From the heat beating off the pavement to the angry lyrics and music welling up from the clubs, the recent New Music Seminar in New York City wasn`t so much a celebration of new music as a demonstration of how difficult it is to make it these days.
The seminar, in its 11th year, attracts more than 7,000 music-biz heavy hitters from around the world and is widely considered the year`s central music-industry event. But it`s hardly an all-for-one display of solidarity.
Music, like all creative expression, feeds off the society that created it, for better or worse. No wonder the seminar`s myriad panel discussions often stank of politics and ill will, a battleground where self-righteous voices were raised in anger and accusation. Some of them actually made sense, even if the messages they bore were hardly soothing.
”Lawyers, money and war,” said Ice-T, in assessing how he and his fellow rappers must fend off the politicians and lobby groups that would censor their music.
”As the walls go down in Europe, the walls are coming up in America,”
he said, commenting on the recent obscenity arrests of 2 Live Crew in Florida. Though Ice-T is a million-selling artist, he noted that it`s now a crime to sell his records to minors in certain Florida counties because of their graphic content.
Vernon Reid, guitarist for the band Living Colour, denounced some of the sex-obsessed raps by 2 Live Crew and Ice-T but also warned that the recent agreement by the record industry to put warning stickers voluntarily on records with explicit lyrics is a troubling precedent. A majority of these records is made by minority artists.
”The powers that be want to see `their` America reflected back at them,” Reid said. ”Their America is not gay, Latino or black. They want to control the way we create.”
”They” referred to, among others, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), leader of the charge against government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; and Tipper Gore, president of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), the right-wing lobby group that has been at the forefront of the record-stickering fight.
At the keynote address, Irving Azoff, a music mogul-turned-maverick of long standing and president of Giant Records, berated the industry for caving in to the PMRC.
”Did anyone really believe that when we agreed to stickering that all retailers would feel compelled to stock these records?” he asked.
Critic Dave Marsh later referred to the stickers as ”an admission of guilt” by the record industry.
Indeed, many retailers have refused to stock 2 Live Crew`s ”As Nasty As They Wanna Be,” declared obscene by a Florida judge, to avoid the fate of five merchants who have been arrested nationwide in recent months for selling the disc to minors.
Many panelists echoed Reid`s belief that Helms, Gore and other conservatives such as Florida Gov. Bob Martinez are trying to make rock and rap the scapegoats for society`s more insidious problems: crime, drug abuse, homelessness, poverty and racial intolerance.
”Just because the indicator on an elevator is going down, just like society, you don`t replace the indicator because the indicator isn`t what`s broken,” said pop critic Jon Pareles, of the New York Times, commenting during a panel on graphic song lyrics.
If the streets of Manhattan are any reflection of our society at large, rock and rap lyrics are, if anything, understating the world`s problems.
Within a block`s walk of seminar headquarters at the Marriott Marquis Hotel, I witnessed a drug bust and later watched as blacks rallied on a streetcorner near Times Square to protest white oppression. Wandering between clubs at night through some of the seedier sections of town, I was offered every enticement imaginable-sex, drugs, jewelry, bootleg tapes-and soon stopped carrying a wallet for fear that I`d soon be parting with it at gunpoint.
In many cases, the most riveting, and disturbing, performances given over five ”New Music Nights” by more than 250 bands were by those artists who funneled these stark realities through their amplifiers.
Prong, composed of three natives of Manhattan`s grimy, drug-ridden, poverty-stricken Lower East Side, played with battering-ram intensity at a Ritz showcase.
With their snarling guitars and gun-shot rhythms, the trio turned the dance floor into a huge ”mosh” pit, in which hundreds of white, wired youths slammed bodies and thrust fists into the air and, sometimes, at each other. As powerful as the music was, the mayhem in the audience gave the proceedings a stomach-turning twist. One unfortunate outsider who found himself trapped in the mosh pit was mugged viciously by the moshers before security intervened.
The ugly mood prevailed at many of the panels as well, where the love of music was no match for the streams of uninformed and often racially tinged rhetoric.
Black producers such as Chicago`s Marshall Jefferson and Detroit`s Derrick May took offense as white dance-music mavens from Manchester, England, began chortling that ”Americans have forgotten how to dance.”
”Dance music is dead when a guy like (Manchester artist) Adamski goes to No. 1 on the charts,” May retorted. Though house music was born in Chicago and nurtured in Detroit and New York, late-arriving Manchester acts such as Adamski, Happy Mondays and 808 State have turned it into a fashionable, money- making commodity.
”If you can play a kazoo in Manchester you get signed these days,” said Tony Wilson, the head of Manchester-based Factory Records.
Meanwhile, most of the seminal house artists in America are without record deals and still struggling to make a living.
”Why? Because no record-company bureaucrat will give a black man a chance,” said May, a sweeping exaggeration that nonetheless accurately reflected the enormity of his frustration.
May and Jefferson later walked out of the panel in a huff, and two days later controversial rap artist Ice Cube and his ”posse” made an early exit from another panel when rumors of potential gang violence made their way through the crowd.
No one expects rock `n` roll to heal these wounds. But the best of it should transcend them. Over five nights, I found at least five acts that did: – Follow For Now, a black hard-rock quintet from Atlanta that merged funk, punk, rap and metal and in blues-tinged voices delivered the most naive and necessary song of the seminar at CBGB`s: ”Where Are You Gonna Be If You Keep Mistreatin` Folks?”
– The Jody Grind, an Atlanta quartet, led by a remarkable vocalist, Kelly Hogan Murray. Backed at Tramps by one of the hardest-swinging acoustic bands this side of the Violent Femmes, she tackled country swing, Duke Ellington blues, Louis Jourdan jive and jazz with astonishing dexterity.
– Scrawl, a fresh-faced, girls-next-door trio from Columbus, Ohio, with a buzzing guitar-based sound and songs that range from frisky (the irresistable ”Charles”) to despairing. In the last year they`ve tightened their sound considerably, as evidenced by a stunning set at Woody`s, a club owned by Rolling Stone Ron Wood.
– Dramarama, a quintet from California via New Jersey, in an early-morning performance at Woody`s. Singer John Easdale closed the set with
”Last Cigarette,” a fevered meditation on the price of temptation. As he repeated the chorus of ”I know it`s killing me,” Easdale leaned into the microphone as if he meant every word. But the urgent music never once let him down.
– I Love You, four California guys who aren`t particularly original songwriters, nor particularly photogenic with their scraggly hair and pale complexions. But the roar they emitted from the speakers, complete with mind- boggling tempo changes, sounded like ”Dinosaurs Stalk the Earth”
revisited at CBGB`s. As the last note of feedback reverberated through the dank, dimly lit club about 3 a.m., singer Chris Palmer let out an audible sigh, a pool of sweat at his feet.
The promise of these five relatively unknown bands was summed up for me in a single gesture on the seminar`s final night, at a performance by Soul Asylum at the Marquee Club, when singer Dave Pirner interrupted his band`s ferocious set to perform Smokey Robinson`s Motown classic ”The Tracks of My Tears.”
Here was a skinny, long-haired white kid in a hard rock band from Minneapolis performing a song written 25 years ago by a black soul singer in Detroit. The song spoke to him, and now it was speaking to us, reminding us all for a few minutes, anyway, why music still matters.
