BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. This week, coordinated attacks in Iraqi cities north and south, including Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi and Baghdad. And war raged in the media, too, as terrorists broadcast their threats and distributed them on leaflets. The violence in word and action has intensified in the run up to Wednesday's historic handover, when U.S. forces transfer control over Iraq to Iraqis. But many political analysts argue that the celebrated handover will not really hand all that much over. Coalition forces will retain control of much of Iraq's security and may even reserve the authority to impose martial law, should it come to that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Also on Wednesday, the Coalition-run Iraqi Media Network will pass into Iraqi control, and it's supposed to form the core of a new public broadcasting service. But the CPA has long been accused of being heavyhanded in its effort to shape the message, and those charges have continued in the run up to the handover. Simon Haselock, the CPA's head of media development and regulation, has tried to prepare for an orderly transition. To that end, he oversaw the passage of order number 65, which established a regulatory structure for Iraqi media complete with what he calls an FCC-style commission. But Steven Schwartz of the Weekly Standard told us last month that Haselock is over-regulating Iraqi media before it even has the chance to breathe on its own.
STEVEN SCHWARTZ: Decree number 65, which is a classic Simon Haselock type decree, basically gives the Coalition and its successor, the government of Iraq, regulatory control over print media, broadcasting, coverage of elections, mobile telephone services, internet providers and internet cafes. This is from Al Sabah's editorial, quote: "This commission will be lawmaker, prosecutor and judge."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The aforementioned Simon Haselock is the CPA's head of media development and regulation, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
SIMON HASELOCK: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's turn to Steven Schwartz's problem with decree number 65.
SIMON HASELOCK: First of all, it's not a decree; it's an order. But the order is, contrary to what Mr. Schwartz says, nothing like the Ministry of Information. It does only what the FCC does in that it issues broadcast licenses to television and radio operators, and it'll also regulate telecommunications. It has no statutory jurisdiction over the press. Order 65 says that the Commission will be empowered as the FCC is to establish codes of conduct which become attached to licenses. And those codes of conduct should be established in consultation with the profession and be based upon, you know, normally-accepted principles. For instance, you might have a code of conduct which says simply that journalists are required to tell the truth, that both sides of any given story must be given, that people should be given the opportunity for a right to reply--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Those codes aren't written in there now, is it? I mean that goes far, far beyond the American FCC.
SIMON HASELOCK: First of all, nobody's imposed anything. Nobody's drawn up any codes. All order 65 does is enable the Commission to start thinking about what sorts of codes that the Iraqis may need. They may decide that they don't want a code of conduct for the print, which will be self-regulatory, may decide it doesn't want a code of conduct or content for broadcasting. These things are not prescribed by the Commission; they are decided upon by a consensus and by a public consultation process. There are, and I would make no bones about it, some orders which have been issued by the CPA -- nothing to do with me, I hasten to add -- which do put some restrictions on the press -- one is specifically is order 14 which is essentially an order which restricts incitement to violence. That is the only legal restriction that there is, and I think it's only been used on two occasions. Whether it should have been used, and the fact that there was no due process in the way it was used, is another matter. And the fact is that the commission which will be established by order 65 will establish the due process that was missing in the application of that particular order.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about Schwartz's concern that, you know, this will impose what amounts to a chilling effect on freedom of speech by dint of the fact that it's out there monitoring every aspect of the airwaves, and also the internet.
SIMON HASELOCK: I, I think that carries a basic misunderstanding of the way an independent regulatory agency works. Are you seriously suggesting to me that a sovereign Iraqi government will not take unto itself, particularly at this state, a much more chilling politically and state-governed institutional framework for regulating the media control than it would be if it was an independent organization run by a board of governors who have been appointed specifically to protect the independence of the organization from state interference and from political interference, that it is subject to regular audit and reports that it has to make to the national assembly when it's formed? I think that institutionally we have created as many checks and balances as we can. If you speak to the broad mass of journalists and look at the broad range of newspaper articles that have been in Iraq about this commission, they're all, although concerned about what's going to happen when the government takes control of the reins, so to speak, they are broadly happy that there is going to be an independent agency and not something residing inside a ministry.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mr. Haselock, under this new framework, how involved will foreign money and foreign journalists be in supporting and overseeing local Iraqi media?
SIMON HASELOCK: Well it won't be involved in overseeing it at all. The point is, this is an Iraqi institution. What foreign governments and foreign institutions will do is offer their expertise and, in some cases, resources as far as training is concerned. The Iraqi Media Network, the whole point of that, is that it shouldn't be supported by foreign funds at all. At the moment, I mean, people have talked about the amount of money which had been put into it by the U.S. government. But over the next year or so, we will hope that the IMN as an institution, and all the other media in Iraq, become self-sufficient.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think of the notion that the Iraqi media ought to be allowed to develop utterly unfettered, the way it did in the United States in the days after the revolution where there was a great deal of instability?
SIMON HASELOCK: First of all, we don't have 200 years in Iraq. Secondly, we have learned a lot in that 200 years about how certain structures actually assist the development of media. You know, nobody has considered regulating newspapers. The fact is that broadcast frequencies are a limited public resources which should be managed. The second thing is that if you want to actually create a marketplace, you need to create a structure where investment has some form of surety. In the early stages of the time after Saddam, nobody was licensed, there was a hundred broadcasters, they were largely run by political parties and religious groups on capital, and as the capital ran out, these broadcasters failed, and nobody with any real business acumen or any media background was prepared to come and invest in Iraq because they had no guarantee that they could get licenses, they had protection of their property or that they had any corporate legal framework which would protect their investment. But I, I do get very frustrated, because people always believe that when you mention the word "regulation," in these sorts of societies, that you're talking about trying to censor people.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Simon Haselock, thank you very much.
SIMON HASELOCK: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Simon Haselock is the CPA's head of media development and regulation.
BOB GARFIELD: It's not hard to find President Bush on the evening news. There he is being appalled by the torture at Abu Ghraib. There he is faced with an insurgency of Nobel laureates on global warming. This may not be the kind of publicity an incumbent necessarily savors, but where is the challenger? Why, he seems to have vanished. But if invisibility seems to be a handicap, recall that John Kerry was nowhere in media sight before he won the Iowa caucuses. Joining me now is someone with a vivid memory of the Iowa campaign, former presidential candidate Howard Dean. Governor, welcome to On the Media.
HOWARD DEAN: Thanks for having me on.
BOB GARFIELD: First of all, a semi-invisible John Kerry? Deja vu?
HOWARD DEAN: I think the only reason John Kerry's invisible is because when you're running for president, you have to go at each place that you stop and give the same speech. Well, the traveling press corps can't write the same story for their editor 30 days in a row, so they don't. They write snippets of who's doing what to who and what he has to do to win and all that kind of stuff. It's mostly news analysis, not much news. And it's a tough thing to try to figure out how to fix, because the readers probably won't want the same story 30 days in a row either, but that's what John Kerry is doing, and he's doing it very effectively, cause I've been with him on the stump.
BOB GARFIELD: President Bush is famous for message management. Does it strike you that we're seeing a sort of un-message management -- a conscious decision by the Kerry campaign to kind of hunker down at a safe distance while the president takes all the incoming?
HOWARD DEAN: I don't think so. I think what's happened is that the news is so dramatic that's coming out of Iraq and so dramatic that's coming out of the 9/11 Commission that most of the press just isn't interested in covering the positive things that John Kerry's developing like his economic message, but people don't like to write about that kind of thing in the press. They like to write about conflict, they like to write about bad news. They generally don't cover good news. And right now John Kerry is mostly putting out position papers and good news, and that's just not something, unfortunately, the media is very interested in.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, let's go back a couple of months, and also let me change the metaphor. In the spring, the Bush campaign spent something on the order of 70 million dollars attacking Kerry with a series of ads aimed particularly at those battleground states. And Kerry, against all that is writ holy in presidential politics, hardly threw a counterpunch. It looked for all the world like rope-a-dope --Mohammed Ali's strategy to absorb the punches and tire out the opponent.
HOWARD DEAN: That's a very interesting thing that you should say that, because that's exactly what people outside the battleground see. But what people inside the battleground see is an enormous effort on the part of groups like the Media Fund and Act and other Democratic-oriented political action committees and 527s who are throwing just as much in those states as everybody else. The general public outside the battleground states get a very different picture of the campaign, because we rely on national media to cover the campaign. But the local media covers the campaigns in the battleground states, and local television stations are saturated with ads both for the Bush campaign and against the Bush campaign. And so the battleground states get a very different picture of the campaign than I think most of the other states do.
BOB GARFIELD: You mentioned that Senator Kerry is effective on the stump. I have to ask you about that. President Bush, of course, is notorious for his inability to put together a simple sentence. Kerry seems unable to put together a complex one. You know, but not for the want of trying. He gets snared in all of his own excess verbiage.
HOWARD DEAN: I think both characterizations are wrong. I actually think George Bush is very effective on the stump. I think it's kind of an Eastern construction that he mangles sentences and so forth. People don't care about that. In fact, I actually think it endears him to a lot of the viewing public. Similarly, I think John Kerry has improved his ability dramatically, and I'm a victim of that, [LAUGHS] I might add. You know, the last three weeks in Iowa he did a tremendous job. His message is more concise. His thinking is clear and it comes through. I think they're both going to be good on the stump, going into the general election.
BOB GARFIELD: Hm. On the subject of making voters understand who John Kerry is, there are those commentators who say that's not necessary, because what he really needs is the anyone-but-Bush vote. Newsweek called it the "sock puppet" strategy as in: I'd vote for a sock puppet before I'd vote for George Bush.
HOWARD DEAN: It's not enough. Certainly both sides are now locked in to at least, my guess is, 45 or 6 percent of the vote. So there's 8 percent or whatever it is undecided in the middle. Now, you can't simply come along as a negative strategy -- anybody but the present incumbent. You've really got to have your own positive program. John Kerry has spent the last 3 weeks outlining his economic program, outlining his health plan, outlining his education plan, substantive addresses on foreign policy. The one thing he hasn't done a lot of in the last few weeks is bash George Bush. Partly, he's left that to others. Partly, events are conspiring to undo what the president's carefully crafted image. But he's building the blocks of a positive campaign, and I don't think you can win the White House just on the anybody-but-Bush theory. I think you've got to have your own positive image and positive campaign as well. And I think that this is the right time to be doing that.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Governor. Well thank you very much.
HOWARD DEAN: Thanks very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Governor Howard Dean is supporting candidates through his organization, Democracy for America.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, the future of the music business.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield, with an update in the deregulation wars. And it's a big one. In a major victory for public interest groups and a blow for big media companies, a U.S. appeals court on Thursday told the FCC it could not enforce the loosened rules on media ownership it promulgated a year ago -- rules that would have permitted a company to own more broadcast stations in a single market.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Third Circuit Court said that the studies done by the FCC to support further deregulation contained, quote, "irrational assumptions and inconsistencies," and ordered the commission to better justify its decision. The court said it did not object to one company owning broadcast stations and newspapers in the same market, but said the FCC had to better explain why a single company should be allowed to own so many media outlets. Earlier this week, the Senate voted to repeal all of the FCC rule changes, but in the unlikely event that provision survived a House-Senate conference committee, the White House has promised a presidential veto. [MUSIC TAG]
BOB GARFIELD: Last month, the major record labels' trade group filed copyright infringement lawsuits against another 493 users of on line peer to peer file-trading networks, bringing the total to nearly 3,000. At the same time, Atlanta-based research firm Big Champagne reported that more people than ever, nearly 10 million, are using the peer to peers. For the five years that networks like Napster have come and gone and come again, their fans have been saying one of the prime attractions is the availability of music that isn't on the shelves at big box retail stores, and isn't being played on commercial radio. Rick Karr reports that the business model used by major labels has driven musicians and fans to the peer to peers -- and to other new technologies.
RICK KARR: Every generation seems to hear the decline of Western civilization in the next generation's pop music, but apocalyptic visions of the aging aside, the aesthetics of pop music have changed over the past couple decades, in large part due to changing business realities in the music industry. Harold Vogel is a New York financial analyst and author of Entertainment Industry Economics, a textbook that's just gone into its sixth edition. He says the changes have affected the record business and radio in the same way.
HAROLD VOGEL: There's a cycle of, let's say, protectionism and risk-aversion, and we're in the depth of that right now. There's certainly a lot of risk-aversion. If it isn't popular in twelve different markets, why should we play it? And nobody wants to play the unpopular or the new or the different.
RICK KARR: Vogel says the risk-averse phase of that business cycle is a long hangover of sorts from the industry's huge expansion in the 1960s and '70s. The Baby Boomers set off a boom in the record industry, rewarding labels that took risks on new talent by making those artists into bankable stars. [LED ZEPPELIN MUSIC PLAYS] Vogel says record labels got used to strong cash flow and big profits, so when the boom tapered off in the late '70s, the industry scrambled to sustain profitability. One solution came from sales of the new compact discs. A lot of music fans bought their record collections all over again. [LED ZEPPELIN] The other way to sustain profits was to cut costs, and so the record industry started to consolidate: conglomerates snapped up independent labels, and major labels merged. The conglomerates set earnings targets and borrowed a page from the movie business's playbook -- the "tentpole release." Vogel says that's what Hollywood calls a film that's supposed to be a blockbuster that props up the studio's finances.
HAROLD VOGEL: An expensive picture, high marketing, high production value, lots of big stars, and all your other pictures, your other 15 pictures or so, would fall under the tent, basically. This would carry the season and be the thing you talk about to your shareholders in the annual report that you write the next spring.
RICK KARR: The same pressures drive tentpole releases in the record business. At least once a quarter, says former Mercury and Warner Bros. chief Danny Goldberg, you have to have a big hit.
DANNY GOLDBERG: When you look at a schedule, and you know you have to make whatever the number is for your company -- 200 million or 300 million or 400 million for the year in terms of your top line of sales -- something you can ship a million of is ten million of those dollars, and almost the same amount of staff time goes into setting up a release where you ship a million as setting up a release where you ship a hundred thousand.
RICK KARR: By extension, a record that sells ten million copies is an even better financial proposition. Goldberg says that makes it harder for major labels to take risks and puts a premium on releases by bankable stars. Labels pay bigger and bigger cash advances to those stars and spend millions promoting their releases to retailers and radio broadcasters. But--:
DANNY GOLDBERG: The more resources that go into that, the less resources are available for the development of, of new talent.
RICK KARR: Even established stars suffer if their records sell only, say, a few hundred thousand copies. The business model at today's major labels, Goldberg says, can't accommodate and act like the Pretenders [PRETENDERS MUSIC UNDER] who released two platinum and one gold album at their peak in the 1980s. [PRETENDERS MUSIC UP FULL] But the business models at smaller independent labels are designed to support acts like that, and in fact the Pretenders are now signed to Goldberg's four and a half year old Artemis Records. Goldberg says independent labels have traditionally been where new artists go to build their careers.
DANNY GOLDBERG: We're just putting out our second album by somebody named Jesse Malin. I'm very excited about it. The first album did about 30,000 but got good press; created some good interest at some parts of the media, and he's a brilliant guy. [Jesse Malin SONG PLAYS]
DANNY GOLDBERG: I think a major label might have spent more on the last record in terms of things like tour support, but they might not have made the second record.
RICK KARR: Goldberg says that throughout the history of the music business, independent labels have gone through cycles of their own, releasing jazz, R&B, rock & roll and punk when the majors were avoiding risk. Once the new genres became popular, the majors swooped in and co-opted them. The down side of the independent label, Goldberg says, is that it has a much harder time marketing artists like Jesse Malin by getting them played on commercial radio, an industry that went through its own cycle of consolidation and risk aversion in the '90s. But Danny Goldberg is bullish on the ability of new technologies to make up for the lack of radio exposure. He likes satellite radio, and he's a big fan of the subscription internet service Rhapsody which allows users to listen to a library of hundreds of thousands of songs for a flat monthly fee. Even the peer to peer networks, the scourge of the major labels, are proving to be places where smaller artists can get some attention. Consider the Seattle-based trio The Jeunes. [THE JEUNES MUSIC PLAYS] They've only played 14 shows, none of them outside the Pacific Northwest. But they have a passionate new fan 4,695 miles away in Derby, England: Musician and D-J Jyoti Mishra.
JYOTI MISHRA: I found about [sic] their music, cause I downloaded it, I thought illegally. Turns out they'd posted it themselves, to try and get better known.
RICK KARR: Mishra says The Jeunes are one of thousands of bands taking part in an on-line Renaissance of pop music -- recording at home, and if they're lucky, gathering fans from among the millions who troll the internet looking for music.
JYOTI MISHRA: People aren't waiting round for permission from major labels to have a career, to having their own career themselves. It may be tiny; it may be very locally-based. It may be internet-based. But they're not waiting round or spending their whole lives chasing some dream of, of being signed and getting some big thing happening. [JYOTI MISHRA'S YOUR WOMAN PLAYS]
RICK KARR: But Mishra knows firsthand that the major labels still dominate one thing -- marketing. They have the clout and the money to grab media attention in a crowded marketplace. His song, Your Woman, recorded under the name Whitetown, got him picked off a small independent label and on to the major EMI Records. In 1997, it went to number one in eight countries and sold more than a million singles and albums worldwide. Without EMI, it would probably never have sold more than a few thousand copies. Seven years later, Jyoti Mishra says, technology is at least starting to give musicians and music fans a choice. They no longer have to buy into the major labels' business model. For On the Media, I'm Rick Karr in New York.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The impossible-to-categorize band Wilco has released a new album on Nonesuch just this week, called "A Ghost is Born." Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot traces the band's singlular history in his new book Wilco: Learning How to Die. He says Wilco has triumphed by willfully ignoring the music industry's business model.
GREG KOT: You get a Wilco album, and you're really not sure what it's going to sound like. Let's go to the first Wilco record, A.M. Think of a song like Casino Queen or Passenger Side from that record-- [WILCO'S PASSENGER SIDE PLAYS] pretty straightforward songs with a little bit of a country tinge to 'em, a little bit of a rock & roll tinge. Then you go to the very next record, Being There, and you play a song like Misunderstood-- [WILCO'S MISUNDERSTOOD PLAYS] and suddenly you realize is this even the same artist any more? [MISUNDERSTOOD PLAYS] There is definitely a sense with Wilco that their record company sort of had to keep up with it and figure out who's going to want to listen to this record, how do we market this thing? They were not a band that was easily categorized, and this really frustrated their record company.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about its commercial prospects? Did it keep its audience? Did it find new audiences for every new-sounding album?
GREG KOT: Well, they lost a few people along the way, but they also gained people along the way as they became more adventuresome. Their last record was the most successful record of their career, Yankee Hotel Fox Trot. It's nearing 500,000 sales, which is a gold record. [WILCO's YANKEE HOTEL FOX TROT] So they have been successful almost in spite of the fact that they get no radio air play, no MTV or VH1 video air play, and they keep changing the format with each record.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's talk about Yankee Hotel Fox Trot. As you said, Wilco was a successful group in the Reprise lineup. It sold briskly, it made money on tour, it never hit up the record company for expenses. Wilco may not have been a golden goose, but it was a solid performer. But Reprise declined to release that album. Why?
GREG KOT: Yeah. That was strictly a case of we don't hear a song on this album that can get played on radio, and without radio air play, this record is dead in the water.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But Wilco was rarely played on radio anyway, even when its most successful records were out.
GREG KOT: Exactly. That's why this thinking was so twisted. Here's a band that had never relied on radio air play or video air play to get the word out about its music and its albums, and suddenly they were being forced to think that way. Very quickly, the record company suggested to the band that maybe you'd be better off putting this record out somewhere else. And then, irony upon irony, the band ends up with another subsidiary of Warner Bros., Nonesuch, a much smaller label. So they basically sold the same record to Warner Bros. twice.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did the internet figure into this at all?
GREG KOT: It was a huge factor. Huge, huge, huge. Wilco has become very adept at using the internet to communicate with its fans. It streamed the contents of Yankee Hotel Fox Trot on its website for several months while the record was in this record company limbo, and what it did was -- when the band went on tour, even without a record label, that fall -- the fans al--already all knew the songs. They were singing along with the songs on the tour with Wilco. Basically, what it said was, Wilco doesn't need a record label to put out its records. it could have done this record completely on its own.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now Greg this is what's really interesting is they made this record more or less available for free on line, and people still went out, when it became available on Nonesuch, and bought it in the hundreds of thousands anyway.
GREG KOT: It has been proven again and again by other bands as well, not only Wilco, but a band like Radiohead which has had a big internet presence for its last few records, and then went on to debut very high with sales in its first week of putting those records out. Wilco had the same experience. What it says, I think, is that the record industry continually under-estimates the intelligence of the listeners, the fans. They think if they can get something for free, they're not going to pay for it later on. I think what they're really saying is: we'll check it out for free. If we don't like it, ain't no way we're going to buy it. But if we like it, we're going to want more. We're going to want everything that this band puts out. And in the case of Wilco, they roll the dice. They said you know what -- we think our fans are going to love this. And that's what happened.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that keeps happening, it seems.
GREG KOT: Yeah, it's -- to me, it's an incredible opportunity that the record industry has failed to capitalize on. And a band like Wilco obviously has capitalized on it and has shown what it can do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jeff Tweedy is the founder of Wilco. What drew you to him, and what makes him and his band such a ripe subject for study?
GREG KOT: Well, Tweedy is, I think, one of the few artists of the last 10, 15 years that continually takes these artistic risks -- the whole idea of being dashed against the rocks -- that's, to me, what art is all about -- showing you new things -- showing you new worlds. Each, each one of their albums is a world unto itself, I think, and they're one of the few bands, I think, that has consistently done that over the last 10, 15 years, and that's why I wanted to focus on them in this book.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Greg, thanks a lot.
GREG KOT: Glad to be on. Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Greg Kot is author of Wilco: Learning How to Die. Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy joins us now -- Jeff, thanks for doing this.
JEFF TWEEDY: No problem.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The music industry, I think it's fair to say, regards you as a means to an end. Now how do you regard the music industry? Do you need it?
JEFF TWEEDY: Well, no, I don't think we need it. By the same token, we want people to hear our music. Not everybody has a computer. [LAUGHS] Not everybody can come see us play. We can't play everywhere. And we wouldn't want to, cause we want to have lives and want to be at home sometimes. But we do want people to hear our music, and there's a infrastructure that is very much the way most people get to hear their music, still. And for me, I don't want to think about that stuff. I don't want to have to start my own label or think about manufacturing and, and--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Distribution, printing 'em up-- so the industry is - when you can make it work - it's the best and simplest means to your end. And when you can't, then you walk away?
JEFF TWEEDY: Yeah, if it's not working, I think that people would serve themselves well to really re-evaluate why it is exactly that they are playing music. I mean that's hard for me to say, because I've been very lucky, but-- to me, it's always been about, well, you're not really making it if you're not making the music you want to make. That's like the whole point. That's what's gratifying about being a musician and, and aspiring to make art and make records that you love. Most people don't need very much to survive, and it's hard. I'm not discrediting that. But certainly nobody that I know really can justify needing a guitar-shaped swimming pool. [LAUGHTER] Or a Rolls Royce or anything. And, you know, like people think they need to have a song on the radio to be validated. It's like -- man, you play a song and 10 people hang out and are moved by it -- that's really all it ever is. That's really all it ever can be.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, thank you very much.
JEFF TWEEDY: Thanks for having me. [WILCO MUSIC PLAYS]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, is public radio's fascination with news and information a classical blunder? And the songs you can't get out of your head.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. What do buggy whip manufacturers at the turn of the 20th Century have in common with classical music public radio programmers at the turn of the 21st? According to a recent article in the Weekly Standard, both know the feeling of immanent extinction. In the case of public radio, that extinction has been brought about by programming changes away from music toward news and information formats. The strategy, which grew out of detailed audience research, has proved extraordinarily successful, if you gauge success by sheer ratings. But it has also proved enormously controversial, as fans of classical, jazz and bluegrass throughout the country lost their only source of non-commercial music on the radio dial. For many of those critics, the perpetrator of all that is wrong with public radio, the anti-Christ himself, is the man who served up much of the audience research. His name is David Giovannoni, and he joins me now. David, welcome to the show.
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: You're an audience-measurement guy, which I presume doesn't make you a proponent for any format. I don't know if you personally care what's on your public radio station or not.
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Actually I do, but I don't let that cloud my professional judgment, no.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so in no way am I trying to paint you as sort of the anti-classical music guy, but I am just curious -- has not the balance tilted dramatically in the number of overall programming hours toward news talk versus music, classical and otherwise?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Yes. That's been the case for many years.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, if that shift has occurred, it strikes me that it seems to have occurred at a moment when public radio's fiscal health was very much in jeopardy, partly for economic reasons during the Reagan administration, and then subsequently for political reasons when the Republican revolution took place. Did some of the shift occur as a direct result of trying to build audience to generate more revenue for the system?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Yes. The threat of diminished federal funding has in the past motivated public radio stations to become more financially self-sufficient. It means that they're going to take a hard look at their program schedules and they're going to determine whether a program is really serving the public, really serving the missions that they have set out for it -- both of those things. And so the threats of decreased federal funding did cause a number of stations to do that calculus, and many of them chose to add news and information programming, but also --and this is an important point -- many of them chose to make their music programming better or more abundant.
BOB GARFIELD: What kind of numbers are you generating that has precipitated these various programming moves?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Well, let me give you one very specific example. Every public radio station across the week has a number of people that tune in to it. One of our assessments tracks that cumulative audience throughout the week, and what we find is that there are times of the day and types of programming that are very, very strong magnets for the stations' own listeners. And then there are times of the day and programming that basically chase the stations' own listeners away. Now, if a station were to fix that programming so that its own listeners would choose to listen to the station, we believe that that is an improvement in the public service.
BOB GARFIELD: It seems to me the central question here is just what constitutes public service. Is it to satisfy the wishes of the largest numbers and most engaged members of the listening audience, or is it to serve the under-served? Isn't serving the under-served a core responsibility of the public radio mission as many stations define it?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: As many stations define it, of course it is. And you know there is a vast under-served audience in America for intelligent, high-quality, civil, civically-responsible news and information programming, as much as there is an under-served audience for jazz programming in all of its flavors, as much as there is an under-served audience for classical music programming in all of its flavors.
BOB GARFIELD: Is it possible that technology will ultimately render this controversy moot -- that people who savor classical music and miss it on the public airwaves will soon realize that they don't need public radio to bring it to them?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: I guess every station has to ask itself what constitutes a more valued and valuable public service -- providing a listener something he or she cannot get anywhere else or something he or she can get somewhere else.
BOB GARFIELD: David, thank you.
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: David Giovannoni is president of Audience Research Analysis.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some audience research suggests that classical music lovers shun modernity, but one of history's best-known classical pianists distinguished himself by embracing everything the latest electronic media had to offer. More than 20 years after his death, pianist Glenn Gould remains perhaps the most controversial performer of classical music in the 20th Century, though he performed for only half of his creative life. An international sensation at the tender age of 31, he suddenly renounced the concert stage and declared that he would henceforth express himself solely through media. On the Media's Senior Producer Arun Rath climbed down from his ivory tower with this appreciation.
ARUN RATH: If we want to be glib, we can reduce Glenn Gould's media prophecy to this: the concert is dead. Long live recording. [STRAUSS'S ELEKTRA W/BIRGIT NILSSON SINGING UP & UNDER] Of course the concert isn't dead. Classical ticket sales are doing better than ever. But it's also true that media have forever changed our experience of music. Tim Page is a music critic for the Washington Post and the editor of the Glenn Gould Reader.
TIM PAGE: To give you an example, when the Metropolitan Opera put on Strauss's Elektra in 1981 with Birgit Nilsson, and they telecast it over PBS, it's estimated that more men, women and children saw and heard the work that night than the sum total of all audiences that had encountered Elektra since its premiere in 1909. Now that's one single night. That's saying quite a lot. [MUSIC: SCHNABEL PLAYING BEETHOVEN 4]
ARUN RATH: Gould even found possibilities in the limitations of technology. As a child listening to Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven concertos, Gould enjoyed the mandatory breaks every four minutes to flip the 78s. Breaking the music down into these segments helped him understand Beethoven's structures. [GOULD LIVE IN LENINGRAD, BACH KEYBOARD CONCERTO NO. 1] Gould believed the concert hall bred bad habits in even the best musicians. In a 1968 interview, he described how he came to put exaggerated phrases in a Bach partita.
GLENN GOULD: And the reason that they got into it, was that I had to play it in very large halls which weren't set up with Bach in mind, certainly, and try to project it to that man up there in the top balcony. And as I did that, I gradually picked up all kinds of what I suppose Sir Tyrone Guthrie would call "bits of business," you know? And I added this hairpin and that hairpin to a phrase that didn't demand it, didn't need it, and that ultimately destroyed the fabric of the music. [APPLAUSE]
ARUN RATH: So Gould favored an intimate acoustic in his recordings. Andrew Quint is the classical music editor for The Absolute Sound. [GOULD/BACH SINFONIA 9 IN F MAJOR UP & UNDER]
ANDREW QUINT: Gould's recordings were all made for Columbia and CBS in studios or in studio-like environments, like the little department store auditorium that he utilized for all those years in Toronto, and not in concert halls. This, of course, gave him a great deal of control over the finished product, but it also allowed him to reject sonically the concert hall experience. He didn't want the music to have any kind of acoustic halo or to sound overly reverberant. The sound on his records is very close up and immediate. I think with these recordings the listener at home is invited to join him in what's a very intensely personal experience, an exploration of the music at hand, and Gould's recordings really pull you in.
ARUN RATH: The intimacy was crucial. Gould longed for what he called a "one to one" relationship with his listener -- something he thought couldn't take place in a crowded concert hall. A large part of Gould's concert aversion came out of his personal hangups. He hated traveling, hated playing with unfamiliar orchestras and untested instruments. And while playing before thousands of people, Gould felt as uncomfortable as a Buddhist in the Roman Coliseum.
GLENN GOULD: There's a very curious and, and almost sadistic lust for blood that overcomes the concert listener, and there's a waiting for it to happen, a waiting for the horn to fluff; a waiting for the strings to become ragged; a waiting for the conductor to forget the subdivide, you know? And it's dreadful!
ARUN RATH: But mostly he objected to the hierarchy of the concert hall -- the plight of the guy in the cheap seats who couldn't hear as well. Gould thought that if music gets distorted for that poor fellow in the last row of the balcony, aren't concerts unfair, even immoral? Andrew Quint.
ANDREW QUINT: I think there's a democratizing aspect of recordings, to be sure. But this becomes less of an issue when the right kind of music is being played in the right kind of form.
ARUN RATH: Even an acoustically perfect performing space wouldn't have been enough for Gould. Part of his moral quest was to deliver as inspired and perfect renderings as possible, and he resented what he called the "non-take-two-ness" of the concert. Gould threw himself into the production process - the ability to equalize the sound - splice in corrections and pick from alternate takes -- and for this, the perfectionist was loathed by the purists.
GLENN GOULD: They feel that there's a certain amount of cheating involved, and of course there is, and they resent the fact that you can, in fact, virtually eliminate error.
ARUN RATH: He relished what he called "discovery in the studio." For instance, one of his more provocative interpretations of Bach was a product of an editing session some weeks after the original recording.
GLENN GOULD: One fugue, the A Minor from the first volume of the Wohltemperte Clavier consisted of two extraordinary takes which were absolutely different in character and which miraculously matched each other, paced each other in tempi, and this is very unusual. [WELL TEMPERED KLAVIER UP FULL]
ARUN RATH: Unless you're especially sensitive to piano technique or listen very closely, it's hard to detect the splices between the turgidly-phrased take 6 and the jaunty take 8. Most of the time, the effect is of a subtle sense of emotional movement. So through an act of inspiration after the actual performance, we get an interpretation that never could have occurred in the concert hall.
GLENN GOULD: I think one can really treat tape as, as a film director treats his rushes. One can look at it the day after and say now what have we really got here? What can we do with this? What does this all mean? [WELL TEMPERED KLAVIER UP FULL, ENDS] [START GOULD/BRAHMS RHAPSODY NO. 2 UP & UNDER]
ARUN RATH: Electronic media also gave the listener some creative control, moving closer to that one-to-one relationship that Gould craved. That relationship began with the first volume knob, but what Gould ultimately had in mind is a lot more involved.
GLENN GOULD: I'd love to issue a series of variant performances and let the, let the listener choose what they, themselves, most like. Let them assemble their own performance. Give them all the component parts, all the component splices rendered at different tempi with different dynamic inflections, and let them put something together that they really enjoy. Make them participant to that degree.
ARUN RATH: That's a lot to ask from a listener, but Gould thought most media so far had under-estimated consumers. He believed in the capacity of people, not just to handle the technology, but to comprehend several ideas at once. If he had a favorite musical form, it was the fugue -- a composition that simultaneously makes use of several melodic lines. When he made a radio documentary about the Canadian North, Gould used his interviews the way Bach used tunes. [EXCERPT FROM IDEA OF THE NORTH PLAYS] [ALL OVERLAPPING EACH OTHER]
SPEAKER 1: Well, I did one of 30 days....
SPEAKER 2: ...and then for another 11 years....
SPEAKER 3: Perhaps they assume -- they, they would....
GLENN GOULD: There's no particular reason, it seems to me, why one shouldn't be able to comprehend clearly and concisely two or three simultaneous conversations.
SPEAKER 1: ...simply traveled it month after month, year after year....
SPEAKER 2: ...I can't conceive of such a person being really untouched by....
SPEAKER 3: More skeptical....
ARUN RATH: Not a surprising sentiment for a guy who could play a 5-voice Bach fugue and give a distinct character to each individual line. He may have over-estimated his audience a little, but the fact is media consumers engage in this type of fugal multi-tasking all the time. Like now, maybe you're listening to the radio while flipping through the paper or surfing the net. And even television, the one household medium apt to capture our whole attention, is cluttered with boxes and crawls, and we have the option to follow some or all of them at the same time. In his own time, Gould used the power of media to open new frontiers and old music, but he also predicted in his quirky, take-no-prisoners fashion, the potential of electronic media and its audience to open new frontiers on the full range of art and ideas. For On the Media, I'm Arun Rath. [MUSIC ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you ever have a tune burrow into your brain? Experts call it an earworm, and it can sound like this: [MR. SOFTEE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] This month, in his continuing battle against noise pollution, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has proposed banning that theme from city streets, where it spills forth all summer long from Mr. Softee ice cream trucks. Think of the mayor as exterminator, nozzle trained on a public infestation of earworms. I remember the first time I had one. I was 9 years old. [MY BOY LOLLIPOP UP & UNDER]
SINGER: MY BOY LOLLIPOP YOU MAKE MY HEART GO GIDDYAP YOU SET THE WORLD ON FIRE YOU ARE MY ONE DESIRE YOU'RE MY LOLLIPOP [HARMONICA] My Boy Lollipop was number two on the hit parade, and it made my heart go giddyap until I was ready to dash my brains out. Took me years to get rid of it. Even now, it sneaks back if I'm tired. But, it could have been worse. [IT'S A SMALL WORLD PLAYS]
CHORUS OF
SINGERS: IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That nightmare tune appeared on a list of top ten earworms compiled last year by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris, with the help of his students. As you might have guessed, songs with lyrics stick most, followed by commercial jingles and instrumental tunes. Kellaris found that most episodes last for hours. Those poor kids. [LION SLEEPS TONIGHT PLAYS]
SINGER: IN THE JUNGLE, THE MIGHTY JUNGLE, THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT IN THE JUNGLE...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In June of 1985, two young climbers attempted to scale a peak in the Peruvian Andes. As told in the book and documentary Touching the Void, one of them fell into a crevasse and was presumed dead. At one point, he almost wished he was, because of an earworm. [TOUCHING THE VOID CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: I did have one time when I got a song going through my head, and it was by a band called Boney M. I don't really like Boney M's music.
SINGERS: TRA LA LA
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA LA LA LA--
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA, LA LA--
MAN: SHE LOOKS LIKE--
MAN: And it just went on and on and on, for hours. I found it very upsetting, cause I, I wanted to try and get it out of my head, I was thinking, you know, bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M.
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They say that musicians, women and neurotics are most susceptible to earworm, but according to the San Francisco Gate, Mark Twain once wrote a short story about a, quote, "jingling rhyme" that became indelibly lodged in the author's mind until he passed it on to another hapless victim. But does that really work? They say breathing into a paper bag can cure hiccups, but can no one rid me of this meddlesome tune? [MISSION IMPOSSIBLE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] Yes. It turns out Neva Grant, a senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition, has the cure.
NEVA GRANT: Yes, I do, Brooke. It is the song America from the musical West Side Story. You deploy this particular antidote when the song that's stuck in your head is so bad that even hearing: [SINGING] I LIKE TO BE IN AMERICA, over and over again is, is better than what was ever there before. Because you need something forceful to kind of push whatever the other thing is firmly out of the way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So there you have it, folks. An end to misery. But don't thank me yet. It may not work for you. Even worse, you might not be able to get America out of your head. In that case, blame Neva. [INSTRUMENTAL SECTION OF AMERICA UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Janeen Price, Megan Ryan and Tony Field, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kosseff and Mike Vuolo and editing help from Sharon Ball. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme, which listeners tell us is too complicated to be an earworm. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
FEMALE SINGER: HERE YOU ARE FREE, AND YOU HAVE PRIDE.
MALE SINGERS: LONG AS YOU STAY ON YOUR OWN SIDE.
FEMALE SINGER: DREAM TO BE ANYTHING YOU CHOOSE.
MALE SINGERS: DREAM TO WAIT TABLES AND SHINE SHOES.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. This week, coordinated attacks in Iraqi cities north and south, including Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi and Baghdad. And war raged in the media, too, as terrorists broadcast their threats and distributed them on leaflets. The violence in word and action has intensified in the run up to Wednesday's historic handover, when U.S. forces transfer control over Iraq to Iraqis. But many political analysts argue that the celebrated handover will not really hand all that much over. Coalition forces will retain control of much of Iraq's security and may even reserve the authority to impose martial law, should it come to that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Also on Wednesday, the Coalition-run Iraqi Media Network will pass into Iraqi control, and it's supposed to form the core of a new public broadcasting service. But the CPA has long been accused of being heavyhanded in its effort to shape the message, and those charges have continued in the run up to the handover. Simon Haselock, the CPA's head of media development and regulation, has tried to prepare for an orderly transition. To that end, he oversaw the passage of order number 65, which established a regulatory structure for Iraqi media complete with what he calls an FCC-style commission. But Steven Schwartz of the Weekly Standard told us last month that Haselock is over-regulating Iraqi media before it even has the chance to breathe on its own.
STEVEN SCHWARTZ: Decree number 65, which is a classic Simon Haselock type decree, basically gives the Coalition and its successor, the government of Iraq, regulatory control over print media, broadcasting, coverage of elections, mobile telephone services, internet providers and internet cafes. This is from Al Sabah's editorial, quote: "This commission will be lawmaker, prosecutor and judge."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The aforementioned Simon Haselock is the CPA's head of media development and regulation, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show.
SIMON HASELOCK: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's turn to Steven Schwartz's problem with decree number 65.
SIMON HASELOCK: First of all, it's not a decree; it's an order. But the order is, contrary to what Mr. Schwartz says, nothing like the Ministry of Information. It does only what the FCC does in that it issues broadcast licenses to television and radio operators, and it'll also regulate telecommunications. It has no statutory jurisdiction over the press. Order 65 says that the Commission will be empowered as the FCC is to establish codes of conduct which become attached to licenses. And those codes of conduct should be established in consultation with the profession and be based upon, you know, normally-accepted principles. For instance, you might have a code of conduct which says simply that journalists are required to tell the truth, that both sides of any given story must be given, that people should be given the opportunity for a right to reply--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Those codes aren't written in there now, is it? I mean that goes far, far beyond the American FCC.
SIMON HASELOCK: First of all, nobody's imposed anything. Nobody's drawn up any codes. All order 65 does is enable the Commission to start thinking about what sorts of codes that the Iraqis may need. They may decide that they don't want a code of conduct for the print, which will be self-regulatory, may decide it doesn't want a code of conduct or content for broadcasting. These things are not prescribed by the Commission; they are decided upon by a consensus and by a public consultation process. There are, and I would make no bones about it, some orders which have been issued by the CPA -- nothing to do with me, I hasten to add -- which do put some restrictions on the press -- one is specifically is order 14 which is essentially an order which restricts incitement to violence. That is the only legal restriction that there is, and I think it's only been used on two occasions. Whether it should have been used, and the fact that there was no due process in the way it was used, is another matter. And the fact is that the commission which will be established by order 65 will establish the due process that was missing in the application of that particular order.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about Schwartz's concern that, you know, this will impose what amounts to a chilling effect on freedom of speech by dint of the fact that it's out there monitoring every aspect of the airwaves, and also the internet.
SIMON HASELOCK: I, I think that carries a basic misunderstanding of the way an independent regulatory agency works. Are you seriously suggesting to me that a sovereign Iraqi government will not take unto itself, particularly at this state, a much more chilling politically and state-governed institutional framework for regulating the media control than it would be if it was an independent organization run by a board of governors who have been appointed specifically to protect the independence of the organization from state interference and from political interference, that it is subject to regular audit and reports that it has to make to the national assembly when it's formed? I think that institutionally we have created as many checks and balances as we can. If you speak to the broad mass of journalists and look at the broad range of newspaper articles that have been in Iraq about this commission, they're all, although concerned about what's going to happen when the government takes control of the reins, so to speak, they are broadly happy that there is going to be an independent agency and not something residing inside a ministry.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mr. Haselock, under this new framework, how involved will foreign money and foreign journalists be in supporting and overseeing local Iraqi media?
SIMON HASELOCK: Well it won't be involved in overseeing it at all. The point is, this is an Iraqi institution. What foreign governments and foreign institutions will do is offer their expertise and, in some cases, resources as far as training is concerned. The Iraqi Media Network, the whole point of that, is that it shouldn't be supported by foreign funds at all. At the moment, I mean, people have talked about the amount of money which had been put into it by the U.S. government. But over the next year or so, we will hope that the IMN as an institution, and all the other media in Iraq, become self-sufficient.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think of the notion that the Iraqi media ought to be allowed to develop utterly unfettered, the way it did in the United States in the days after the revolution where there was a great deal of instability?
SIMON HASELOCK: First of all, we don't have 200 years in Iraq. Secondly, we have learned a lot in that 200 years about how certain structures actually assist the development of media. You know, nobody has considered regulating newspapers. The fact is that broadcast frequencies are a limited public resources which should be managed. The second thing is that if you want to actually create a marketplace, you need to create a structure where investment has some form of surety. In the early stages of the time after Saddam, nobody was licensed, there was a hundred broadcasters, they were largely run by political parties and religious groups on capital, and as the capital ran out, these broadcasters failed, and nobody with any real business acumen or any media background was prepared to come and invest in Iraq because they had no guarantee that they could get licenses, they had protection of their property or that they had any corporate legal framework which would protect their investment. But I, I do get very frustrated, because people always believe that when you mention the word "regulation," in these sorts of societies, that you're talking about trying to censor people.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Simon Haselock, thank you very much.
SIMON HASELOCK: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Simon Haselock is the CPA's head of media development and regulation.
BOB GARFIELD: It's not hard to find President Bush on the evening news. There he is being appalled by the torture at Abu Ghraib. There he is faced with an insurgency of Nobel laureates on global warming. This may not be the kind of publicity an incumbent necessarily savors, but where is the challenger? Why, he seems to have vanished. But if invisibility seems to be a handicap, recall that John Kerry was nowhere in media sight before he won the Iowa caucuses. Joining me now is someone with a vivid memory of the Iowa campaign, former presidential candidate Howard Dean. Governor, welcome to On the Media.
HOWARD DEAN: Thanks for having me on.
BOB GARFIELD: First of all, a semi-invisible John Kerry? Deja vu?
HOWARD DEAN: I think the only reason John Kerry's invisible is because when you're running for president, you have to go at each place that you stop and give the same speech. Well, the traveling press corps can't write the same story for their editor 30 days in a row, so they don't. They write snippets of who's doing what to who and what he has to do to win and all that kind of stuff. It's mostly news analysis, not much news. And it's a tough thing to try to figure out how to fix, because the readers probably won't want the same story 30 days in a row either, but that's what John Kerry is doing, and he's doing it very effectively, cause I've been with him on the stump.
BOB GARFIELD: President Bush is famous for message management. Does it strike you that we're seeing a sort of un-message management -- a conscious decision by the Kerry campaign to kind of hunker down at a safe distance while the president takes all the incoming?
HOWARD DEAN: I don't think so. I think what's happened is that the news is so dramatic that's coming out of Iraq and so dramatic that's coming out of the 9/11 Commission that most of the press just isn't interested in covering the positive things that John Kerry's developing like his economic message, but people don't like to write about that kind of thing in the press. They like to write about conflict, they like to write about bad news. They generally don't cover good news. And right now John Kerry is mostly putting out position papers and good news, and that's just not something, unfortunately, the media is very interested in.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, let's go back a couple of months, and also let me change the metaphor. In the spring, the Bush campaign spent something on the order of 70 million dollars attacking Kerry with a series of ads aimed particularly at those battleground states. And Kerry, against all that is writ holy in presidential politics, hardly threw a counterpunch. It looked for all the world like rope-a-dope --Mohammed Ali's strategy to absorb the punches and tire out the opponent.
HOWARD DEAN: That's a very interesting thing that you should say that, because that's exactly what people outside the battleground see. But what people inside the battleground see is an enormous effort on the part of groups like the Media Fund and Act and other Democratic-oriented political action committees and 527s who are throwing just as much in those states as everybody else. The general public outside the battleground states get a very different picture of the campaign, because we rely on national media to cover the campaign. But the local media covers the campaigns in the battleground states, and local television stations are saturated with ads both for the Bush campaign and against the Bush campaign. And so the battleground states get a very different picture of the campaign than I think most of the other states do.
BOB GARFIELD: You mentioned that Senator Kerry is effective on the stump. I have to ask you about that. President Bush, of course, is notorious for his inability to put together a simple sentence. Kerry seems unable to put together a complex one. You know, but not for the want of trying. He gets snared in all of his own excess verbiage.
HOWARD DEAN: I think both characterizations are wrong. I actually think George Bush is very effective on the stump. I think it's kind of an Eastern construction that he mangles sentences and so forth. People don't care about that. In fact, I actually think it endears him to a lot of the viewing public. Similarly, I think John Kerry has improved his ability dramatically, and I'm a victim of that, [LAUGHS] I might add. You know, the last three weeks in Iowa he did a tremendous job. His message is more concise. His thinking is clear and it comes through. I think they're both going to be good on the stump, going into the general election.
BOB GARFIELD: Hm. On the subject of making voters understand who John Kerry is, there are those commentators who say that's not necessary, because what he really needs is the anyone-but-Bush vote. Newsweek called it the "sock puppet" strategy as in: I'd vote for a sock puppet before I'd vote for George Bush.
HOWARD DEAN: It's not enough. Certainly both sides are now locked in to at least, my guess is, 45 or 6 percent of the vote. So there's 8 percent or whatever it is undecided in the middle. Now, you can't simply come along as a negative strategy -- anybody but the present incumbent. You've really got to have your own positive program. John Kerry has spent the last 3 weeks outlining his economic program, outlining his health plan, outlining his education plan, substantive addresses on foreign policy. The one thing he hasn't done a lot of in the last few weeks is bash George Bush. Partly, he's left that to others. Partly, events are conspiring to undo what the president's carefully crafted image. But he's building the blocks of a positive campaign, and I don't think you can win the White House just on the anybody-but-Bush theory. I think you've got to have your own positive image and positive campaign as well. And I think that this is the right time to be doing that.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Governor. Well thank you very much.
HOWARD DEAN: Thanks very much.
BOB GARFIELD: Governor Howard Dean is supporting candidates through his organization, Democracy for America.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, the future of the music business.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield, with an update in the deregulation wars. And it's a big one. In a major victory for public interest groups and a blow for big media companies, a U.S. appeals court on Thursday told the FCC it could not enforce the loosened rules on media ownership it promulgated a year ago -- rules that would have permitted a company to own more broadcast stations in a single market.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Third Circuit Court said that the studies done by the FCC to support further deregulation contained, quote, "irrational assumptions and inconsistencies," and ordered the commission to better justify its decision. The court said it did not object to one company owning broadcast stations and newspapers in the same market, but said the FCC had to better explain why a single company should be allowed to own so many media outlets. Earlier this week, the Senate voted to repeal all of the FCC rule changes, but in the unlikely event that provision survived a House-Senate conference committee, the White House has promised a presidential veto. [MUSIC TAG]
BOB GARFIELD: Last month, the major record labels' trade group filed copyright infringement lawsuits against another 493 users of on line peer to peer file-trading networks, bringing the total to nearly 3,000. At the same time, Atlanta-based research firm Big Champagne reported that more people than ever, nearly 10 million, are using the peer to peers. For the five years that networks like Napster have come and gone and come again, their fans have been saying one of the prime attractions is the availability of music that isn't on the shelves at big box retail stores, and isn't being played on commercial radio. Rick Karr reports that the business model used by major labels has driven musicians and fans to the peer to peers -- and to other new technologies.
RICK KARR: Every generation seems to hear the decline of Western civilization in the next generation's pop music, but apocalyptic visions of the aging aside, the aesthetics of pop music have changed over the past couple decades, in large part due to changing business realities in the music industry. Harold Vogel is a New York financial analyst and author of Entertainment Industry Economics, a textbook that's just gone into its sixth edition. He says the changes have affected the record business and radio in the same way.
HAROLD VOGEL: There's a cycle of, let's say, protectionism and risk-aversion, and we're in the depth of that right now. There's certainly a lot of risk-aversion. If it isn't popular in twelve different markets, why should we play it? And nobody wants to play the unpopular or the new or the different.
RICK KARR: Vogel says the risk-averse phase of that business cycle is a long hangover of sorts from the industry's huge expansion in the 1960s and '70s. The Baby Boomers set off a boom in the record industry, rewarding labels that took risks on new talent by making those artists into bankable stars. [LED ZEPPELIN MUSIC PLAYS] Vogel says record labels got used to strong cash flow and big profits, so when the boom tapered off in the late '70s, the industry scrambled to sustain profitability. One solution came from sales of the new compact discs. A lot of music fans bought their record collections all over again. [LED ZEPPELIN] The other way to sustain profits was to cut costs, and so the record industry started to consolidate: conglomerates snapped up independent labels, and major labels merged. The conglomerates set earnings targets and borrowed a page from the movie business's playbook -- the "tentpole release." Vogel says that's what Hollywood calls a film that's supposed to be a blockbuster that props up the studio's finances.
HAROLD VOGEL: An expensive picture, high marketing, high production value, lots of big stars, and all your other pictures, your other 15 pictures or so, would fall under the tent, basically. This would carry the season and be the thing you talk about to your shareholders in the annual report that you write the next spring.
RICK KARR: The same pressures drive tentpole releases in the record business. At least once a quarter, says former Mercury and Warner Bros. chief Danny Goldberg, you have to have a big hit.
DANNY GOLDBERG: When you look at a schedule, and you know you have to make whatever the number is for your company -- 200 million or 300 million or 400 million for the year in terms of your top line of sales -- something you can ship a million of is ten million of those dollars, and almost the same amount of staff time goes into setting up a release where you ship a million as setting up a release where you ship a hundred thousand.
RICK KARR: By extension, a record that sells ten million copies is an even better financial proposition. Goldberg says that makes it harder for major labels to take risks and puts a premium on releases by bankable stars. Labels pay bigger and bigger cash advances to those stars and spend millions promoting their releases to retailers and radio broadcasters. But--:
DANNY GOLDBERG: The more resources that go into that, the less resources are available for the development of, of new talent.
RICK KARR: Even established stars suffer if their records sell only, say, a few hundred thousand copies. The business model at today's major labels, Goldberg says, can't accommodate and act like the Pretenders [PRETENDERS MUSIC UNDER] who released two platinum and one gold album at their peak in the 1980s. [PRETENDERS MUSIC UP FULL] But the business models at smaller independent labels are designed to support acts like that, and in fact the Pretenders are now signed to Goldberg's four and a half year old Artemis Records. Goldberg says independent labels have traditionally been where new artists go to build their careers.
DANNY GOLDBERG: We're just putting out our second album by somebody named Jesse Malin. I'm very excited about it. The first album did about 30,000 but got good press; created some good interest at some parts of the media, and he's a brilliant guy. [Jesse Malin SONG PLAYS]
DANNY GOLDBERG: I think a major label might have spent more on the last record in terms of things like tour support, but they might not have made the second record.
RICK KARR: Goldberg says that throughout the history of the music business, independent labels have gone through cycles of their own, releasing jazz, R&B, rock & roll and punk when the majors were avoiding risk. Once the new genres became popular, the majors swooped in and co-opted them. The down side of the independent label, Goldberg says, is that it has a much harder time marketing artists like Jesse Malin by getting them played on commercial radio, an industry that went through its own cycle of consolidation and risk aversion in the '90s. But Danny Goldberg is bullish on the ability of new technologies to make up for the lack of radio exposure. He likes satellite radio, and he's a big fan of the subscription internet service Rhapsody which allows users to listen to a library of hundreds of thousands of songs for a flat monthly fee. Even the peer to peer networks, the scourge of the major labels, are proving to be places where smaller artists can get some attention. Consider the Seattle-based trio The Jeunes. [THE JEUNES MUSIC PLAYS] They've only played 14 shows, none of them outside the Pacific Northwest. But they have a passionate new fan 4,695 miles away in Derby, England: Musician and D-J Jyoti Mishra.
JYOTI MISHRA: I found about [sic] their music, cause I downloaded it, I thought illegally. Turns out they'd posted it themselves, to try and get better known.
RICK KARR: Mishra says The Jeunes are one of thousands of bands taking part in an on-line Renaissance of pop music -- recording at home, and if they're lucky, gathering fans from among the millions who troll the internet looking for music.
JYOTI MISHRA: People aren't waiting round for permission from major labels to have a career, to having their own career themselves. It may be tiny; it may be very locally-based. It may be internet-based. But they're not waiting round or spending their whole lives chasing some dream of, of being signed and getting some big thing happening. [JYOTI MISHRA'S YOUR WOMAN PLAYS]
RICK KARR: But Mishra knows firsthand that the major labels still dominate one thing -- marketing. They have the clout and the money to grab media attention in a crowded marketplace. His song, Your Woman, recorded under the name Whitetown, got him picked off a small independent label and on to the major EMI Records. In 1997, it went to number one in eight countries and sold more than a million singles and albums worldwide. Without EMI, it would probably never have sold more than a few thousand copies. Seven years later, Jyoti Mishra says, technology is at least starting to give musicians and music fans a choice. They no longer have to buy into the major labels' business model. For On the Media, I'm Rick Karr in New York.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The impossible-to-categorize band Wilco has released a new album on Nonesuch just this week, called "A Ghost is Born." Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot traces the band's singlular history in his new book Wilco: Learning How to Die. He says Wilco has triumphed by willfully ignoring the music industry's business model.
GREG KOT: You get a Wilco album, and you're really not sure what it's going to sound like. Let's go to the first Wilco record, A.M. Think of a song like Casino Queen or Passenger Side from that record-- [WILCO'S PASSENGER SIDE PLAYS] pretty straightforward songs with a little bit of a country tinge to 'em, a little bit of a rock & roll tinge. Then you go to the very next record, Being There, and you play a song like Misunderstood-- [WILCO'S MISUNDERSTOOD PLAYS] and suddenly you realize is this even the same artist any more? [MISUNDERSTOOD PLAYS] There is definitely a sense with Wilco that their record company sort of had to keep up with it and figure out who's going to want to listen to this record, how do we market this thing? They were not a band that was easily categorized, and this really frustrated their record company.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about its commercial prospects? Did it keep its audience? Did it find new audiences for every new-sounding album?
GREG KOT: Well, they lost a few people along the way, but they also gained people along the way as they became more adventuresome. Their last record was the most successful record of their career, Yankee Hotel Fox Trot. It's nearing 500,000 sales, which is a gold record. [WILCO's YANKEE HOTEL FOX TROT] So they have been successful almost in spite of the fact that they get no radio air play, no MTV or VH1 video air play, and they keep changing the format with each record.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's talk about Yankee Hotel Fox Trot. As you said, Wilco was a successful group in the Reprise lineup. It sold briskly, it made money on tour, it never hit up the record company for expenses. Wilco may not have been a golden goose, but it was a solid performer. But Reprise declined to release that album. Why?
GREG KOT: Yeah. That was strictly a case of we don't hear a song on this album that can get played on radio, and without radio air play, this record is dead in the water.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But Wilco was rarely played on radio anyway, even when its most successful records were out.
GREG KOT: Exactly. That's why this thinking was so twisted. Here's a band that had never relied on radio air play or video air play to get the word out about its music and its albums, and suddenly they were being forced to think that way. Very quickly, the record company suggested to the band that maybe you'd be better off putting this record out somewhere else. And then, irony upon irony, the band ends up with another subsidiary of Warner Bros., Nonesuch, a much smaller label. So they basically sold the same record to Warner Bros. twice.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did the internet figure into this at all?
GREG KOT: It was a huge factor. Huge, huge, huge. Wilco has become very adept at using the internet to communicate with its fans. It streamed the contents of Yankee Hotel Fox Trot on its website for several months while the record was in this record company limbo, and what it did was -- when the band went on tour, even without a record label, that fall -- the fans al--already all knew the songs. They were singing along with the songs on the tour with Wilco. Basically, what it said was, Wilco doesn't need a record label to put out its records. it could have done this record completely on its own.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now Greg this is what's really interesting is they made this record more or less available for free on line, and people still went out, when it became available on Nonesuch, and bought it in the hundreds of thousands anyway.
GREG KOT: It has been proven again and again by other bands as well, not only Wilco, but a band like Radiohead which has had a big internet presence for its last few records, and then went on to debut very high with sales in its first week of putting those records out. Wilco had the same experience. What it says, I think, is that the record industry continually under-estimates the intelligence of the listeners, the fans. They think if they can get something for free, they're not going to pay for it later on. I think what they're really saying is: we'll check it out for free. If we don't like it, ain't no way we're going to buy it. But if we like it, we're going to want more. We're going to want everything that this band puts out. And in the case of Wilco, they roll the dice. They said you know what -- we think our fans are going to love this. And that's what happened.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that keeps happening, it seems.
GREG KOT: Yeah, it's -- to me, it's an incredible opportunity that the record industry has failed to capitalize on. And a band like Wilco obviously has capitalized on it and has shown what it can do.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jeff Tweedy is the founder of Wilco. What drew you to him, and what makes him and his band such a ripe subject for study?
GREG KOT: Well, Tweedy is, I think, one of the few artists of the last 10, 15 years that continually takes these artistic risks -- the whole idea of being dashed against the rocks -- that's, to me, what art is all about -- showing you new things -- showing you new worlds. Each, each one of their albums is a world unto itself, I think, and they're one of the few bands, I think, that has consistently done that over the last 10, 15 years, and that's why I wanted to focus on them in this book.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Greg, thanks a lot.
GREG KOT: Glad to be on. Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Greg Kot is author of Wilco: Learning How to Die. Wilco founder Jeff Tweedy joins us now -- Jeff, thanks for doing this.
JEFF TWEEDY: No problem.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The music industry, I think it's fair to say, regards you as a means to an end. Now how do you regard the music industry? Do you need it?
JEFF TWEEDY: Well, no, I don't think we need it. By the same token, we want people to hear our music. Not everybody has a computer. [LAUGHS] Not everybody can come see us play. We can't play everywhere. And we wouldn't want to, cause we want to have lives and want to be at home sometimes. But we do want people to hear our music, and there's a infrastructure that is very much the way most people get to hear their music, still. And for me, I don't want to think about that stuff. I don't want to have to start my own label or think about manufacturing and, and--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Distribution, printing 'em up-- so the industry is - when you can make it work - it's the best and simplest means to your end. And when you can't, then you walk away?
JEFF TWEEDY: Yeah, if it's not working, I think that people would serve themselves well to really re-evaluate why it is exactly that they are playing music. I mean that's hard for me to say, because I've been very lucky, but-- to me, it's always been about, well, you're not really making it if you're not making the music you want to make. That's like the whole point. That's what's gratifying about being a musician and, and aspiring to make art and make records that you love. Most people don't need very much to survive, and it's hard. I'm not discrediting that. But certainly nobody that I know really can justify needing a guitar-shaped swimming pool. [LAUGHTER] Or a Rolls Royce or anything. And, you know, like people think they need to have a song on the radio to be validated. It's like -- man, you play a song and 10 people hang out and are moved by it -- that's really all it ever is. That's really all it ever can be.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, thank you very much.
JEFF TWEEDY: Thanks for having me. [WILCO MUSIC PLAYS]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, is public radio's fascination with news and information a classical blunder? And the songs you can't get out of your head.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. What do buggy whip manufacturers at the turn of the 20th Century have in common with classical music public radio programmers at the turn of the 21st? According to a recent article in the Weekly Standard, both know the feeling of immanent extinction. In the case of public radio, that extinction has been brought about by programming changes away from music toward news and information formats. The strategy, which grew out of detailed audience research, has proved extraordinarily successful, if you gauge success by sheer ratings. But it has also proved enormously controversial, as fans of classical, jazz and bluegrass throughout the country lost their only source of non-commercial music on the radio dial. For many of those critics, the perpetrator of all that is wrong with public radio, the anti-Christ himself, is the man who served up much of the audience research. His name is David Giovannoni, and he joins me now. David, welcome to the show.
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: You're an audience-measurement guy, which I presume doesn't make you a proponent for any format. I don't know if you personally care what's on your public radio station or not.
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Actually I do, but I don't let that cloud my professional judgment, no.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so in no way am I trying to paint you as sort of the anti-classical music guy, but I am just curious -- has not the balance tilted dramatically in the number of overall programming hours toward news talk versus music, classical and otherwise?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Yes. That's been the case for many years.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, if that shift has occurred, it strikes me that it seems to have occurred at a moment when public radio's fiscal health was very much in jeopardy, partly for economic reasons during the Reagan administration, and then subsequently for political reasons when the Republican revolution took place. Did some of the shift occur as a direct result of trying to build audience to generate more revenue for the system?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Yes. The threat of diminished federal funding has in the past motivated public radio stations to become more financially self-sufficient. It means that they're going to take a hard look at their program schedules and they're going to determine whether a program is really serving the public, really serving the missions that they have set out for it -- both of those things. And so the threats of decreased federal funding did cause a number of stations to do that calculus, and many of them chose to add news and information programming, but also --and this is an important point -- many of them chose to make their music programming better or more abundant.
BOB GARFIELD: What kind of numbers are you generating that has precipitated these various programming moves?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Well, let me give you one very specific example. Every public radio station across the week has a number of people that tune in to it. One of our assessments tracks that cumulative audience throughout the week, and what we find is that there are times of the day and types of programming that are very, very strong magnets for the stations' own listeners. And then there are times of the day and programming that basically chase the stations' own listeners away. Now, if a station were to fix that programming so that its own listeners would choose to listen to the station, we believe that that is an improvement in the public service.
BOB GARFIELD: It seems to me the central question here is just what constitutes public service. Is it to satisfy the wishes of the largest numbers and most engaged members of the listening audience, or is it to serve the under-served? Isn't serving the under-served a core responsibility of the public radio mission as many stations define it?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: As many stations define it, of course it is. And you know there is a vast under-served audience in America for intelligent, high-quality, civil, civically-responsible news and information programming, as much as there is an under-served audience for jazz programming in all of its flavors, as much as there is an under-served audience for classical music programming in all of its flavors.
BOB GARFIELD: Is it possible that technology will ultimately render this controversy moot -- that people who savor classical music and miss it on the public airwaves will soon realize that they don't need public radio to bring it to them?
DAVID GIOVANNONI: I guess every station has to ask itself what constitutes a more valued and valuable public service -- providing a listener something he or she cannot get anywhere else or something he or she can get somewhere else.
BOB GARFIELD: David, thank you.
DAVID GIOVANNONI: Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: David Giovannoni is president of Audience Research Analysis.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Some audience research suggests that classical music lovers shun modernity, but one of history's best-known classical pianists distinguished himself by embracing everything the latest electronic media had to offer. More than 20 years after his death, pianist Glenn Gould remains perhaps the most controversial performer of classical music in the 20th Century, though he performed for only half of his creative life. An international sensation at the tender age of 31, he suddenly renounced the concert stage and declared that he would henceforth express himself solely through media. On the Media's Senior Producer Arun Rath climbed down from his ivory tower with this appreciation.
ARUN RATH: If we want to be glib, we can reduce Glenn Gould's media prophecy to this: the concert is dead. Long live recording. [STRAUSS'S ELEKTRA W/BIRGIT NILSSON SINGING UP & UNDER] Of course the concert isn't dead. Classical ticket sales are doing better than ever. But it's also true that media have forever changed our experience of music. Tim Page is a music critic for the Washington Post and the editor of the Glenn Gould Reader.
TIM PAGE: To give you an example, when the Metropolitan Opera put on Strauss's Elektra in 1981 with Birgit Nilsson, and they telecast it over PBS, it's estimated that more men, women and children saw and heard the work that night than the sum total of all audiences that had encountered Elektra since its premiere in 1909. Now that's one single night. That's saying quite a lot. [MUSIC: SCHNABEL PLAYING BEETHOVEN 4]
ARUN RATH: Gould even found possibilities in the limitations of technology. As a child listening to Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven concertos, Gould enjoyed the mandatory breaks every four minutes to flip the 78s. Breaking the music down into these segments helped him understand Beethoven's structures. [GOULD LIVE IN LENINGRAD, BACH KEYBOARD CONCERTO NO. 1] Gould believed the concert hall bred bad habits in even the best musicians. In a 1968 interview, he described how he came to put exaggerated phrases in a Bach partita.
GLENN GOULD: And the reason that they got into it, was that I had to play it in very large halls which weren't set up with Bach in mind, certainly, and try to project it to that man up there in the top balcony. And as I did that, I gradually picked up all kinds of what I suppose Sir Tyrone Guthrie would call "bits of business," you know? And I added this hairpin and that hairpin to a phrase that didn't demand it, didn't need it, and that ultimately destroyed the fabric of the music. [APPLAUSE]
ARUN RATH: So Gould favored an intimate acoustic in his recordings. Andrew Quint is the classical music editor for The Absolute Sound. [GOULD/BACH SINFONIA 9 IN F MAJOR UP & UNDER]
ANDREW QUINT: Gould's recordings were all made for Columbia and CBS in studios or in studio-like environments, like the little department store auditorium that he utilized for all those years in Toronto, and not in concert halls. This, of course, gave him a great deal of control over the finished product, but it also allowed him to reject sonically the concert hall experience. He didn't want the music to have any kind of acoustic halo or to sound overly reverberant. The sound on his records is very close up and immediate. I think with these recordings the listener at home is invited to join him in what's a very intensely personal experience, an exploration of the music at hand, and Gould's recordings really pull you in.
ARUN RATH: The intimacy was crucial. Gould longed for what he called a "one to one" relationship with his listener -- something he thought couldn't take place in a crowded concert hall. A large part of Gould's concert aversion came out of his personal hangups. He hated traveling, hated playing with unfamiliar orchestras and untested instruments. And while playing before thousands of people, Gould felt as uncomfortable as a Buddhist in the Roman Coliseum.
GLENN GOULD: There's a very curious and, and almost sadistic lust for blood that overcomes the concert listener, and there's a waiting for it to happen, a waiting for the horn to fluff; a waiting for the strings to become ragged; a waiting for the conductor to forget the subdivide, you know? And it's dreadful!
ARUN RATH: But mostly he objected to the hierarchy of the concert hall -- the plight of the guy in the cheap seats who couldn't hear as well. Gould thought that if music gets distorted for that poor fellow in the last row of the balcony, aren't concerts unfair, even immoral? Andrew Quint.
ANDREW QUINT: I think there's a democratizing aspect of recordings, to be sure. But this becomes less of an issue when the right kind of music is being played in the right kind of form.
ARUN RATH: Even an acoustically perfect performing space wouldn't have been enough for Gould. Part of his moral quest was to deliver as inspired and perfect renderings as possible, and he resented what he called the "non-take-two-ness" of the concert. Gould threw himself into the production process - the ability to equalize the sound - splice in corrections and pick from alternate takes -- and for this, the perfectionist was loathed by the purists.
GLENN GOULD: They feel that there's a certain amount of cheating involved, and of course there is, and they resent the fact that you can, in fact, virtually eliminate error.
ARUN RATH: He relished what he called "discovery in the studio." For instance, one of his more provocative interpretations of Bach was a product of an editing session some weeks after the original recording.
GLENN GOULD: One fugue, the A Minor from the first volume of the Wohltemperte Clavier consisted of two extraordinary takes which were absolutely different in character and which miraculously matched each other, paced each other in tempi, and this is very unusual. [WELL TEMPERED KLAVIER UP FULL]
ARUN RATH: Unless you're especially sensitive to piano technique or listen very closely, it's hard to detect the splices between the turgidly-phrased take 6 and the jaunty take 8. Most of the time, the effect is of a subtle sense of emotional movement. So through an act of inspiration after the actual performance, we get an interpretation that never could have occurred in the concert hall.
GLENN GOULD: I think one can really treat tape as, as a film director treats his rushes. One can look at it the day after and say now what have we really got here? What can we do with this? What does this all mean? [WELL TEMPERED KLAVIER UP FULL, ENDS] [START GOULD/BRAHMS RHAPSODY NO. 2 UP & UNDER]
ARUN RATH: Electronic media also gave the listener some creative control, moving closer to that one-to-one relationship that Gould craved. That relationship began with the first volume knob, but what Gould ultimately had in mind is a lot more involved.
GLENN GOULD: I'd love to issue a series of variant performances and let the, let the listener choose what they, themselves, most like. Let them assemble their own performance. Give them all the component parts, all the component splices rendered at different tempi with different dynamic inflections, and let them put something together that they really enjoy. Make them participant to that degree.
ARUN RATH: That's a lot to ask from a listener, but Gould thought most media so far had under-estimated consumers. He believed in the capacity of people, not just to handle the technology, but to comprehend several ideas at once. If he had a favorite musical form, it was the fugue -- a composition that simultaneously makes use of several melodic lines. When he made a radio documentary about the Canadian North, Gould used his interviews the way Bach used tunes. [EXCERPT FROM IDEA OF THE NORTH PLAYS] [ALL OVERLAPPING EACH OTHER]
SPEAKER 1: Well, I did one of 30 days....
SPEAKER 2: ...and then for another 11 years....
SPEAKER 3: Perhaps they assume -- they, they would....
GLENN GOULD: There's no particular reason, it seems to me, why one shouldn't be able to comprehend clearly and concisely two or three simultaneous conversations.
SPEAKER 1: ...simply traveled it month after month, year after year....
SPEAKER 2: ...I can't conceive of such a person being really untouched by....
SPEAKER 3: More skeptical....
ARUN RATH: Not a surprising sentiment for a guy who could play a 5-voice Bach fugue and give a distinct character to each individual line. He may have over-estimated his audience a little, but the fact is media consumers engage in this type of fugal multi-tasking all the time. Like now, maybe you're listening to the radio while flipping through the paper or surfing the net. And even television, the one household medium apt to capture our whole attention, is cluttered with boxes and crawls, and we have the option to follow some or all of them at the same time. In his own time, Gould used the power of media to open new frontiers and old music, but he also predicted in his quirky, take-no-prisoners fashion, the potential of electronic media and its audience to open new frontiers on the full range of art and ideas. For On the Media, I'm Arun Rath. [MUSIC ENDS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you ever have a tune burrow into your brain? Experts call it an earworm, and it can sound like this: [MR. SOFTEE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] This month, in his continuing battle against noise pollution, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has proposed banning that theme from city streets, where it spills forth all summer long from Mr. Softee ice cream trucks. Think of the mayor as exterminator, nozzle trained on a public infestation of earworms. I remember the first time I had one. I was 9 years old. [MY BOY LOLLIPOP UP & UNDER]
SINGER: MY BOY LOLLIPOP YOU MAKE MY HEART GO GIDDYAP YOU SET THE WORLD ON FIRE YOU ARE MY ONE DESIRE YOU'RE MY LOLLIPOP [HARMONICA] My Boy Lollipop was number two on the hit parade, and it made my heart go giddyap until I was ready to dash my brains out. Took me years to get rid of it. Even now, it sneaks back if I'm tired. But, it could have been worse. [IT'S A SMALL WORLD PLAYS]
CHORUS OF
SINGERS: IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That nightmare tune appeared on a list of top ten earworms compiled last year by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris, with the help of his students. As you might have guessed, songs with lyrics stick most, followed by commercial jingles and instrumental tunes. Kellaris found that most episodes last for hours. Those poor kids. [LION SLEEPS TONIGHT PLAYS]
SINGER: IN THE JUNGLE, THE MIGHTY JUNGLE, THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT IN THE JUNGLE...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In June of 1985, two young climbers attempted to scale a peak in the Peruvian Andes. As told in the book and documentary Touching the Void, one of them fell into a crevasse and was presumed dead. At one point, he almost wished he was, because of an earworm. [TOUCHING THE VOID CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: I did have one time when I got a song going through my head, and it was by a band called Boney M. I don't really like Boney M's music.
SINGERS: TRA LA LA
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA LA LA LA--
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA, LA LA--
MAN: SHE LOOKS LIKE--
MAN: And it just went on and on and on, for hours. I found it very upsetting, cause I, I wanted to try and get it out of my head, I was thinking, you know, bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M.
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They say that musicians, women and neurotics are most susceptible to earworm, but according to the San Francisco Gate, Mark Twain once wrote a short story about a, quote, "jingling rhyme" that became indelibly lodged in the author's mind until he passed it on to another hapless victim. But does that really work? They say breathing into a paper bag can cure hiccups, but can no one rid me of this meddlesome tune? [MISSION IMPOSSIBLE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] Yes. It turns out Neva Grant, a senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition, has the cure.
NEVA GRANT: Yes, I do, Brooke. It is the song America from the musical West Side Story. You deploy this particular antidote when the song that's stuck in your head is so bad that even hearing: [SINGING] I LIKE TO BE IN AMERICA, over and over again is, is better than what was ever there before. Because you need something forceful to kind of push whatever the other thing is firmly out of the way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So there you have it, folks. An end to misery. But don't thank me yet. It may not work for you. Even worse, you might not be able to get America out of your head. In that case, blame Neva. [INSTRUMENTAL SECTION OF AMERICA UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Janeen Price, Megan Ryan and Tony Field, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kosseff and Mike Vuolo and editing help from Sharon Ball. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme, which listeners tell us is too complicated to be an earworm. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.
FEMALE SINGER: HERE YOU ARE FREE, AND YOU HAVE PRIDE.
MALE SINGERS: LONG AS YOU STAY ON YOUR OWN SIDE.
FEMALE SINGER: DREAM TO BE ANYTHING YOU CHOOSE.
MALE SINGERS: DREAM TO WAIT TABLES AND SHINE SHOES.
- Back to story:
- June 25, 2004
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Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
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An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
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Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
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A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
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A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
- Department of Justice Warrant Names Journalist as a Possible Leak Co-Conspirator
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A Source for Sources
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The Totally Legal Subpoena
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Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
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With IRS Scandal, Conservative Bloggers Feel Vindicated
