I started writing "Move the Crowd" as a column for The Note back when it was still its own paper. Back then, the idea was to tie the issues facing musicians to the issues facing their audiences and make the most of rock's promise one small step at a time. One issue after another reared its head, and the column gained a sense of purpose the more I wrote it. But in the past year, something new has happened.

A story has begun to emerge from these scattered struggles, and my columns are beginning to take on the quality of chapters in an unfolding story. Certain characters are emerging repeatedly because they are building this story, a story with anyone who reads this becoming a potential player in the action. In twelve years of writing about music, this is the most dangerous and exciting time I've experienced, and it is calling for a fresh approach to get it right. So, do me a favor. Bear with me if you feel like you're hearing a story you've heard before. I'm only repeating ideas for the sake of developing the larger picture. Same book, different chapter.

We're All in the Same Gang

I know a little about how much writers and musicians have in common. For the most part, we aren't paid for the work that we do. If I get paid the exorbitant amount of 45 dollars for a live music review (good money around here), that breaks down to 45 dollars for the hour I spend going to and from the show and the average of three hours I spend there. That's still 11+ dollars an hour, which doesn't count the money I responsibly should have spent on the bands' previous CDs (sometimes we do get the most recent one for free), which exceeds what I get paid pretty quickly. The amount of time I spend listening to the artists and actually writing about them never gets figured into the picture, and if I buy food or drinks, I'm already in the hole. The point is, I essentially do what I do for free--to support my interest in music.

Musicians are in the same boat. Most musicians in Kansas City work for dollars on the door or a low flat rate of say $100 or $200 a night. If they have to pay a decent sound technician, that's $50 to $75. If there are four people in the band, a lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bassist and drummer, that's, at the high end, less than $40 for each band member. Most of the time, I see band members walk out of a club with less than $20 in their individual pockets at the end of the evening. That isn't much to buy new guitar strings, pay for gas to get to the next gig and pay rent on a rehearsal space, much less pay studio time to make a demo. That's why 99% of the greatest musicians I know work 40 hours a week or more at a day job and then, somehow, find the stamina to arrive at a club early for a soundcheck and stay up until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., waiting to get paid their small change.

A Los Angeles musician friend of mine (where bands have to pay to play the prime spots) said recently that the main difference between a musician and the average person living in poverty is that the musician always thinks he/she is about to get a big break. The promise that they might get signed to a major record deal keeps them going. Writers do the same thing. We put what spare energy we have into book proposals that get their one shot with publishers in a 20 second long pitch by an agent.

And what happens to virtually every band when they get signed by a label? The high turnover in the industry makes it most likely that the talent scouts (A&R people) that had some enthusiasm for their music will not be at the label any longer by the time they finish their first album. The exact thing happened when I had a book published as part of a series by Putnam/Berkeley. The administrators who cared about the series were gone by the time it came out, and the books were released with little-to-no publicity. How many bands in the Kansas City area have had that same experience with their music?

It's the nature of the game. In a March LA Weekly, a record label president offered to give reporter Sarah Luck Pearson the inside scoop on why bands get dropped from labels. After all, the recent Universal/Polygram merger dropped every band from those two labels' subsidiaries who sold less than 200,000 copies an album. The president was blunt:

"You have to understand that the entire record business is now run by minds that are not pioneers, but minds of accountants. We are all now responsible to people that do not have innovative, artistic values, minds and spirits, but spend most of their time working on projections, budgets! The best talents in the record business are just basically working for Wall Street!."

When Pearson asked him if he warned those he signed that they might fail, he stated, "They will fail" (6).

Pearson's article contains a number of horrors, including the detail that most companies "sign 20 to 30 new acts annually with only the budget to market six of them effectively" (2). And her interview with the president includes a rationalization for contracts that charge artists three times what it costs to make a CD and the royalties withheld by labels when they give away CDs or sell them in bulk as cut-outs, which sometimes exceed official release sales (4). The anonymous president even admits that he wouldn't "shave a zero" off of his 7 figure salary to provide healthcare for his artists.

But he does recognize what most artists have yet to grasp-his industry is doomed the moment musicians and their fans wake up. He forecasts that musicians "will realize that this isn't the place for them, and they will create their own environment. The Internet will be an amazing way for artists to directly distribute their music. When I look into the future . . . . we will be extinct" (6).

To avoid that extinction, the music industry inevitably has to go to war with the artists it represents. It is no coincidence that the industry is trying to stop the coming MP3 explosion or that the Recording Industry Association of America recently raided half a dozen Kansas City record stores (with police) ostensibly to crack down on bootleg music. Ironically, representatives of Texas recording artist Lucinda Williams had just called one of these record stores the very same day to see if they could get a hold of a copy of one of her bootlegs for fans.

I write for The Zone because it is a step toward creating that environment that can overturn the music industry. That is the same reason I have written for the industry watchdog newsletter, Rock & Rap Confidential, for the past thirteen years. Musicians and fans have to talk seriously about how we can help each other take advantage of the technological revolution that, right now, is pushing the record industry to try to cut us all out of the picture.

Creative people tend to be such individualists that they isolate themselves from others in many ways. But anyone in a band knows that the greatest music comes from the jam, from the collaboration with others toward a certain focus. The best moment in any show is that moment when the whole band has worked together to take a risk it hasn't taken before, and the audience is part of that risk-taking as well. The audience reassures and feeds the process. On a regular basis, dozens of us work together to achieve a moment we couldn't achieve individually.

And yet, when it comes to fighting the music industry, our collectivity tends to dissolve. We go for our band to be the one that gets signed, and the one that makes it while 30 other signed bands fail. At the other extreme, we throw benefits for every cause that touches our hearts, and we always rally when one of our own is sick or has been hurt in an accident (since very few musicians can afford health insurance). Excuse me for talking like a musician; I live in your world so much of the time, the line literally blurs. And, really, your world is our world. Musicians hand us the tunes we hum all day long and the company that keeps us going during the lowest times. Somehow, we haven't fully taken advantage of, or envisioned what, that great world that revolves around music might be capable of doing.

We better learn because we are going down with the Titanic. According to Industry Week, "Even though the economy is at full employment, wage rates have not accelerated at all, and the median real income has declined every year since 1989." Conservative figures show 36 million Americans living at poverty level (1 in 5 children), and, though the Clinton administration brags that it has cut welfare by 42% since 1994, the number of people living in poverty has not changed. And with the globalization of finance, this has become a worldwide phenomenon. In 1996, the International Monetary Fund reported that more than half of the world's developing countries have had negative income growth in the past two decades, and there is no reason to expect this trend to change. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, and musicians typically stand on one side of that line.

So, the obvious question is, why don't we work with our brothers and sisters who are also slipping into darkness and unite our energies in a creative process that builds a world big enough for all of us? The simple answer is, we aren't sure how. But, collectively, we share the pieces of the puzzle.

We sense the danger, and we throw ourselves into every promising project that comes along, but what we don't do often enough is share our understanding with others and build strategic alliances and focused goals. That's why I took part in the founding of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America 7 years ago. The League brought together the poorest of the poor, battling daily for food, clothes and housing with others who had learned, after sometimes many decades of activism, that they needed to align themselves with those being thrown out of the system, analyze why this violent change was taking place and form a collective that strategized for the kind of radical change necessary to build a new society out of the remnants of the old.

One thing that separated the League from other groups I have encountered is that it understood music's unique importance in this work. The finest, most visionary music writers I have ever known aligned themselves with the League to varying degrees, many joined, and we worked together to provide an analysis and a vision that specifically concerned the issues musicians face and the relationships between those issues and those faced by their larger audiences. We published two supplements (Music & Revolution 1 & 2) to the League newspaper, The People's Tribune, and traveled around the country talking to musicians about the issues they faced. Out of this rich experience, we are now putting together a new, more in-depth Music & Revolution, and we are planning to take the dialogue wider than ever before. This effort is the only light of its kind we have in all this darkness, and we are inviting anyone who reads these words to help us make it brighter and help us make it through.

On June 26th, we will be holding a national meeting surrounding this Music & Revolution effort in Kansas City. We are inviting in representatives of the League--musicians, writers and fans. We are also inviting musicians from around the country, including some, from the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), who are building an international poor people's movement out of the most neglected area of North Philly.

KWRU's Economic Human Rights Campaign brought together over 100 poor people's organizations from around the country for a Poor People's Summit in October. Members of KWRU have traveled to the Middle East and Mexico to organize with other poor people's organizations worldwide. In October, they will join with poor people's groups from Canada and Latin America for a month long March of the Americas, from Washington D.C. to the United Nations in New York, to formally indict the U.S. government for gross violations of economic human rights toward its own people and the world. Whatever occurs as a result of that action, KWRU will carry forward its construction of the largest poor people's movement the world has ever seen.

In June, we are also inviting other musicians who are building this movement from places as remote as South-central Los Angeles and Jackson, Mississippi. And we want you. If you are a musician or if you just love music and care about its future, we want you to be a part of helping us create this new environment that will render the music industry extinct. They know we're coming, and they are organizing against us, but we have the moral vision of a just future on our side, and that's a tough piece of magic to beat.

To help us on June 26th, check out the Music & Revolution button at the LRNA website LRNA website. You may write me through the culture committee e-mail located at that page or at danny@thezone.org.

--Danny Alexander
danny@thezone.org

Sources

Evans, Mike. "Income Gap Widens: New Employment Trends Futher Separate Rich and Poor." Industry Week. April 1, 1996.

Pearson, Sarah Luck. "The Suit: An Anonymous Executive Talks." LA Weekly. March 29, 1999.

Pritchett, Lant. "Forget Convergence: Divergence, Past, Present and Future." Finance and Development. June, 1996.

Scheer, Robert. "End of Welfare Isn't the End of Poor People." Los Angeles Times. February 23, 1999.