Cultured to be One

Stereogum points to the latest Stephin Merritt news from the Nonesuch site, reporting the news that another one of Merritt’s classic project-acts is being revived. It was just a few months ago that a new Future Bible Heroes track showed up on a comp somewhere, wasn’t it?

It may have been almost 10 years since The New Despair came out, but more importantly it’s been almost 7 years since we sat outside of some hardcore show in Michigan, desperately trying to convince an internet celebrity who shall remain nameless that this particular Merritt project was truly named The Gothic Archies and not “The Gothic Archives”. Though that innacurate moniker may flow more readily, it’s not nearly as high-concept as the actual band name (thus not really befitting of a Merritt project).

The idea behind The Gothic Archies at its inception was something like the arid, melancholic early-’80s goth aesthetic of Bauhaus, maybe the lithe, snakey leads of the First and Last and Always-era Sisters of Mercy combined with the clean-cut frou-frou bubblegum aesthetic of Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company, and of course the quintessential ’60s “not really a band” band, The Archies, who sang “Sugar, Sugar” and existed only in animated form on a Saturday Morning cartoon show (though we’ve heard stories of various bands touring clubs in those days as “The Archies” and playing their songs). They were rivaled in their “pre-fab”-ness only by Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution, a band made up of lip-synching chimpanzees who “performed” every week on Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, which if you don’t remember, was a takeoff on spy comedy Get Smart only all the characters were monkeys. Lancelot Link made the concept behind later Get Smart knock-offs like Inspector Gadget look reasonably sane by comparison, and this entire digression makes us wish we’d been pitching TV show ideas in the late-’60s, when apparently a steady paycheck from a major television studio was only a bong-rip away.

Anyway, if you’ve never heard The New Despair and are familiar only with Merritt’s work as/with The Magnetic Fields, you ought check it out, as it combines the disparate afforementioned sounds in a way that only Merritt could do it – of course, Get Lost, The Charm of the Highway Strip and 69 Love Songs are never far away from bubblegum nor misery, so think of Gothic Archies as intensifying both of those elements of what the Mag Fields do, the same way Future Bible Heroes, at least at their inception (the essential “I’m Lonely” EP) played up Merritt’s HI-NRG synth-pop aspirations (not without the help of Christopher Ewen, from the oft’ overlooked Boston-by-way-of-Detroit synth-pop act Figures on a Beach).

The three new Gothic Archies tracks available for listening on the Nonesuch site show a side of the project that’s shifted a little in the last decade, after all, the upcoming disc, entitled The Tragic Treasury: Songs from a Series of Unfortunate Events is meant to accompany the final Lemony Snicket book. Merritt is a longtime friend of Daniel Handler AKA Snicket, and the three new songs are definitely less bubblegum pop, more, uhm, bubblegum theatre(?) than The New Despair. Merritt did come out with that album of showtunes, so maybe it should be expected that he’s taking the Gothic Archie’s high-drama and applying it to a real dramatic, darkly cartoonish work. We’ll see how the album stands on its own.

In other Merritt news, for those who have missed it, he’s releasing a track on the upcoming Plague Songs, a compilation on 4AD featuring tracks by Stephin Merritt AND Brian Eno (collaborating with Robert Wyatt, one time drummer of the freakin’ Soft Machine!) , as well as 8 other artists, with each track intended to reflect one of the 10 plagues from the book of Exodus. We’re not fucking around here, folks, Eno, Robert Wyatt, and Merritt on the same compilation.

If the Gothic Archies album doesn’t do it for us, whatever shows up on Plague Songs might very well be the one to get us crying like a baby, a’la the last time we saw The Magnetic Fields perform live (we received no comment on our bout of Merritt-induced neuraesthenia from Meg White, who we were later told was sitting next to us – we too entranced by Merritt to notice, which is how it should be). The track is gong to be entitled “The Meaning of Lice”. In classic Merritt style, the witty wordplay just doesn’t quit, and it’s as caustic as Morrissey’s in his heyday.

The last truly cool thing the world had to offer with “underground” intentionally written into its title was probably Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Even that name is just an approximate English translation of the Russian that happened to win out as the most oft’ used anglo-moniker for the 1864 novel. Even if you’re a huge fan of, say, Tony Hawk’s Underground, it’s intuitive enough that once something is self-consciously labeled “underground” as a marketing tool, any “underground appeal” it may have once had is a thing of the past. The “YouTube Underground” promotion might ostensibly exist to promote four lucky bands, but what it actually signifies is a shift away from “underground-ness,” and not just because of the corporate sponsorship from Cingular. “YouTube Underground” is a big leap off of the Long Tail.

“The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson of Wired’s wonder-theory that you can’t escape from if you’re talking about anything related to internet media (and that he’s recently been able to turn into a book, i wonder how often books about economics get optioned to be movies?), goes as follows, according to Wikipedia

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include the online retailer Amazon.com and the online video rental service Netflix. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market. successfully.

In terms of Amazon and Netflix, The Long Tail lends exposure and availability to those obscure books, movies, CDs, etc., that wouldn’t make it onto the shelf in brick-and-mortar stores due to the cost of keeping it on the shelf when there’s no reasonable belief that someone looking for a particularly obscure item will actually come into a store. In short, it’s worthwhile for Amazon to have that copy of Kurosawa’s Ikiru on DVD or Shogun Kunitoki’s Tasankokaiku CD available, whereas it probably wouldn’t be for your average chain store in Middle-of-Nowhere, USA. In terms of YouTube, though, let’s think about pure exposure along The Long Tail rather than anything that’s actually sold.

Since there’s no cost involved in putting anything up on YouTube at this point, it’s probably in the interest of an obscure band with a video or a budding filmmaker with an amateur short to throw it up for the world to see, simply because it can’t hurt – having your band’s home performance seen by ten people online is better than having it seen by three friends in your parents’ basement. Ideally, weird left-field underground bands with equally weird, left-field videos are given an equal shot at exposure as the ones that might be accessible enough to some day show up on MTV.

Enter “YouTube Underground”:

YouTube describes the competition as follows:

YouTube is on a quest to find the most talented and entertaining unsigned musicians and bands out there. Submit videos that best represent your group’s musical, lyrical and video-making skills. The YouTube community will vote and decide just who rules the YouTube Underground.

So the competition is meant to publicize, ostensibly, the best four bands on YouTube, voted on by users. Sounds as democratic as it gets, eh?

The problem is – well, there’s two problems. First of all, the whole deal seems shady, because as mentioned before, it’s sponsored by Cingular, and corporate sponsorship almost guarantees that the best band will probably be the most marketable band. It’s hard to imagine a truly bizarre, inaccessible act winning the contest in an upset with Cingular footing the bill.

But more important than any potential impact of corporate sponsorship, the contest itself robs YouTube of a certain “underground” appeal. In terms of its “long-tailness”, YouTube has thus far created space where the weirdest, most left field acts offered the same amount of exposure as the popular ones – in the “YouTube Underground” contest, the most popular acts, the “big head” of the power-law curve becomes as important as it does in traditional marketing. Popularity wins out, and the “musical underground” that generally benefits the most from YouTube – if it doesn’t suffer directly – has its importance diminished because it lacks the accessibility or fad-appeal that might make it a hit with YouTube’s main demographic.

One can only imagine that when the contest results are in, it will have some structural effect on the frontpage of the site. Obscure videos might not necessarily get less play than they would otherwise, but the contest winners will no doubt be plastered all over the front page and thus get more play, and there’s no way around it. More accessible videos will win, and they’ll be the first thing you see when you login. That means notably more hits for the winners.

Whether this actively deprives less accessible, weirder acts from getting hits, due to the majority of users not looking any further than the sexy splash graphic that will accompany the contest results, or whether their hits remain consistent, they’re still falling victim to YouTube’s shift in focus, from long tail to big head. Granted, in its current form, user ratings are in part used to determine what videos are “featured” on the front page. But the contest changes the entire concept of the site, giving certain videos of certain marketable artists a prominence that can’t be achieved by artists farther out on the fringe.

“Underground”? Hardly. This contest marks YouTube taking a step towards favoring the mainstream and popular, cutting off the fringe, the outsider, the poor old long tail.

For the first time in 20 years, someone has mentioned The Knack outside of the context of one of those sleazy “Best of the [decade]” CDs past-their-prime celebrities sell on late night TV.

No, the authors of “My Sharona” and nothing else haven’t gone and done something crazy like, say, writing a new song – they’re doing what all the has-beens seem to do these days and filing a lawsuit.

No doubt being hard pressed to find someone to sue, what on account of having no presence in the public mind for the better part of the last two decades, they have filed suit against pioneering hip-hop group (do we really even need to say pioneering? Everybody knows that) Run DMC for sampling “My Sharona” in the perennial classic “It’s Tricky”.

Here’s some specifics from MTV News

The filing — which also names Rick Rubin (who produced the cut for 1986’s Raising Hell), Arista Records, Rush Groove Music, Rush Communications, online music retailers Yahoo, Amazon, Napster, iTunes and others as defendants — claims that Run-DMC engaged in the “unauthorized copying, reproduction and distribution of [the Knack’s] musical composition and improperly [profiting from]” use of the sample, which the suit claims was “willfully, or with reckless disregard, unlawfully appropriated.”

We have hypothesized an interaction between Doug Feiger/Berton Averre of The Knack and the surviving members of Run DMC, which will now follow:

The Knack: Pardon me kind sirs, but it appears that you sampled our song in 1986. Could we please have some fucking money?

Run DMC: But that song has been a legend in its own right for the last 20 years, and probably turned people on to buying your crappy albums in the first place.

The Knack: The title of the song is My Sharona, not Thy Sharona.

We’re certainly hoping that if anything, this overly litigious behavior on the part of morons Feiger and Averre (oh come on, none of them ever used the stage name “Nick Knack”?) will point out the ridiculousness of the way current copyright laws function with respect to derivative works. If Run DMC had been unable to release that track – or many of their other tracks that emply samples – at the outset, it’s possible that an entire genre of music’s shift into the mainstream could have been dramatically slowed or stymied.

The reason that The Knack didn’t sue in 1986? Oh, this one is truly priceless.

Despite the popularity of the riff, some may wonder why Fieger and Averre waited two decades to take action against the hip-hop icons. The lawsuit claims the pair never heard the DMC classic before 2005.
Despite the popularity of the riff, some may wonder why Fieger and Averre waited two decades to take action against the hip-hop icons. The lawsuit claims the pair never heard the DMC classic before 2005.

Never heard that song? This gives us the distinct impression that Fieger and Averre talk in the Richard Pryor “white guy” voice, and say things like “rap…, more like c-rap!”

In all seriousness, though, we’re hoping a judge will throw this one out on account of the contradictory nature of the charges – first look here:

The document asserts that, because of Run-DMC’s sampling of “My Sharona,” Fieger and Averre have “suffered actual damages, including lost profits, lost opportunities, loss of goodwill, lost publicity, attorneys’ fees and interest.” The suit seeks unspecified damages and related legal fees, and characterizes the “signature” riff sampled in “It’s Tricky” as “the essence” of the song.

Then go here:

“That [riff] is not only the essence of ‘My Sharona,’ it is one of the most recognizable sounds in rock and roll,” said Fieger through his lawyers.

So, if it’s one of the most ‘recognizable sounds in rock and roll’, what possible profits, opportunities, or publicity could the band have lost? Everyone already knew the damned song anyway.

This contradiction is a bit remniscent of Jerry Falwell’s admission that no one would ever actually believe that he did his mother in an outhouse, while at the same time trying to prove that Larry Flynt’s joke-ad about it in Hustler couldn’t be construed as a parody. Hopefully this faulty logic finds The Knack releasing that long-ago played out one hit wonder on another compilation instead of trying to squeeze money out of visionary artists like Run DMC.