another, they are not mutually incompatible. It is possible to believe both of these things without contradicting yourself:
If something becomes popular, that’s because it’s good; if something fails to become popular, that’s because it’s missing something.
If something fails to become popular, that’s because it’s good; if something becomes popular, that’s because it’s characterless.
They aren’t self contradictory because they aren’t actually about the category of “the popular” but rather opinions about how things get there. Since things can become popular in more than one way, you’re only talking out of both sides of your mouth if you say both of these statements about the same “something.”
See Molière, The Misanthrope.
One way in which these beliefs can be reconciled is by focusing one’s animus not on the market, or on the consumer, but on the mediating parties who bring your goods to the market. Which, for writers, means publishers. Thus, the people long for [you and your friends], but the elite keep giving them [somebody else and their twerpy friends].
For any worthwhile discussion of why a particular album in 1970 wasn't a hit, it's important to understand what was involved with having a hit in 1970. No internet, so that means that the only music you ever heard was either live, on the radio, in a movie, or from a record that you owned. From her Wikipedia bio, it appears that she was never a touring musician, and got her recording contract because she cleaned the teeth of a film composer. So no one was hearing her music live. Nor was her music used in a movie, despite the initial connection.
So that leaves the radio and records. Generally people didn't buy records unless they had already heard the band, or learned something about them that interested them. But she's not touring and she's not trying to meet music journalists who might champion her work. So people didn't have any reason to write about her.
This leaves radio, and frankly, for anyone who was trying to have a hit in 1970, radio was how you had a hit. At that point, there were two distinct channels for getting played on the radio - AM Top 40 or FM album rock. In 1970, both channels were very open-minded in terms of what they would play, because there had been a lot of hit songs that people had not seen coming in the late '60s. So in theory the radio stations were willing to play anything and see if audiences liked it or not.
However, this was complicated by the fact that jukeboxes were one of the best ways for the Mafia (very much a going concern at the time) to launder its ill-gotten gains. No one is going to count all those nickels after all. This meant that over the course of the '50s and '60s, many enterprising men of questionable backgrounds had started record companies and gotten involved in the music business in various ways. By the late '60s, the most reliable career path in the music business for someone who was comfortable breaking the law was to work as what was called a "promotion man".
The job of the promotion man looked legitimate - he was hired by the record companies to meet with radio djs and persuade them to play the records the record company wanted played. However, since radio djs were not generally well paid, and the record companies could make ridiculous amounts of money from a hit, the promotion men were largely engaged in bribing the djs, either by directly paying them or by entertaining them (drugs, prostitutes, etc.).
The djs were entertainers and weren't going to play a record just because a record company paid them to - they would take chances, but if the audience didn't respond to a record they wouldn't keep playing it. But given that they only had a set number of openings for new records, they were going to use those openings for records that the promo men were pushing, and not go looking for new music that they weren't being paid to listen to. So the promo men were basically a protection racket imposed on the record companies - if you had a record that you wanted to be a hit, you budgeted for the promo men, so that at least a few djs would play it for their audiences.
The book that laid all this out was "Hit Men" by Fredric Dannen, which was only published in 1990. Before that, when musicians complained about the record companies failing to promote their records, we tended to assume they were just whining, but Dannen made it clear that without a promotional budget, a record had virtually no chance of getting radio play.
So how does "Parallelograms" fit into this? The record was released on Kapp Records, which Wikipedia tells me was a subsidiary of MCA that released movie soundtracks. This makes sense, given that Linda Perhac was signed by a film composer. But movie soundtracks were one of the main forms of music that didn't rely on radio airplay for getting an audience. People bought them because they heard them in movies. (The true music of the '60s was "The Sound of Music" soundtrack, which people other than teenagers bought.) There may have been bribes involved in getting a song into a movie, but that happened before Kapp released the album. So it probably never occurred to anyone at Kapp that they ought to hire a promo man to get it played on the radio.
The way I look at records like "Parallelograms" is not that they were failures, but that they are products of a record industry boom that was so extravagant that they were willing to record the songs of someone who was very creative, but (quite sensibly) unwilling to overturn her life completely to have (the very small chance of) a professional career in music. It's also great that there have been music fans who have spent the time and money to find these gems in second-hand record stores. The ultimate lesson here is to respect all of the people doing the work of making the work available to you. Distribution and curation of media is a job, one that a lot of people do for love, but it still deserves respect.
In terms of evaluating your own work, it's good to have feedback from people who have no reason to sugarcoat their views, and who will not necessarily be your friends. A film composer that you meet through your day job is a pretty good sounding board for a musician. Hopefully Linda Perhac appreciated that positive feedback enough to deal with whatever disappointment she felt about not reaching a wider audience by engaging in a corrupt music industry.
Was very stoked to see this album cover in my inbox this morning. I feel like there are plenty of tracks on that record that have mass market appeal, so I’m still baffled by the hippies of 1970 who didn’t eat it up