Afterword
What can be done about
what most people think of as popular music?
Britain still has better
record shops than American towns. Norwich, in the English county of
Norfolk, has three or four record shops that are better than any between
Chicago and Milwaukee, a distance of around 100 miles; the Norwich City
Council area has a population of about 124,000. The tiniest village
shop may not have much stock, but the salesperson there will know how
to order any record you want (from a middleman, at full price).
The number of recordings
available commercially in Britain is much smaller than in the USA, yet
the shops have better selections: this is partly because Britain has
better broadcasting, by a wide margin, than the USA. Britain’s first
national commercial radio station is a classical one, because the government
awarded the franchise with some care; launched while this book was being
written, it is already commercially successful. Margaret Thatcher, however,
arranged for commercial television to be sold to the highest bidder
before she left office, and was then astonished at the unfair results
of the auction: there are signs that Britain is only a decade or two
behind the USA in trashing itself.
The real problem began
in the USA, and it would never be too late for the Federal Communications
Commission to wake up. The experience of the last twenty years shows
that the USA needs regulation. The deregulation of the Savings and Loans
led to the biggest financial disaster in American history; long after
the deregulation of the airlines it still cost $700 to fly from Milwaukee
to New York and back in December 1990, while some of the oldest airlines
in the world have gone bust. (In early 2002 Enron of Houston, Texas,
an energy trading company, provided us with the biggest bankruptcy in
history: an unregulated corporation turned out to be a house of cards.)
Similarly, the playing of non-stop pop videos is nothing but free advertising
for the record companies; if the government is going to regulate anything
at all, America’s MTV channel ought to be seen as violating existing
law. If Americans can chop up the world’s best telephone service into
fifty small bits and require car manufacturers to obtain an overall
mileage from their products, they can do anything.
Radio stations relying
on recorded music should be required to do their own programming, rather
than subscribing to a factory-compiled tape which is identical in every
urban area. Mass-produced pap is bad enough in a supermarket; and, for
that matter, it will never be too late to ban wired music in public
places, if music is thought to be of any value: it is an irony typical
of our times that although the stuff must make a profit somehow, nobody
would miss it. A law prohibiting any radio station from playing any
track more than once a day (or even better, once a week) would still
allow any station to play all the hits, but would require somebody somewhere
to think about which records to play for the rest of the time. Such
rules might result in jobs in radio for people who actually like music.
Needle time could be made
more expensive by raising the royalty on the records played after a
certain number of hours a day, forcing stations to think about what
kind of music they want to pay for; or the additional expense could
be avoided by allowing a balance with live music: the practical difficulties
broadcasters will foresee would quickly be overcome with the pressure
of necessity, putting today’s technology to some good use for a change.
The need for live entertainment would soon result in a wider variety
of it; broadcasters would learn to choose a good polka band over a mediocre
teen-pop outfit, and, for that matter, a great many university music
departments have excellent ensembles of various kinds. Why should there
be relatively more live music in British broadcasting, with fewer stations
and a fraction of the population, than there is in America? The performers
would have to learn how to play for a live audience, and as listeners
discover what live music sounds like, they might demand records that
sound like music.
Small specialist and local
stations could be exempt from some of this, and if Congress or the FCC
will not act, state legislatures could do something. None of these measures
would amount to discrimination against any musical genre, but another
result would be the redundance of pro-censorship groups, such as the
American Parents Music Resource Center, who will accomplish nothing
anyway because they attack symptoms instead of problems. Successful
pressure on behalf of a wider range of musics would swamp much of the
childish dirtiness to which the censors object.
But the Davises and the
Yetnikoffs are in charge of American business, and legislatures are
full of lawyers who make too many laws and too few examples. Our only
hope is that the pop-rock business goes smash, so that we can start
all over again. Maybe it is only a matter of time; Michael Jackson’s
latest album has sold fifteen million copies at the time of writing,
and apparently has not made enough money for Sony. Any industry that
does business that way will go to the wall sooner or later.
