[acid-jazz] more on the decline of the music biz

From: adario (adario@thingsburnup.com)
Date: Fri Jun 07 2002 - 17:02:21 CEST

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    Interesting comparison in New York Magazine,
    a dario

    http://www.newyorkmag.com/page.cfm?page_id=6099

    Facing the Music
    Rock stars and music-industry execs once ruled the earth, but now -- in
    terms of size and profit margins -- the music industry is becoming the book
    business (minus the literacy).
    BY MICHAEL WOLFF

    Hemingway had rock-star status (and even impersonators). Steinbeck was
    Springsteen. Salinger was Kurt Cobain. Dorothy Parker was Courtney Love.
    James Jones was David Crosby. Mailer was Eminem. This is to say -- and I
    understand how hard this is to appreciate -- that novelists were iconic for
    much of the first half of the last century. They set the cultural agenda.
    They made lots of money. They lived large (and self-medicated). They were
    the generational voice. For a long time, anybody with any creative ambition
    wanted to write the Great American Novel.

    But starting in the fifties, and then gaining incredible force in the
    sixties, rock-and-roll performers eclipsed authors as cultural stars. Rock
    and roll took over fiction's job as the chronicler and romanticizer of
    American life (that rock and roll became much bigger than fiction relates,
    I'd argue, more to scalability and distribution than to relative influence),
    and the music business replaced the book business as the engine of popular
    culture.
    ...



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