Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Black Is Beautiful

Chapter One

On season two, episode eleven of The Henry Rollins Show, Hank interviewed Gene Simmons of KISS fame.  This interview is a few years old, but I only recently viewed it for the first time.



During his traditional nonsensical ramblings, Mr. Simmons made a comment that Rap is huge and Rock is dying because Rappers are the new Rock Stars.  He explains that, with Grunge, Rock Stars wanted to be viewed as normal.  According to his logic, folks don’t want their celebrities to be normal.  We want to idolize people that are super human, or at the very least, people that aren’t scared to do the things from which normal folk shy away.



What Gene is describing was heavily utilized by Johnny Cash in his Man In Black, Outlaw persona. Being a bad boy was such an integral part of what people loved about him, the majority of society chose to turn a blind eye to the fact that he was arrested for smuggling a very large amount of drugs in 1965. Considering he only had to pay a $1000 fine, and serve a 30 day suspended sentence, even the court seems to have taken a “That’s just John being John” approach to the situation.



I wish I could prove Gene wrong, and find a contemporary rebel Rock Star, but none come to mind.  While metal tries to portray itself as evil and dark, you still see the members of Slayer attending the Grammy’s with their kids and being sincerely, decent parents.  Rock has grown old.



Also, while Rock musicians pride themselves on not selling out and not going commercial, they probably can’t afford to constantly get into trouble.  Meanwhile Rap performers are selling us everything from Toyotas to tampons. If Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dog, formerly Snoopy Doggie Dog formerly Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr) wants to participate in a 1993 murder in broad day light, at a heavily populated park with several witnesses, why wouldn’t he? All he has to do is start selling something like Snoop Poop Adult Diapers, and boom, the killing pays for itself.



Glen Danzig is a musician that made a career out of being intimidating, and being viewed as a rebel.  In 2004 a video was circulated via Youtube of him being punched in the face by an obese rocker.  Neither striking back, nor even verbally assaulting his attacker, Danzig did nothing in response.  Later in an interview he stated that as a celebrity people are often looking for reasons to take you to court and get some of your fortune.  His explanation for doing nothing was to avoid being sued.  A Rapper would have just shot the fat fuck, and then paid to make the problem go away. 



In the same interview, Danzig also said that he has never been paid for any of the recordings he did with Rick Rubin.  Assuming lyrics like “Hacking off little girls heads / hang em on my wall” never got him a cell phone commercial, Danzig and his like can’t afford to be rebellious, and Rap is now the new Rock.



If it was ever proposed to him that he was the genesis of the Rapper’s persona, I wonder how Johnny would have felt about that.  The key difference is that Johnny Cash wasn’t really a bad guy.  He was a knucklehead, and he was addicted to drugs that at the time were still not completely illegal. It wasn’t until five years later that Nixon got the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act passed.  I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine Cash would have ever condoned the killing of another person. The similarity in Johnny’s “Outlaw”, and a modern day Rapper’s “Outlaw” is that both are demonstrations of the common man.  But the common man of 1965 Nashville and the common man of 2015 New York City, are pretty different. 

Part B


In an interview I read with Everclear singer Art Alexakis he explained that while he was getting started and signed to an indie label he realized that being signed didn’t really mean much.  While most musicians would assume the label is going to promote their albums, he instead took it upon himself and paid out of his own pocket for promotions.  He went on to explain the importance of a publicist which he also hired and was responsible for compensating.



At the time when I read that I didn’t know anything. I was young and stupid.  While I had seen characters in movies portraying publicists I still didn’t actually understand what one did, or how they were hired.  Alexakis explained that a great band with no publicist can easily go unnoticed, while a mediocre band with a great publicist can get all the attention in the world (e.g. KISS).



It wasn’t a long article, but it was extremely informative.  Art, though not a Grunge musician, obviously shared the Grunge train of thought regarding an open, honest, human approach to being a celebrity. Clearly this is the opposite of how Gene Simmons believes musicians should behave. Gene believes that providing the audience with too much information makes you human and less than a God.


Mr. Simmons would have you believe that KISS earned fame based on their talent, and would choose to leave out details about extremely talented business people that made the mediocre band what it became.  The people Gene doesn't want to talk to you about include an impressive list of songwriters that penned most of the band’s hits, while the Grunge band’s he criticized wrote their own material.



Anyway, I don’t really know where I stand on this discussion.  While I don’t agree with Gene’s logic, I do agree that Rock music is suffering, and it’s players are no longer iconic.  I also agree with him that the world wants celebrities to be unrealistically super human.



A couple of side notes to all of that:  Gene simplified the problem without taking into consideration the current climate of the music industry.  Major labels are not offering record deals to small rock bands as they did when KISS first got signed.  Most large labels (like Interscope) no longer even have a rock department.  That means they only focus on Top 40 and Hip Hop. Gene did not mention the possibility that maybe Rock music is dead because nobody invests in Rock music, while Rap is heavily financed.  Why?  Who knows?  Maybe it is easier to control one performer than it is to control 3-5 people in a band, but it is not due to a lack of public demand.



The Blink 182 reunion album Neighborhoods (Interscope, 2011)  was highly anticipated.  At the time of its release the band was selling out large arenas all around the world.  People were excited about Blink 182 being back together and looking forward to their first album in 8 years.  The album’s sales were less than impressive and can easily be credited to piss poor promotions.  With no Rock department, Interscope didn’t have a single employee with connections in Rock radio, or Rock press.  Their employees had to start from scratch to promote that album.



Other side note: my experience is that people don’t want the truth.  I can tell a journalist the quick and easy story of how we did what we did and they will say “there is no story here.” But if I church-it-up and emphasize the action words then I am guaranteed attention.  In the documentary TAD Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears Jonathan Poneman discusses this. He mentions the importance of having a creative back story.  He says something along the lines, and I am paraphrasing here, "oh you're in a band and you make music just like the tens of thousands of other bands out there? Well that's not very interesting." So as much as I hate to admit it there is some validity to Gene’s theory.