Reimagining music in our lives – some insightful writing from around substack

The 'new golden age of music' series

Welcome, everyone, to a post to get us thinking about what kind of musical future we want to create.

It’s not up to ‘them.’ They screwed up, big-time. Things are not working. Fuggedaboudit, we say to them. We’ll take it from here.

It’s up to us now. We’ll assess, educate ourselves, consult, dialog, envision, strategize, plan, and create a worlds better future for ourselves and the generations to come.

I always take hope from the energy and passion of the young, like the three Mexican sisters (above) who are now a remarkably successful band called The Warning.

We must also take heart in the fact that governments come and go, and industries rise and fall, but music lives on and on.

It’s impossible to kill a great song. It’s like religion in the Soviet Union. It just went underground for seven decades and experienced a remarkable resurgence once the system fell apart.

So if the system doesn’t want to support our music, it doesn’t matter. We will support, nurture, and protect it ourselves.

And we will create our own system to do that. Which brings up the question of the moment:

Given our experiences with the highly flawed systems that have controlled music production, distribution, and consumption in our lifetimes, what do we want our musical future to be?

How do we want to make and share music?

Do we want to continue the industrial model we have now that’s all about the numbers — number of streams, sales, hits, revenues and profits, stock market prices — with only a few people really making it?

Or are we more concerned with what we had in past golden ages of music — diversity, variety, idiosyncracy, vibrancy, innovation, creativity, and quality?

Is it that we’re not getting that now? Or is it that the system for finding and supporting the emergence and longevity of a diversity of creative talent no longer works?

Does anyone who makes it have to be blessed, as the Villarreal Vélez girls of The Warning above have been, with parents who are passionate and persistent on their behalf?

According to one of my previous posts, that would immediately eliminate up to 60% of talented artists from the equation who come from families in turmoil or traumatic backgrounds.

The current system favors the lucky few.

Let’s hear from some other writers on Substack, who have offered interesting and illuminating opinions in the past week.

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Before we do, let me just mention a few things.

I’ve set up a special tab on my substack where you can find all posts in this series, called ‘New golden age of music,’ as well as one for ‘Women in rock.’

Also, please be aware that you can opt out of these posts but keep getting the Women in Rock series (or vice versa) by changing your personal preferences.¹

If you want to stay involved and not miss a post, it’s best to subscribe. And please feel free to share with anyone you think would be interested in creating a new golden age of music.

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Nope, things can’t stay the same

Let’s hear takes from five people on the importance of music, why things can’t stay the same, and how we might move in the direction of positive change.

We must never be discouraged as we work on changing a system focused on promoting just a handful of geniuses

This is from Ted Hope from Hope Floats in his post “Why I will never be discouraged.” He’s talking about film, but it is just as relevant to the music industrial complex, or book publishing, or any of the arts:

We have a system that relies on the exception to be the example. We rely on the fifty or so geniuses a year who are able to escape the net of designed mediocrity, instead of creating a system that aims to lift the good into the great…

Yet since we are in this industry of managed risk predicament, those that are promoted, and generally hired, are those that subscribe to that gospel of limiting downside. They are rewarded for having low standards. They are trained to not try to make it better.

Things do get better but you need the long view. I know who I am going to bet on. Art, artists, and audiences react faster than business or markets ever will.

That fact alone keeps me going. I will never be discouraged.

Speaking of, here’s one of those artists speaking out this past week…

Let’s just remove ourselves from ‘the game’ and start over together to create something local, magical,and transformative

One of our rockers, Neko Case — I highly recommend reading her substack Entering the Lung — says “Let’s go smaller”:

…“those times” when we are part of something magical and transformative don’t have to remain the “Good old days” as if we were somehow done…

My role may be different in the scenes ahead, but they aren’t one time things that are dead forever once their glow has dimmed. They are in us all the time, and we can, and should, make more. Passionately. Starting over, starting small and engaging in collaboration. That seems to me the way forward in this time in history. The time for aggressive joy through community.

The grim, gray expanse of Spotify consuming everything in its path… capitalism’s robot of death for our industry. Luckily, you can’t kill artists and musicians. We swerve. “Let’s remove ourselves from the game,” I suggested. “Let’s go smaller.” We are so trained to capitalism that we don’t ever consider “smaller” an option.

Let’s make records and zines again. Small batch. It doesn’t have to go world-wide. We don’t have to put things up on spotify, maybe just two or three songs to advertise (though, I don’t even want to be that involved with them…) and call it good. WE DON’T HAVE TO WORK WITH DICKS. And it doesn’t hurt to focus on our local scenes again. Remember how lovely?

Here’s a song of Neko’s I absolutely love, “Hold On, Hold On,” from her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood — which also seems entirely appropriate to our topic (!):

Another Substack writer gives going local a different twist…

Don’t forget that there’s nothing like local live music, and we can also share it with others right here on Substack

David Drayer of Strange and Unusual Places would agree that local is where it’s at:

…nothing beats live. On the porch or in the parlor with a fine guitar or a shoebox the music emanates from the heart directly to the ear, and we feel the difference. Kinda’ gotta’ be there.

He’s now offering “Open Mic Night” on his Substack to give a platform to local musicians:

We might get something started here - subversive, underground music that puts a finger up at commercialized, overproduced, contrived musical “product”.

Music for the everyday folk.

Have you ever fallen in love with a song the first time you heard it? If you’re like most folks a new song takes some getting used to; that’s why the recording industry exposes us to play after play in hopes of gaining popularity. If nobody knows who you are then your music will probably only be heard once - if ever.

That’s where open mic comes in, where we can repeat performance in front of the same audience (for the most part) or at least an audience there for the open mic…

Speaking of free [music], a proper musician understands the value of expression and the right thereof.

SemperFi was featured playing “Slide on a Backpack” in the latest post.

Never forget the power of music to ‘shake things up’ and change the world because it’s happening, right now, in country after country

Ted Gioia of The Honest Broker shares examples of songs and musicians changing the world we live in, in countries around the world, in his latest post.

I got a kick out of Pearl Jam stopping a strike and a traffic jam in Australia, but he shares many profound examples of the ‘unsettling’ power of music.

I recommend reading the post, but here’s some of the intro:

I keep telling young musicians to see the new Bob Dylan biopic (see trailer below). But this has nothing to do with nostalgia… I tell them to see the movie as a powerful reminder that songs are change agents in human life. Music is transformative. It shakes people up.

And people want to be shaken. The audience is hungry for this catalytic force—and the Dylan movie shows that repeatedly…

Some people called it protest music, back in the 1960s. Or political music. Even the words rock and roll are appropriate—because that’s what he did to everyone around him.

Now here’s the best part of the story: This disruptive life-changing music is still getting played today.

And it’s still feared by the system.

But you won’t read about this in Rolling Stone (although you should). And you certainly won’t hear about it on TikTok or Spotify. But if you pay attention to real songs in the real world, you can see that they still shake up entire nations.

That’s why I share periodic updates on political and protest music. (You can find previous accounts here and here and here).

And we mustn’t forget the sins of the music industry and why things absolutely must change — no matter which country we’re in (because the industry is now global)

Music lawyer and former head of Rounder Records John Strohm, who writes Ready for Nothing, talks about the exploitation he and his bandmates in Blake Babies experienced with their first record contract in his latest post:

The year before we’d signed to Mammoth Records, a scrappy, ambitious independent label based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, founded by a recent Duke MBA who had recently interned for Eagles manager Irving Azoff, then head of MCA Records. Our debut album, Earwig, had been out since late fall 1989, garnering good reviews and adds at college radio stations around the country. It was exciting to get noticed, but we were struggling on the road without much money or even a functioning tour van.

Mammoth made no secret of its desire to sell our contract to a major label. No secret, that is, once we were under contract. Every New York show became a label showcase, and they tried to get us in front of labels at every opportunity, to our constant irritation and stress. It’s something they’d pulled off the previous year with their first big signing, the Arizona roots band The Sidewinders, whose contract had been sold to RCA Records.

It isn’t that we’re completely against being upstreamed to a major label; it’s that our contract only required Mammoth to pay us $8,000 for the first option album. That meant the big major label advance would go to Mammoth, not us… Clearly selling our contract was Mammoths’ business model - that wasn’t a secret. It’s something we hadn’t understood at all when we signed our independent deal, but we found out after meeting the disgruntled Sidewinders, who let us know it wasn’t great for them…

We spent much of the previous year on tour under unpleasant conditions, sleeping on floors, getting on each other’s nerves, struggling to keep our rent paid back in Boston. We didn’t want to go all the way to Texas [to the SWSX festival] - an expensive trip - for just one show that only served the label’s interests. We understood that every penny spent on the trip would be recoupable against our future royalties: the flights, hotels, meals, etc. We weren’t given a choice, and that made it feel like a chore for someone else’s benefit…

As with all of our label showcases around that time, we underwhelmed the industry crowd, and no contract buyout materialized. All that came out of it was thousands of dollars of recoupable costs including the bar tab to entertain industry bigwigs at the venue. Technically, our contract is probably still unrecouped. Label accounting from that era is laughable. Maybe the unrecouped balance means Mammoth paid their own damn bar tab after all. I assume we got some “free” drinks on our tab as well. Welcome to the music biz.

I recommend reading John’s entire post to get a more enhanced view of the industry from different angles, given his evolving roles and growing knowledge over time as a musician, lawyer, and label head.

Here’s a tune off Blake Babies’ 1990 album Sunburn called “Out There,” written by John and Juliana Hatfield:

If you come across other posts that bear on the current state of the music system, or opinions and perspectives on where things should go, please share them in the comments or send them to me at ellenendwell@proton.me.

This is all part of the process of reflecting on where we’ve come from and where we could go, and what we could create — together.

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