Darren Hayes: Art(pop) vs Commerce
By Nick Levine
I’ve never been short of an opinion.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Lady Gaga has a new album out. I’m also not sure if you’ve noticed, but there’s been a bit of a backlash. Not because it’s bad (I think the record is amazing actually) and not because she’s offended a nation or pissed off a President (recent interviews reveal her to be more likeable, more accessible this time round). No, the backlash appears to be because she’s apparently not selling enough records compared to her own track record. She’s been branded a ‘flop’ but purely by her own high previous sales standards.
I’ve been watching the whole thing unfold from the sidelines and I’ve started to feel the situation has very little to do with Gaga and is more a symptom of a larger pattern in the way we view the performer in 2013.
Since the beginning of my career in 1996 all the way through to today I’ve embraced the age of connectedness. My laptop and now my phone have, for the last 17 or so years, been a portal through which I’ve been able to communicate with my audience and in turn, they with me. I’ve enjoyed how it tore down the veil between the pedestal and those applauding and at the same time I’ve lamented the price for such immediate access: the demystification of the pop star.
When I was a child the people I looked up to were untouchable. Michael Jackson. Prince. Madonna. Icons of the 1980s who seemed otherworldly. It helped that they lived in a world beyond mortal access – approved retouched publicity stills, carefully-orchestrated press and a way of recording and making music that could only be done by professionals.
You might make a tape recording of their music, but you always wanted the ‘real’ thing – a vinyl record or an official cassette. You might catch a glimpse of them without make-up in a rogue paparazzi shot – but you never truly tore the curtain down to see what was beyond. And that is what kept you watching.
There was value in the music they made and there was a sense of awe at their untouchable-ness. I couldn’t recreate the feeling they gave me unless I had the smell of fresh printer ink coming off the album booklet or sat up all night hoping to catch a video premiere on MTV. I could imitate their style or fashion but I didn’t necessarily know where to buy the clothes or how they generated this glow of… well, stardom. And I loved it. It fascinated me.
This polite gap between the audience and the stage was, for me at least, where mystery lay and my respect for the performer thrived. One of the most incredible pieces of advice I ever received in the music business was to understand that my role was purely to fascinate. I was not a marketing expert. I was not a radio promotions guy. It helped to understand those facets of my industry but by and large my greatest contribution to the machine was to be magical. To keep ‘em interested. To be an artist just like those who inspired me growing up.
That was 1996 – the beginning of the fall of a golden era in the music industry. Soon illegal file sharing would usher in a new financial paranoia at the record labels, sales would eventually drop overall and the spontaneity and risk-taking nature of my business began to change.
The element that brought about the most change in the business was invariably that invention by Steve Jobs. The iPod changed the object of desire from a 12-inch vinyl album to a shiny electronic device. What became important was the size of your, err, hard drive. Less important the stuff on it. Sure, we all wanted as many songs as possible on our computers and often spent weeks uploading our entire CD collections – but once they were in digital form we viewed them less as valuable rare jewels and more a bunch of gigabytes. We cared what people thought of our collections and we got the same joy out of songs, but we cared less how we got them. Today the end result of iTunes and file-sharing is, in my opinion, a general consensus that music is ultimately free. It’s been devalued and with that marking down, something has rubbed off on the way we view the performer.
It’s the era of the instantaneous – where global corporations see art as merely ‘content’ for our devices. It is through these devices that we have all become armchair critics (on a good day) and a horde of nasty hecklers on the days in between. Sometimes we are just music fans.
Which brings me back to Lady Gaga – where much of the criticism seems to stem from something as cold and matter-of-fact as numbers.
It’s a strange thing for the audience to know the sales figures.
My movie industry friends will bore you for hours talking about how the publishing of box office receipts has harmed the mystery and excitement of film-making. The general public seems to know the budget and the opening weekend takings of a theatrical release in a way that previously only executives at Paramount Pictures used to. They take this information and they use it to decide if a film is good or not, sometimes without even seeing it.
The irony in all of this is, Gaga’s album ARTPOP debuted at Number One in in the US, the UK and Japan and was Top Five in most others.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but presumably Number One means it sold more copies than any other album that week, yes? So if it were a competition based on who came in first – she kind of won, right? Why then, even before the sales figures were released, were media outlets all claiming the project to be dead in the water? ‘ARTFLOP’ as it appears to have been branded, had been labeled a failure before it had even arrived.
For the record, this isn’t a fan letter to Gaga.
It’s about a corner we’ve turned in pop culture. The most obvious example I can use to demonstrate it being the pungent stench of a rotten tomatoes and thumbs down we appear to have given an artist who, just five minutes ago, we declared a global treasure.
The curious case of this backlash is that I witnessed it beginning with some of the very media outlets that had once fiercely supported her. Gay-centric and pop-obsessed bloggers, journalists and media types who had once fawned at her McQueen heels suddenly turned ambivalent. I guess it struck a chord with me because traditionally I’ve always seen gay press and pop culture fanatics take a stance when it came to trends and fashion that was proudly separate from the mainstream ‘build ‘em up tear ‘em down’ attitude. Sure, we can be bitchy sometimes but there’s always been an unwritten code that we take care of our Dannii Minogues or our Geri Halliwells when the world loses interest. We’re not fairweather fans is my point.
So why the change?
The music isn’t the problem. If you listen to the record from beginning to end, it’s a proper album album. It begins with her tearing down her veil (literally) and asking if you want to see what’s behind it. The record then systematically deconstructs the entire relationship we have with her as an icon but never in a preachy way. It’s gloriously fun and kaleidoscopically exciting. It features some of her most pop melodies and genuinely confessional moments and blistering great vocals. Is it strange? Sure! But did you see the video for Bad Romance?
Still there’s been a shift in perception and it’s noticeably less favourable.
I guess it started somewhere towards the beginning of the Born This Way campaign – when Gaga was releasing the follow-up to two massively successful and brilliant pop albums, an era pop aficionados would describe as an imperial phase.
There was a murmur of ‘image fatigue’ – of her style overshadowing the music. She was branded ‘attention-seeking’. It’s bizarre because one moment we were applauding her for turning up to The Graham Norton Show with a telephone on her head and the next slating her for having a pony tail a little bit like Madonna.
Maybe some of the laser beam focus of The Fame Monster was missing from the follow-up album, but I carried with me a hope that the streak of brilliance we’d seen in songs like The Edge of Glory was evidence that Gaga had the potential to be a new hybrid of amazing in the long-term arc of her career: Prince meets Cyndi Lauper. A proper singing, dancing, writing and certifiably nutty genius for a new generation.
The criticisms that the lead single sounded a bit like Express Yourself (it was a bit inspired maybe, but certainly not plagiarism) ushered in an avalanche of image hurdles that ultimately resulted in Gaga cancelling some tour dates due to injury and hiding away until the release of this new record.
You’d have to have been hiding under your own rock not to sense the impending doom coming for Gaga. Her own promotional video for Applause featured self-proclaimed jibes like ‘Lady Gaga is over’ – seemingly a reiteration of what was already being touted in the mainstream press. Then her appearance at the MTV Awards, where she deliberately dubbed in ‘boo’ jeers over her entrance, seemed to score the point. I watched this performance, where she put on and took off every single image she had created in her career to date, and could not for the life of me work out why the world wasn’t applauding as enthusiastically as I was. She had deconstructed her entire rise to fame in the minutes and tore it all off in front of an audience as if to say, ‘I am more than my collection of images’. She sensed she had a point to make and in doing so it seemed Gaga had been right in predicting a backlash.
Let’s get the boring stats out of the way quickly shall we? Though it sold more copies than any other release in the same week, the truth is ARTPOP did not come close to matching the sales figures of her previous release, Born This Way.
But then, what does in 2013?
As an artist trying to sell records in an industry where people don’t like to pay for them, I’m living proof that selling albums is more and more difficult every year. What none of the articles really focused on was that Gaga’s first week sales were similar to two other female superstars who released new albums this year: Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus.
The next dagger hurled at Gaga was the apparently shameful and filthy fact her second week sales decreased by 86% in the US.
To the casual reader, I guess that does seem like a sharp drop.
Yet Eminem, whose album was briefly knocked from the top spot by ARTPOP, also suffered a significant second week slump of 72% decrease.
No one really reported that in the same breath.
For the record, other superstars who’ve suffered similar second week drops include Madonna, (87% slide for her MDNA album) and Kanye West – whose stunning and massively successful album Yeezus also slid over 80% in its second week.
The point is, in 2013 superstars debut with huge sales in week one then experience a sharp drop. Albums that sneak up on us and take over the world (Adele) rise and rise and rise. But you really only get to do that once in a career. Those albums are your Jagged Little Pill, or Thriller or dare I say it, The Fame.
Why the focus on Gaga? Why the brandishing of the word ‘flop’?
Somewhere along the way it appears the general consensus shifted from ‘We love you even in your Kermit the Frog Dress’ to ‘your 15 minutes are up’.
I still don’t think it has much to do with Lady Gaga.
Historically I’ve always thought of celebrity as a modern equivalent of royalty. As a species we have a well-documented history of taking one of us and putting them up on a pedestal. We like to have someone to aspire to be, someone to project wish fulfilment upon. It used to be royalty or Messiahs. Celebrity sort of trumps them all though because you don’t need to have been born with a magical bloodline. Presumably anyone can become a star and historically most of our modern-day idols famously came from nothing. The bigger the trailer-park, the better. Move over Norma Jean, make way Jackson 5 in your below-the-breadline two bedroom house. We always make room for our everyman propelled to greatness because we see ourselves as strapped in next to them for the ride to heaven.
When one of us is launched into the stratosphere, perhaps plucked from the obscurity of suburbia and paraded before Piers Morgan to beg for a record deal, it’s like some perverse real life Hunger Games. We can imagine we are that smalltown hero and it makes us feel good. And we can release the hounds if they displease us.
Did we like Gaga more when she was making her own dresses and carrying that same wig around for a year because she seemed more vulnerable? At what point does the table turn? When do we flip from loving a Matt Cardle, to ridiculing a Craig David? Perhaps it’s the minute we begin to resent them.
We may not be responsible for their demise, but it appears there is a satisfaction in seeing someone formerly celebrated lose their crown – and I find that sad.
Pop culture history is littered with examples. Scandals are the most efficient way of ejecting someone from their throne (unless of course that person is actually royal). If you can’t find a scandal, mockery or in Gaga’s case branding them a ‘flop’ will do the trick.
The culture that creates the hero so personally can also destroy it mercilessly and anonymously. I watched on Twitter how an entire generation of people ‘reviewed’ the latest Gaga album 60 minutes after it leaked. Think about that for a second – it’s like being a master pastry chef and seeing someone break into your bakery, steal your cupcake, eat it then leave a note on the door to say, ‘It was rubbish’.
The scenario reminds me very much of what happened to Michael Jackson after the release of Bad. If you get the opportunity watch the fantastic Spike Lee documentary about the making of that album. The truth is, M.J went from being the biggest star on the planet to being ridiculed for ‘only’ selling 30 million copies of Bad. It yielded six Number One singles and produced my favourite era of Jackson music – and led to his record-breaking seven sold out Wembley Stadium concerts, during which he played to over half a million Brits. Flop? Hardly. Yet it never matched the sales of Thriller and for the longest time was referred to as a commercial disappointment. Michael Jackson ‘only’ recorded the second biggest album of all time, losing out to (you guessed it) himself! The shame! The flop!
I always thought that particular ghost haunted Michael Jackson, and contributed at least in part to the sadness and the demons that chased him throughout the rest of his short life. And it was a ridiculous cross to bear. Bad remains an extraordinary success and one not likely to be repeated anytime soon.
I need to reiterate, this piece is not a fan letter. It’s a question about the lion’s pit we have constructed for those who entertain us. Before Christmas it was Lady Gaga, a week later Nigella Lawson – who knows whose turn it will be next week. Why do we do it?
As a gay man, I am aware that our culture has always stuck by our divas. To be a Kylie fan meant you had Impossible Princess on your walkman, you stood by Madonna during her experimental phases when the world just wanted another Like a Prayer and you adored Britney even if sometimes it appeared she was just phoning it in. We did this because we had a connection to these women. These beautiful creatures that faced the same types of discrimination and alienation in a man’s world that queer folk felt just being on planet earth. We found solidarity in their survival. We accepted that a career, like a life or a friendship, was not always a bed of roses. It was a journey we committed to for the long haul.
Had we written Madonna off, we would have missed her evolution into Ray of Light. When the world considered Kylie a ‘has been’ we stuck by her to watch them eat their words and fawn over Can’t Get You Out of My Head. When Cher was a nostalgia act to some, we were there every step of the way to witness Believe carve out an entire 3rd act in her career. We never stopped allowing these women to have careers. We didn’t care about sales or chart figures. We just cared if the music was good.
In a culture where our focus appears to be almost entirely on biggest, most, loudest, can’t we stick up for someone who just wants to be good? They may just be about to deliver their Thriller.
Whether you’re into Gaga or not isn’t the issue. In a recent Sirius XM interview with the incredible Larry Flick, Stefani Germanotta suggested in this time of social media where everyone is a critic, we seem to have lost some of the respect and awe we used to afford artist. She spoke of how artists used to be celebrated for being off the wall and visually brave and yet today what seems to sell is the most easily digestible and cheapest item on the menu. ‘I’m not a French fry. I’m foie gras,’ she said. It was a bold and potentially offensive thing to say but I got it. I respected it. The Twittersphere is a realm where we’ll slag off someone just for having a different opinion to ours (for the record, I probably won’t be reading the comments section below this article). To speak your truth, to dare to be offensive or buck a trend is today more than ever a career risk for most pop stars and I’m so glad Gaga is one of them taking risks.
I want to live in a world with more Morrisseys, Mileys, Madonnas and Michael Jacksons. I want to live in a world where I’m fascinated again.
Phone in to Darren’s weekly live radio podcast WWW.BLOGTALKRADIO.COM/DARRENHAYES