THE MYSPACE COUNTDOWN CONTINUES (PART 2)

For those of you just tuning in, I’m counting MySpace plays to judge musical popularity as of July 2008, this being an era when the traditional record industry is in a shambles and Internet is ascendant. So far I’ve counted down past the top 50 with some gross omissions as I promised. By a strict count the grossest omission would be number one, Panic at the Disco, with some two hundred million plays, highest I've ever seen, and some forty million views. That’s a problem, though, because plays never run five times the number of views, so I don’t believe it. I suspect that it’s being manipulated just by the fact that somebody like me might be ranking them. I can believe the forty million views, so that’s where I’d rank them, though plays could very well be sixty million or so. That would place them right with their label-mates Fall Out Boy, who I also omitted. Then there’s their bass player's stable-mate Ashlee Simpson at 20 million, who I also omitted, along with Carrie Underwood at some 40 mil, coincidentally with one of the lamer My Space sites I’ve seen, especially since it’s ‘managed’ by Arista Nashville. Isn’t that what we’re trying to avoid here? Enter You Tube, exit Nashville.

So do you give up yet on who’s the number 3 t-shirt idol in the third world after Che Guevara and Bob Marley? It’s Kurt Cobain. Third-world cognoscenti cry out not just for revolution or minority equality, but out of sheer anguish at the very fact of their being. They ‘get it’ whether a record executive ever will or not. Nirvana has also received over 15 million MySpace plays, despite the fact that they only released three albums of new material and their leader self-destructed at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, apparently the prime age for self-destruction, the Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and James Dean of his era. Also at around or over fifteen million plays are rockers Oasis and Kid Rock, and guess which classic-era act? Beatles maybe? Stones? How about Journey, the Santana spin-off (they’ve fared much better than Santana himself)? Then there’s country star Faith Hill, Jason Mraz, rappers ‘The Dream’ and DJ Khaled, the perennial Madonna, this year’s model Leona Lewis and (pull up a drink) Paris Hilton, forever proving the old adage, “sex sells.” As I reiterate, this is a snapshot in time. It has no metaphysical meaning.

We’ve seen 90’s rock; we’ve seen 70’s; now where’s the 80’s? At around 10 million hits there are U2 and Green Day for the US and UK, along with the ex-King, now dethroned, Michael Jackson himself. Sister Janet’s right there also. Forget Van Halen; you gotta’ stay in shape. For Spanish speakers there are Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez, and for country lovers there are the good-looking Toby Keith, Dierks Bentley, Jessica Simpson, Shania Twain, and cow-couple Sugarland. Then there’s teen pop star Jesse McCartney, Shinedown and American Idol Jordin Sparks, rockers Limp Bizkit, rappers Three6Mafia and the still revered Tupac Shakur, decisively beating his old rival Notorious B.I.G., who pulls only around 100,000 posthumous MySpace hits. Then at the same 10 million level there are rising emo stars Metro Station, Wyclef Jean, last week’s Top 100 #1 Katy Perry and Gwen Stefani. Considering Gwen’s old band No Doubt itself still pulls 5 million hits with no maintenance or even any songs, a solo career may or may not have been a good career move for the ‘no-holla-back’ girl. Witness hubbie Gavin Rossdale’s re-energized career also.

Switching genres was DEFINITELY a good move for Jewel, who can’t rap worth a shit, but finds herself a rising star in country music with over five million MySpace plays, along with fellow country-folk Hank Williams, Jr. and Alan Jackson. There are also 90’s rockers Beck, Pearl Jam, and Radiohead around that level. Jazz gets their first entry on Hardie K’s list here with the bubbly Michael Buble’, as does sometimes alt-country rocker Ryan Adams. Where’s the 60’s music? Guess who tops the list? Meet Mr. Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan who Allen Ginsberg, no slouch himself, once referred to as “the greatest poet of our age” or something like that. Want some more poetic justice? The Mexican group Mana’ are right there with five million hits, Mana’ a group that’s never sung a word in English, did Led Zep’s ‘Fool in the Rain’ in Spanish’, and has never even bothered to establish an ‘official’ MySpace site. They cracked the Billboard Top 5 in 2006, though the average Anglo-American has never heard of them, with their CD ‘Amor es Combatir’ (‘Love is Warfare’). They’re one of my favorites. The Colombian hip-shaker Shakira, up-and-coming rapper David Banner, old-time-white-boy rappers Beastie Boys, country rising star Blake Shelton and Scandinavian inspirations-for-Cold Play Sigur Ros round out the five million category, along with Flobots, 80’s party animals Motley Crue and southern rockers Alkaline Trio. Guess what 60’s icons come next? The Who, followed by Jimi Hendrix.

Many more sixties and seventies favorites, all still active, show up at the 2-3 million hit level, including Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Elton John, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, the Eagles, James Taylor, and Jefferson Airplane (their Starship spin-off didn’t do as well). Tambien los Hispanicos demuestran su fortitud a este nivel con la apariencia de Juanes, Manu Chao, y Julieta Venegas. Then there are the Marley brothers Ziggy and Stephen following in daddy’s footsteps and playing his songs, America’s best 80’s band R.E.M., up-and-comer Duffy and freak-folkie Devendra Banhart. Ready for a 50’s rocker? Guess who? That’s right, Elvis the Pelvis, still getting a few million listens thirty years after his death and at least forty-five after his heyday. What about kiddie groups? Hanson’s here, along with the newly-active New Kids on the Block, featuring ‘the other Wahlberg.’ Then there’s ex-Take That star Robbie Williams. Wha ‘tsat? Never heard of them? They’re from the island, mate. They’ve got a million hits on their own, too. Don’t forget late Tex-Mex star Selena at 2-3 million. The ‘new’ Selena, or is it the ‘Mexican Miley’, Selena Gomez only gets 2-300,000, but give her some time, and maybe a Spanish dictionary, and maybe a few more years on the Disney Channel.

Obviously at this level we’ve got stars on their way down as well as their way up, such as Sam Sparro with his red-hot take on events at the Garden of Eden with ‘Black and Gold’ or Mexican Techno-Rancheros (my term, not theirs) Kinky. Scads of classic-rock biggies are at this million-hit level, including the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Lou Reed from the 60’s, but no CSN or Santana. There are Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, John Denver, Peter Frampton, and the BeeGees from the 70’s, but no Allman Brothers or Joni Mitchell. From the 80’s are Crowded House and Bauhaus, but no Tears for Fears. Not really classic but sounding a lot like it are Indigo Girls and the jammers Widespread Panic and Phish. Old-timers but not really rockers Sergio Mendes and George ‘Possum’ Jones are there at a million, as well as almost-world-music groups Ozomatli and Michael Franti’s Spearhead. Jazz’s Norah Jones is there with John Mayer and so is hip-hop’s P. Diddy/Puff Daddy/Sean Combs, or whatever he’s calling himself these days, ironically the richest rapper from other investments and involvements. We’re just counting popularity here, remember, not money.

Mainstream world music gets a lot more entries around the half-million level. There’s Lila Downs, TJ’s Nortec Collective, and everybody’s favorite Cambodian band Dengue Fever. Then there are country faves Lucinda Williams on the way up and Randy Travis on the way down and Dwight Yoakam holding his ground between acting gigs. 90’s Alanis Morrissette is there along with 70’s Genesis and their antidote, the Sex Pistols, along with 50’s rockers Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. Ready for some 40’s music? How about ol’ blue eyes, Frank Sinatra x 2, Sr. and Jr. both. I bet they’ve got a lot of the same fans. Guess who else? Yep, ol’ boots-made-for-walking Nancy is still pleasing fans. I walk by her mural every day at Hollywood and Highland. Then there’s my heroine Patti Smith and my hero Townes Van Zandt, the original Cowboy Junkie, proving that death CAN be a good career move, considering he never got more than thirty minutes of radio play in his life. There is poetic justice in the world. It wasn’t quite as good for Gram Parsons at half that nor fellow cowboy junkie Steve Earle.

The farther down you go, the thicker the field gets of course, and at a few hundred thousand hits there are many great artists rising from their graves in a universe now contracting, for instance: jazz greats John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, blues great Howlin’ Wolf, and their upbeat contemporary Doris Day. There’s world-music star Angelique Kidjo, Lyle Lovett, Carole King, and Thai chart-toppers Silly Fools. Bluegrass finally gets their vote in here with Allison Krauss and Union Station, though Jerry Douglass gets 100K on his own also, where the field starts to get really thick. There you find world-music greats Orchestra Baobab, Ali Farka Toure,’ Fela Kuti & Femi Kuti, Café Tacuba, Tinariwen, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Andy Palacio, bluegrass greats Ralph Stanley and Doc Watson, and old timers Os Mutantes, Joni Mitchell, the Allman Brothers, grateful splinter acts Ratdog, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart, and a surprisingly weak Carlos Santana, my vote for greatest disappointment. He really is not as well known among Hispanics as you might think. When he toured the US with Mana’ I suppose he was the secondary act. B.B. King is down there, too.

Are you ready for somebody from the 30’s? How about Leadbelly at a cool 50K, or maybe Blind Lemon Jefferson? 20’s? How about Al Jolson with the same? Rudy Vallee is down there somewhere. Any further listing would be a bit ridiculous. The main point is the comparative popularity among genres from a 2008 perspective. The other point is that with social networking, Internet and computers are now for everybody and record companies play only a secondary role. You Tube can even help a band where MySpace can’t. Many Thai bands from outback Isan who haven’t given a thought to MySpace have videos on You Tube. Figures like these of course are only good right here and right now. If they became a goal in themselves, then they could be manipulated like back-link farming and page ranking within the blogosphere, and thereafter meaningless as a true gauge of popularity.

So who are the big winners and the big losers in the MySpace music era? Aside from the youth for whom such is a way of life, big winners are the regional music centers in general. Big losers are the musicians manufactured by Hollywood, pablum for Saturday morning consumption. For example Austin old-timers Townes Van Zandt, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and the 13^th Floor Elevators each get more hits, 3-400,000 EACH, than some of their best-known 70’s contemporaries, while most boy bands get little or nothing at all. Elmore James has twice as many hits as the Monkees. How’s that for poetic justice?

MYSPACE REVOLUTION IS A REVELATION, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

The biggest paradigm shift in the popular music industry since 1955 has occurred and is now a fait accompli. The previous cultural and musical revolution occurred when greasy long-haired redneck rock-and-rollers from the South knocked corporate crooners from the North off the charts and changed music forever. In 1954 when Bill Haley first poked his head on to the charts, Sinatra and Como, Page and Fisher, Clooney and D. Day (Rosemary and Time) ruled the music sales charts as they had for years. By 1956 they barely retained a toe-hold as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Gene Vincent, all scored big hits, many of them right off the Louisiana Hay Ride as ‘hillbilly’ music become ‘rockabilly’ and ‘race’ music felt its way toward ‘soul.’ They would be joined in 1957 by Sam Cook, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and in 1958 by Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Eddie Cochran. The industry responded by signing its own version of watered-down rebellious youth music, much of it brilliant in its own right, in the form of the Everly Brothers, Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, Pat Boone, and ‘Little Ricky’ Nelson (not to mention Alvin and the Chipmunks), but by then the die was cast and the damage was done. The ‘old guard’ would never return. Pop music belonged to youth.

What does it all mean? It means that people reserve the right to create their own music and have it heard by others, without corporate interference or oversight. Not surprisingly this usually happens at the edges of corporate contentment where dissatisfaction takes root and creates fruit, freed from formula and following the inner cry for expression. That era in the South can hardly be described. Imagine families living in shacks dotting the countryside, with a dozen kids all going to school barefoot, cussing and fighting, never tamed by Church or State. And that’s the white people! The condition of blacks was unspeakable, one room shacks in open pastures, the wind blowing through the walls’ cracks, from which they share-cropped or ‘tenant farmed.’ I saw my first wood stoves there long before it became Foxfire hip, all this in the ‘richest country in the world.’ Whites there were consumed with their own inner demons and so were the blacks. The Civil War had never really ended and the Republican Reconstruction had yet to really begin. You either conformed or rebelled or you got the Hell out of Slidell. Or you sublimated those impulses into your art. That world ended with the Welfare Act of 1965.

Fast-forward fifty years and it’s happening again. It never really stopped happening of course. After the initial rock-and-roll years things settled back into a smug Tin Pan Alley predictability until the edges of the culture began screaming to be noticed by the center again, this time from the UK. Losing its colonies and its preeminent position in the world to the US, the UK was ripe for cultural revolution in the ‘60’s. Taking cues from the US and cross-breeding it with the existential fashions of the Continent, England came up with something truly original and brought it over to the US to remind us of what we had almost forgot, the boogie factor. Cross-breed that again with Beatnik poetry, a Harry Smith-inspired folk revival, ‘soul’ music and an unpopular war (sound familiar?) and the time was right for all Hell to break loose, the Psychedelic ‘60’s, followed in quick succession (and no certain order) by Southern rock, hard rock, soft-rock, and folk-rock. Once again the Industry raised its ugly head in the mid 70’s and incorporated beyond anything ever imagined, sending the Eagles, the BeeGees, John Denver, and disco music out to all corners of the world, all on vinyl and safe for public consumption. The New York ‘new wave’ and British punk rock said ‘fuck all that’ of course, and they were spot-on. So it goes in an endless dialectic between growth and contraction, thesis and antithesis, corporate crap and individual creativity, right up to the current day.

The traditional record industry is dead or dying and something else has come and taken its place. This time the medium is the message, the medium of Internet, and it’s not about stealing songs by download. It’s about choice, supply and demand. The pop music revolution that started in the US and got cross-bred with the UK, has caught fire in the rest of the world as well. Increasingly widespread affluence and its ironic counterparts, discontentment and artistic release, has spread to even the smallest countries. Art is something to be created by the ambitious individual, not handed down from corporate boardrooms. IPod and other MP3 players are but the visible symbols of the change. MySpace and other Internet social networks are at the heart of it. There you can listen to anything, if not everything that’s ever been created, all for free. Some die-hards grumble, but radio was always free, wasn’t it? Just like love, you don’t pay until you want to possess it, or see it performed live.

Sometime around 2005 the word got out that something was going on by Internet that any band could use to its advantage in this cut-throat industry. Those who signed on first might reap the largest benefits, of course, so by 2006 the race was on, ironically many times by the fans themselves, making sure that ‘their’ band was represented with its best songs. It was chaotic of course but fun to watch as it evolved. Chaos slowly organized itself and most bands have an ‘official MySpace site’ by now, sometimes to the exclusion of all others, sometimes to the exclusion of its own website, all this in a medium that barely even existed a decade ago. I got my first e-mail address in 1999, before most of my friends, but not all. Any band that doesn’t have a MySpace site by now just doesn’t care much about its future. It’s not that hard.

So what does it all mean? In short for me it means that ‘plays’ and ‘views’ of a band’s MySpace songs and site are a valuable look at a band’s level of popularity. When I was looking to book bands in Arizona, that’s the first thing I looked at. The numbers of plays and views tend to be similar, rarely one as much as twice the other, but that in itself tells a tale. A band with more views than plays seems to be ‘breaking out,’ with a surge of publicity as cause and effect. A band with more plays than views tends to be stable with long-term fans looking to listen. There is still an element of chaos, of course, multiple sites for many bands, etc., so the figures are somewhat provisional and any conclusions should be approached with caution, but are nonetheless enlightening. So what do the numbers say? Surely they must be skewed toward youth-oriented groups and hip-hop, right? Do country music groups do MySpace? The results are interesting. I see them as a reliable gauge of popularity, not money, but popularity. I’ll tell you next week. Do your own survey if you like, and we’ll compare notes. Stay tuned.