COULD OBAMA ALSO BE TALKIING ABOUT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY?

It’s not often that I get anything outta listening to a speech by Barack Obama.

Lotsa words, precious little action, not much sense.

But listening to his speech today in Kansas, I kinda got what he was trying to say.

Or maybe I finally got what I have been thinking all along.

And which is that the American Middle Class is barely existent.

NY Times

How America is still all about idiots like Donald Trump and that small percentage of Wall Street executives who are taking it all and giving nothing back except bad sound-bites.

Yes, sound-bites like the bloated bully boy rhetoric of The Donald who needs political backing to continue to make his “garden” grow.

His tirades against China? They won’t let him in.

Not like the UAE.

Ever seen how much Trump has dumped into Dubai?

The man is a shameless opportunistic and he has Fox News as his PR agency.

Which brings me to the music industry.

We are still talking about Doug and Lucian and Irving and Lyor and Jimmy.

Edgar Junior has cashed in and upped and left and given Warner to a Russian billionaire who is clueless about Music.

Where is the music industry’s Middle Class?

When in advertising, my mentor, Keith Reinhard, asked us Creative Directors, Where are the Young Lions?

We had answers and we/they revolutionized the advertising industry. Globally.

Where are the music industry’s Young Lions?

Around the world, the same old- very old- names are trotted out.

And most of these names have run outta new ideas.

Wait: They have never had any new ideas.

These are people who only know how to run a traditional music company.

They know nothing about thinking outside of the box and are happy as Larry, Moe and Curly Joe to live and work inside the square.

They are nowhere as creative and entrepreneurial in the ways in which Chris Blackwell, Jac Holzman, the Ertegun Brothers, my advisor and friend Bhaskar Menon, Berry Gordy Jr, Alpert and Moss built up Island Records, Elektra Motown, EMI, Atlantic and A&M.

Give me one lunch with Bhaskar Menon or Chris Blackwell than any music conference with toadies, wannabes and past-its.

There is so much to learn from these gentlemen.

And enough to humble you.

Can someone like Terry McBride inspire me?

Lovely guy, but, please, no.

These legends remain trailblazers as there is no one else around with the IQ and the EQ.

And no one with that passion for music and respect for and from those who make this music.

How can there be when, as Chris Blackwell points out, the current crop-dusters of music executive must marry Wall Street with the music industry.

After all, nearly all their parent companies are in other businesses.

Music is just a vanity hobby.

Ask that French tart Jean-Marie Messier- an apropos name- who ran Universal Music’s parent company Vivendi before he was tossed out.

These are the money-hungry puppet masters behind the Lyors, the Dougs etc.

These are the real people running the major music companies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=corgLnu2czI

Today, Warner, for example, is run by a Russian billionaire who would not know the Stones from paper and scissors.

Nor does he want to. What for?

Has he even heard of Chris Blackwell?

I doubt it.

What for?

The Dougs, the Lyors etc are simply trying to recycle what has come before them, pretend they’re doing something useful and holding onto power.

It’s not unlike those running governments around the world.

They are scared, they are insecure to “share the wealth” and open the doors to anything and anyone new.

And so, they lock their doors and do deal like an Old Boys Club.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqcWh4lPa98

Cronies and toadies and sychophants who know no better write glowingly about these people.

They try to be smart and pretend to write “for the artist”, but they are part of the problem ‘cos they are part of the Old Boys Club machinery.

One lunch with a Lyor or an Irving and they are enraptured with having been invited and so, unwittingly, do their bidding.

They are today’s equivalent of The Plaster Casters and other groupies.

They are old fart groupies, but they are not groupies to artists- though they feign that they are.

They are groupies to those with power- that very small top percent of music executives who want nothing to change.

And this is why the music industry is down the crapper: Cosmetic changes and artists not taking control.

Artists not Occupying Wall Street or Universal Music or Sony Music.

Sure, there are the Jay-Zs, the Dr Dre’s, Russell Simmons etc, but they have been brought in to the Old Boys Network for a reason:

They were brought in to reach an audience someone like Doug and Lyor could never ever reach.

Why? They were and are white and Jewish.

How was Lyor Cohen going to “become street” without getting a team already in place to bring this street to him?

And which eventually became his Def Jam Records and with little or no advances paid to many on its roster.

It was a successful musical genre takeover for chump change aided and abetted by a few- at that time- Uncle Toms.

Def Jam was them hyped and became a magnet for the less fortunate- and the desperate.

Uncle Toms became respectable and years later wore sharp suits and started calling the shots.

The Tanning of the American Music Industry had begun.

And about time, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPeGT62474A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCMKEm1Seac

When Lyor Cohen started up Def Jam Japan, I was part of this plan.

And it was a business plan.

It had nothing to do with music.

It was a team looking at the bottom line and seeing that that there was a Japanese Hip Hop culture we could tap into.

How? Sign up a few Japanese wannabe Rappers for nothing and put in the least amount of money as possible on “artist development”.

Def Jam Japan just ddin’t fly.

Japanese Rap fans wouldn’t buy into local Rappers and Japanese Hip Hop.

They wanted to Buy American.

Lyor’s dreams of a Def Jam Japan died.

This Old Boys Network continues today with, to be fair, even the Old Boys not realizing that they are part of a money-making or even money-laundering network for others.

They need each other and are as “independent” as thirty and fortysomething “Indie” artists living with their parents.

In 2008 I decided that governments and world leaders are full of bullshit.

I also realized that we voted them in and we could fire them.

Same with those running music companies.

We might not be able to fire them- literally.

But we can ignore them and expose them for the frauds that they are.

Now is not the time to be intimidated.

Nor the time and place to look up to false idols and make-believe heroes

Fire these creepy opportunists.

The bullying must stop.

WNYC