"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."
I'm not an economist, but I married one and read other economists' writings, and economists seem pretty sensitive to the role chance plays in making it.
If units of artistic goodness could be measured – in, say, "artils" (to play on "utils") – arts industries rather obviously don't optimize for "artils" but the bottom line, which, to be fair, typically bears some relationship to the "artils" involved, but which understandably can't consider "artils" in isolation. Search costs aren't zero, and are subject to diminishing returns. Talent can be both discovered and overlooked by dumb luck. A crowded world holds so much achievement that passing up several "best if only you knew" would still leave plenty of high achievers who'll likely work well enough. Be talented, work hard, get lucky: economists seem down with the fact that "making it" takes all three.
Evo-bio nerds point out that evolution is a satisficer, not an optimizer. And, while plenty of economic problems are constrained (sometimes *very* constrained) optimization, satisficing isn't economically irrational. The market can be a satisficer, too.
The guy who coined the term "meritocracy" used it to describe an omniscient central bureaucracy, not the result of market forces and widespread opportunity. Even if market forces combined with widespread opportunity is the best approximation of meritocracy we bald apes can manage in our time here on earth, it's likely a rough approximation. Tight approximation seems like it would be inefficient. I dislike the common usage of "meritocracy" that lets prosperity theology masquerade as economics.
Haha, not everyone does, sometimes for understandable reasons, and not everyone wants them to be, including non-economists wanting to use "because economics" to justify their opinions. In popular discourse "thinking like an economist" *can* be used as cover to treat people less like people, despite economics being a social science and economists themselves being people. Economists are sometimes complicit in this cover, but less often than supposed – and, I think, (at least by some) desired.
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.
No problem with the short reply, as you have an important book to write! I do appreciate the acknowledgement, though, as I was hoping it was not too "boomer dad talking about the old days" to be interesting.
OK, you give me this empty text box on the Internet, and I'm going to use it.
Can I turn this into "Dear BDM"? I have a friend and we used to do our little art things, coding, design, tiny games. But as the years went by my friend stopped improving and just did the same thing over and over. I didn't mind it much because it was still fun and I can't draw a circle to save my life. Then he stopped doing anything and started this "I'm buying X, this is how I'm going to start making X-art". I'm in a "you don't need that" camp so I was telling him tools won't "save" him, "you already have all you need".
Fast forward last 2 years and he's completely hooked on that gen-LLM juice. He would barrage many of us with the joyless, content-less and effort-less images and I got very harsh with him, "what's the point, this is nothing, you didn't do shit", etc, etc. He stopped. But really, he stopped sending them to me. Last week I leaned that he "made an album" (as in music album, he can't make a whistle whistle but always dreamed about being musician)
I was thinking entire week if I should just tell him to stop embarrassing himself, or maybe I should just ignore it, I'm very opinionated and it's not easy for me to "let people enjoy things" and maybe I'm overdoing it and my reaction is so harsh because it's someone close to me who fell into idea man machine's cogs.
putting on my newly acquired "Dear BDM" hat—I think if your friend stopped sending this stuff to you, he knows exactly what you think and he got the message when you chewed him out before. Now he sends it to other people who are at least unable to tell him to his face that they don't like or respect it. (Possibly even one sicko who likes it, who knows.)
So… I think you should just not say anything even though it kind of bothers you. "I heard from our mutual friends that you continue to waste your time on meaningless bullshit" is a little too aggro for anything that is not an actual life ruining thing like addiction. You got your message across and he's ignoring you but also acknowledging it. (If he sends you the album, though, that's a different story. Let him have it with both barrels, etc.…)
You're absolutely right, it would be a little psycho to scold him if he purposefully didn't tell me. He's a good friend, I'm not going to bully him (too much) over it and only face to face.
I think it is American, or at least used to be more American until the world became more homogenized. Because we don’t believe in class, everyone thinks they can “make it,” whereas in a more traditional culture, you would never have any thought of making it, and you would accept your station in society, whatever that might be. This is a double edged sword, the ability to better your life is a good thing, but it also creates immense amounts of pressure and anxiety on the individual. If you don’t make it, it’s your fault, whereas in a more traditional society, making it is out of your hands. We are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who are just waiting for our big break.
one of the lines from movies I think of often (I feel like we all have some sort of personal canon of one liners) is the bit in Whisper of the Heart where the girl decides to focus on writing her novel instead of studying for her exams and her dad tells her that he supports that but also says something like, "you can leave the road everybody follows, but remember, then you have no one to blame but yourself." Anyway, thought of this reading your comment…
the archives aren't open today so my plans are mostly to do laundry and avoid walking myself into exhaustion (yesterday was "i have walked myself into exhaustion" lol)
I really really appreciate this post! I've been wrestling with it a lot recently thinking about cultural auteurs (word choice?) who moved the dial and were also commercially successful/viable, and I think your identification of the paradox is a more eloquent phrasing of where I landed ("I guess it just depends...")
yeah I'm always interested in artists who have genuinely pop ambitions but are also serious about their art. I feel like looking backward you can often figure out how things came together for one person or didn't for another, but it's usually a combination of inner drive and luck and the thing about luck is… it's unreliable
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
I think a lot of it comes down to “are art objects marketed/made available/promoted in a real way in the first place” which usually comes down whether the thing in question has perceived “marketability” or is otherwise disseminated in a marketable way. If brilliant art ends up being “proved” brilliant by the market, I think that’s mostly correlation not causation, it’s the fact of its being out there and seen and talked-about, rather than the market giving any kind of meaningful, meritocratic approval.
and then like, Parallelograms was presumably promoted the first time and not everybody “got” it anyway—so even promotion is no guarantee! but maybe it also wasn’t promoted in a way that encouraged people towards it. or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, who knows
"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."
I'm not an economist, but I married one and read other economists' writings, and economists seem pretty sensitive to the role chance plays in making it.
If units of artistic goodness could be measured – in, say, "artils" (to play on "utils") – arts industries rather obviously don't optimize for "artils" but the bottom line, which, to be fair, typically bears some relationship to the "artils" involved, but which understandably can't consider "artils" in isolation. Search costs aren't zero, and are subject to diminishing returns. Talent can be both discovered and overlooked by dumb luck. A crowded world holds so much achievement that passing up several "best if only you knew" would still leave plenty of high achievers who'll likely work well enough. Be talented, work hard, get lucky: economists seem down with the fact that "making it" takes all three.
Evo-bio nerds point out that evolution is a satisficer, not an optimizer. And, while plenty of economic problems are constrained (sometimes *very* constrained) optimization, satisficing isn't economically irrational. The market can be a satisficer, too.
The guy who coined the term "meritocracy" used it to describe an omniscient central bureaucracy, not the result of market forces and widespread opportunity. Even if market forces combined with widespread opportunity is the best approximation of meritocracy we bald apes can manage in our time here on earth, it's likely a rough approximation. Tight approximation seems like it would be inefficient. I dislike the common usage of "meritocracy" that lets prosperity theology masquerade as economics.
I agree with this! I suppose I should have said people (except for economists)… I do believe economists are people.
Haha, not everyone does, sometimes for understandable reasons, and not everyone wants them to be, including non-economists wanting to use "because economics" to justify their opinions. In popular discourse "thinking like an economist" *can* be used as cover to treat people less like people, despite economics being a social science and economists themselves being people. Economists are sometimes complicit in this cover, but less often than supposed – and, I think, (at least by some) desired.
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.
I am going to have to read this book, damn. (Sorry this reply is so short but I do enjoy reading these… I always learn something!)
No problem with the short reply, as you have an important book to write! I do appreciate the acknowledgement, though, as I was hoping it was not too "boomer dad talking about the old days" to be interesting.
OK, you give me this empty text box on the Internet, and I'm going to use it.
Can I turn this into "Dear BDM"? I have a friend and we used to do our little art things, coding, design, tiny games. But as the years went by my friend stopped improving and just did the same thing over and over. I didn't mind it much because it was still fun and I can't draw a circle to save my life. Then he stopped doing anything and started this "I'm buying X, this is how I'm going to start making X-art". I'm in a "you don't need that" camp so I was telling him tools won't "save" him, "you already have all you need".
Fast forward last 2 years and he's completely hooked on that gen-LLM juice. He would barrage many of us with the joyless, content-less and effort-less images and I got very harsh with him, "what's the point, this is nothing, you didn't do shit", etc, etc. He stopped. But really, he stopped sending them to me. Last week I leaned that he "made an album" (as in music album, he can't make a whistle whistle but always dreamed about being musician)
I was thinking entire week if I should just tell him to stop embarrassing himself, or maybe I should just ignore it, I'm very opinionated and it's not easy for me to "let people enjoy things" and maybe I'm overdoing it and my reaction is so harsh because it's someone close to me who fell into idea man machine's cogs.
WWBDMD?
putting on my newly acquired "Dear BDM" hat—I think if your friend stopped sending this stuff to you, he knows exactly what you think and he got the message when you chewed him out before. Now he sends it to other people who are at least unable to tell him to his face that they don't like or respect it. (Possibly even one sicko who likes it, who knows.)
So… I think you should just not say anything even though it kind of bothers you. "I heard from our mutual friends that you continue to waste your time on meaningless bullshit" is a little too aggro for anything that is not an actual life ruining thing like addiction. You got your message across and he's ignoring you but also acknowledging it. (If he sends you the album, though, that's a different story. Let him have it with both barrels, etc.…)
See? The hat fits!
You're absolutely right, it would be a little psycho to scold him if he purposefully didn't tell me. He's a good friend, I'm not going to bully him (too much) over it and only face to face.
I think it is American, or at least used to be more American until the world became more homogenized. Because we don’t believe in class, everyone thinks they can “make it,” whereas in a more traditional culture, you would never have any thought of making it, and you would accept your station in society, whatever that might be. This is a double edged sword, the ability to better your life is a good thing, but it also creates immense amounts of pressure and anxiety on the individual. If you don’t make it, it’s your fault, whereas in a more traditional society, making it is out of your hands. We are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who are just waiting for our big break.
one of the lines from movies I think of often (I feel like we all have some sort of personal canon of one liners) is the bit in Whisper of the Heart where the girl decides to focus on writing her novel instead of studying for her exams and her dad tells her that he supports that but also says something like, "you can leave the road everybody follows, but remember, then you have no one to blame but yourself." Anyway, thought of this reading your comment…
Never seen that movie! Guess I should watch it
parallelograms is one of my favorite albums ever. there are days where i listen to ‘Delicious’ on repeat about 30 or 40 times in a row.
maybe I will listen to it this morning and vibe a bit…
it gives me a very ‘misty morning in the mountains’ vibe
which is to say… time2vibe
the archives aren't open today so my plans are mostly to do laundry and avoid walking myself into exhaustion (yesterday was "i have walked myself into exhaustion" lol)
I really really appreciate this post! I've been wrestling with it a lot recently thinking about cultural auteurs (word choice?) who moved the dial and were also commercially successful/viable, and I think your identification of the paradox is a more eloquent phrasing of where I landed ("I guess it just depends...")
yeah I'm always interested in artists who have genuinely pop ambitions but are also serious about their art. I feel like looking backward you can often figure out how things came together for one person or didn't for another, but it's usually a combination of inner drive and luck and the thing about luck is… it's unreliable
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
Yes “Paper Mountain Man” deserves to be one of the all time diss tracks like “Positively 4th Street” lol
I think a lot of it comes down to “are art objects marketed/made available/promoted in a real way in the first place” which usually comes down whether the thing in question has perceived “marketability” or is otherwise disseminated in a marketable way. If brilliant art ends up being “proved” brilliant by the market, I think that’s mostly correlation not causation, it’s the fact of its being out there and seen and talked-about, rather than the market giving any kind of meaningful, meritocratic approval.
and then like, Parallelograms was presumably promoted the first time and not everybody “got” it anyway—so even promotion is no guarantee! but maybe it also wasn’t promoted in a way that encouraged people towards it. or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, who knows
I'm not sure Parallelograms DID get promoted in the first place honestly. I do think its survival as a cult favorite is genuinely kind of amazing.
“I am not sure there is a takeaway, honestly.” My takeaway is to go listen to Parallelograms. Never heard of it!
It’s a really beautiful album!