If it's not about music, it should be
Like just about everyone else, I watched Mariah Carey's January Super Bowl appearance in anticipation of something besides "The Star Spangled Banner". It came, of course, in the wake of the news that her former record company Virgin would pay her $28 million not to make any more records for it and that Carey would keep the $21-million signing bonus she got when she agreed to make four albums for $80 million. She made only one, the soundtrack to the disastrous movie "Glitter", which sold about 2 million records. That means Carey has made about $250 on every $15 CD sold.
In any case, Carey, who either had a nervous breakdown last year or didn't, didn't do anything embarrassing at the Super Bowl. The next day, some of the same pundits who had relegated Carey's career to the Milli Vanilli Memorial Scrap Heap were saying she had salvaged it, amid rumors that she was about to sign a contract with another label. It was an amazing comeback-for which she probably gave thanks to God, Francis Scott Key and the new music-business ethos, which says better to throw the safe overboard than to sink.
The record business is like Wall Street in wide screen; a blip becomes a bang, and Chicken Little's squawking quickly drowns out everything else. The music industry was down a whopping 2 percent and change last year, and the sky is falling. Label divisions are closing, layoffs are rampant and longtime contracts are being dropped. Warner Brothers, apparently unable to persuade Van Halen to take David Lee Roth back, dropped the band, which has sold tens of millions of mediocre albums for the company over a quarter-century.
And, if you're wondering about that live-in-Detroit album that saxophonist James Carter was supposed to release this month on Atlantic, it seems Atlantic has sent its artists to corporate bedmate Warner Brothers, home to such innovators as Boney M. When Carter's album is released, it may be a single disc, not the double that had been promised.
Everybody, of course, has a theory on why the music business is in a so-called slump. Sept. 11 gets blamed for everything, as does an aging consumer base, economic uncertainty, blah, blah. So how do we account for the fact that the movie industry had yet another record-breaking year in 2001 and that the DVD business is going through the roof?
Let me expound my own off-the-wall theory: Could it be that Mariah Carey's record was bad? That Whitney Houston's and Michael Jackson's overproduced pop is passe, having been supplanted by the leaner, more intimate soul of Alicia Keys and Angie Stone? Could it be that an industry spoiled greedy by records that sold 20 million copies has unrealistic expectations?
As for us aging baby boomers who allegedly would rather drop $100 on a steak dinner than $13 on a CD, well, we've bought almost 600,000 copies of Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft", which would make it the second-biggest-selling record of his career, barring greatest-hits collections. And why would that be? Because it's just a great record, a record that didn't need Super Bowl appearances to hype it. On the other hand, if old Bob ever wants to take a shot at "The Star Spangled Banner", I'll pay to see it. (Detroit Free Press) Many thanks to Michael.
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