When artists cave, or refuse to cave, which is still caving

 Occasionally, I click on clickbait.  I'm not proud of it.  Usually, I resist the temptation, but occasionally, my finger slips, and the bait clicks itself.  Cringe ensues.  I shall not acknowledge the specific bait that got the click, but rather, I shall tell a story to motivate this morning's post.  Recently, I assigned Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses to a group of students, on the topic of book-banning.  I asked the students what they thought would have been most infuriating to Ayatollah Khomeini.  Nobody gets it.  No sane person can put himself in the mindset of a looney-tune, and while the book is not exactly pious, the part that really got Khomeini's goat was not what anyone, save Khomeini, would guess.  Anyway, the bait that baited my click followed the precise methodology of my question to students on The Satanic Verses for... another thing.  Present the heretical thing.  Ask the audience to guess the heresy.  I failed to guess the heresy contained within the teapot tempest of the day, but the hullabaloo had me thinking about when artists cave.  Not, when they have to go live in a cave, like Salman, to escape the assassins that Khomeini sent after him, but when they cave metaphorically.  When they yield.  When they say, OK, I'll do whatever you say.  I'm I sinner, I repent, please buy my shit you consumer-dupe-motherfuckers.  Keeping in mind that I'm an avid capitalist, so you know, know your product, know your market, sell your shit.  Key word:  "know."  It's the bullshit I don't like.

Remember hoof-and-mouth disease?  Once upon a time, it was a pretty serious thing, but we have mostly knocked it out with modern medicine.  A couple of decades ago, some wacko sent a few packets through the mail, and infected a few prominent figures, sending everyone into a tizzy, and to this day, we still don't know who did it, and now do you know what I'm talking about?  Yeah, "hoof-and-mouth disease" is the old colloquialism for anthrax.  Historically speaking, anthrax has killed not only a lot of livestock, but a lot of humans.  It is deadly serious, and it is still a real threat as a potential bioweapon, which is why we keep samples in our labs.  In fact, it was used as a bioweapon shortly after 9/11.  That's that story I just told.  We don't know who did it.  That, itself, is scary.  Our continued ignorance has been a plot in fiction (see, for example, Greg Bear's Quantico, although I cannot really recommend it as quality literature), but yeah.  It happened.  Some unknown psycho sent anthrax through the mail.  This did, however, lead to one funny story.  Like, ha-ha, funny.  You know how student debt cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, only death?  Well, a woman's kid died, and Sallie Mae kept sending collection notices.  So she sent them back some of her kid's ashes.  During... the... anthrax scare.  Yeah, c'mon.  Admit it, that's funny.  OK, it wasn't funny when it turned into a potential national security threat, but in retrospect, it's one of those crossed-wires, tragicomic mix-up things, and admit it.  It was funny.

But anthrax itself is not at all funny.  It is scary as hell, and it has killed a lot of people.  But there's this thing about heavy metal.  Metal bands like to do silly, childish things, like name themselves after deadly diseases.  Some day, some group of children will start banging away on their instruments and dub themselves "SARS-CoV-2," and yes, with a million Americans dead over the last two years, that's called "poor taste," which is not a thing that I am in any position to judge, but it'll happen.  There's probably a metal group somewhere called "AIDS," and at least a dozen called, "Cancer," and the only reason there aren't any called "Necrotizing Fasciitis" is that it just doesn't roll off the tongue like "Meshuggah," or "Cynic," the latter of whom get a royalty check from me every morning I wake up, just because.  The former?  Yeah, I heard that, even through the computer.  (Which would tend to validate the point, wouldn't it?)

Anyway, before the USPS dust-up (what?! I'm supposed to leave that joke on the table?) one particular group had already adopted the name, Anthropogenic Clima... sorry, Anthrax.

So when your band's name is Anthrax, and the country is living under terror of anthrax attacks, what do you do?

If you are a bunch of weasels, you change your name, apologize, genuflect, and all that, right?  We'll come back to this.  Thrash metal is not my thing, but this was awesome.  What this group of yahoos did, instead, was as follows.  They arranged an event in which they showed up on stage, each wearing a jumper with one word on it.  They then stood in a line, so that the words spelled out, "We're Not Changing Our Name."

This, I respected.  Has anthrax killed a lot of people over the centuries?  Yes.  Was it killing people at the time?  Yes.  Were people terrified of anthrax at the time?  Yes.

Did the band cave?

No.

I have never owned an Anthrax album, but if anything would ever make me buy one, it was that moment.  Yet if we are honest, would they have suffered more, financially, if they had caved, given their fanbase?

Probably.  And note my reaction.  I'm not a metalhead, even if there are a few bands I can appreciate (like Animals As Leaders) but I have a bit of that fuck-the-system attitude, mixed in with my political scientist institutionalist/establishmentarianism.  Which may seem like a contradiction, but fine, insert Whitman quote, blah-blah.

Point being, while I didn't buy in response to the commercial, it increased my probability of buying because propensity to buy is heterogeneous by product type and consumer type.

Suppose you read a review of an album which describes the music as having non-linear melodies, time signatures that are almost too complex to follow, and vary in strange and unpredictable ways within a composition, tonal experimentation, impossible to classify by genre...  How does this sound to you?  Would you buy it?  Most people wouldn't, but when I see those kinds of descriptions in a review, I go immediately to listen to sound clips, or if I can, the whole album.  This is total me-bait.  I'll occasionally post a music clip from a modern jazz pianist named Tigran Hamasyan.  Guy's an absolute, fuckin' genius (and in fact, he cites that metal band, Meshuggah, as a primary influence).  Just trying to count out his compositions is a math challenge, and he plays with soul.  Love this guy.  If he ever played a dance tune in 4/4, those of us who worship him like a god would ask, what the fuck?!

And if Anthrax had changed their name to Cipro-- the antibiotic they were using to treat the bug-- their fans would have asked, what the fuck?!

In which case, was it real courage?

Maybe not.  So maybe I shouldn't have cheered them.  Maybe they were stuck.  They had a fanbase that demanded that they stand up to the pressure from those who probably weren't buying their albums or concert tickets anyway.

Other types of fanbases exist within the world of changing norms, which can be seen most easily when we look over the time frame of a century or so.  I have been accused of having antiquated tastes in music, although much of what I post here is quite recent.  Nevertheless, I find much to appreciate about older styles.  So let us consider Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly.  Many of his songs remain blues standards, like "Gallows Pole," "Good Night, Irene," "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"...  The list of standards written by Leadbelly is a long list.

You know what you don't hear all that often?  "The Bourgeois Blues."  It was a song about segregation, racism and such.  Now, I know what you're thinking!  That sounds like everyone should still be singing it!  But... Leadbelly used "the n-word."

The whole song is kind of taboo now.  Ry Cooder, who is white and not at all racist, covered it on Chicken Skin Music (1976), and a lot of Ry's fans think of that as his best album, although I lean towards Into The Purple Valley.  Ry, who is... again... white, used "the n-word" while covering "The Bourgeois Blues."  It was a Leadbelly song.  He was just coving a Leadbelly song, and the politics in 1976 were such that it was understood that a song criticizing segregation was not an endorsement of racism merely for the presence of "the n-word," even when sung by a white person.

Today, I dare you to find me a white person willing to sing "The Bourgeois Blues," much less some of those old Carter Family songs that really were racist as opposed to the stuff we choose to remember about them.  Yes, The Carter Family is famous, and every guitarist has to learn that Maybelle thing, but if you dig into their back catalog, they sang some really racist shit.  But what about "The Bourgeois Blues?"

I went over to Ye Olde Youtube, to see what I could find.  Here's a fun one.  Levon Helm's band (as opposed to his famous band, The Band) performing "The Bourgeois Blues," in 2011.  Quite recent, and with politics about "the n-word" that are, I think, comparable to those of 2022.

Note that the singer does not sing "the n-word."  At 3:59, the singer uses the phrase, "your kind," which may not make as much sense when you look at the singer.  In Leadbelly's original version, that was where "the n-word" appeared.  I was honestly surprised that I found any live versions of white singers doing this one in the 21st Century, but in order to understand the song, and the phrase, "your kind," you have to know the original lyrics.  (Benefits of having "antiquated" tastes in music-- it is fundamentally little different from being an amateur music historian, but as Ted Gioia has reminded us, the only reason we even have the recordings anymore is that the amateurs, like me, maintained private libraries.)  I wonder what kinds of meetings they had, when deciding how to change the lyrics.  By the way, this meets the technical definition of revisionist history, or at least, revisionist art.  There are plenty of old songs that have a truly racist line or two that might be changed, but remember that "The Bourgeois Blues" is a condemnation of racism.

And this is not exactly a hill on which someone will pull an Anthrax.  Their careers really would die.  Ry could get away with it in '76, but in 2022?  Nope.

Remember 2011?  Ironically enough, the same year in which Levon and not-the-band performed their altered version of "The Bourgeois Blues, The Tea Party made a big stink about starting their new House majority with a full, complete reading of the Constitution.  It might have helped if at least one of them had read the document at some point in their lives before, so that they knew the nature of their commitment in advance, but... oopsies!  Apparently, it never occurred to them that the full text of the Constitution includes shit like the 3/5ths clause, which kind of makes the document seem a little less divinely-inspired, and nobody was willing to read that aloud on camera.  But that never occurred to them before making a big thing that they would do it.  Dumbasses.  Of course, there is a difference between the 3/5ths clause of the Constitution, and "The Bourgeois Blues."  The 3/5ths clause was demeaning a category of people, and denying their humanity and their rights, intentionally, and with malice.  Leadbelly was using "the n-word" while excoriating racism.*  Yet they get treated the same way in historical readings.  Nobody wants to say the bad part, because if you quote the bad part, you're the bad person.

And that threat really does carry something.  Not as much weight as Khomeini brought to bear on Rushdie, but consider.

In order for an artist to maintain a career while resisting pressure, the pressure has to come from outside the artist's consumers.  When combined with a product whose image is resistance to pressure, the economically rational thing to do there is to resist the pressure.  Otherwise, one must concede in order to maintain a career.

Long ago, The Simpsons understood this.  They did an episode in which they turned Krusty The Clown turned into a George Carlin figure, in which his angry rants somehow find a fanbase as anti-commercial rebelliousness, and he makes a new and profitable career off of that, which he then turns around and uses to sell an SUV, but that backfires because you can't use a Carlin-appeal to sell SUVs.  So, the whole thing collapses.  You can make a career and fuckloads of money out of empty, anti-commercialist rhetoric (cough, cough, Rage Against the Machine), but if you then cave, you've lost your revenue stream.

And if you already are just open commercialism, give the people what they want, when they wants and they wants it all the time.

So one way or another, you're giving your people what they want.  Which sometimes, I guess, is hoof-and-mouth disease.

But this guy is a little more my style.  Billy Strings, "Dust In A Baggie."  Incidentally, the Tennessee Sec. State got a DUI leaving this show.  I suppose, given the song, it could have been a bigger bust.

*Some asshole may come along and think, "but Huddie Ledbetter was a criminal!"  Blah-blah, founding fathers!  I don't care, not the point.  He doesn't have to have been a good person to have been right, and an intelligent person should be able to accept a complex view of the Constitution and history.  Sick of this shit.