Who Needs Labels?
The search for artistic freedom no longer ends at the Emerald City of major labels.
by David John Farinella
August 29, 2000
Aimee Mann |
Let's agree to call it the Dorothy Principle, that tendency among bands and artists to seek the wizard who will make all their dreams come true. Alas, many who make that long trip realize that the wizard is an infirm old man who is out of fresh ideas and concepts. Much as Dorothy was crushed to discover the truth about the Wizard of Oz, musicians are often dismayed to find out that nothing is as it seems once they reach the major-label holy land.
Rather than throw out the proverbial red slippers, though, established artists such as Michael Penn and Aimee Mann, as well as a younger bands like New York-based Ida, are ditching their old dreams and taking responsibility for their own future.
Penn and Mann, along with Mann's longtime manager Michael Hausman, have created a collective known as United Musicians. Based on the same principles as the old film collective United Artists, UM is in the early stages of deciding who to work with and how to do it. With Mann and Penn they've got their first two artists, they've inked a deal with major distributor RED, and they're in the process of building a strong Web presence.
Ida, on the other hand, had what was to be its major label debut rejected by Capitol Records -- after two years in the works -- and decided to release the album through the independent label Tiger Style. Though they are now setting up their own label for future Ida releases, the band decided it was best to go through another label for their first offering.
What do these artists have in common? Let's just say they've seen the old man and opted to kick him out and take over Oz.
United Musicians: Seeds of Discontent
'You spend so much of your time trying to get [major label] people to believe in you because otherwise they're going to bury your record.' -- Aimee Mann
Aimee Mann |
For Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, setting up the United Musicians collective was damn near a matter of survival. Each has battled with record labels over their material, each has fought for the right to dictate their own career, and each has seen that the only way to better themselves achieve their goals was to jump head-first off the Yellow Brick Road.
Mann's battles with the industry started in 1995 when Imago, the label that was due to release the follow-up to her 1993 solo debut, folded. Rather than let her go, Imago fought to keep the album under their control. Mann eventually won her independence at the end of 1995 and released I'm With Stupid on Geffen Records. But that's where the real trouble started. Label honchos weren't thrilled with the material she was turning in, and she was growing more and more outraged with the system. (You can hear all about it in the song "Calling It Quits" from her latest album.) After some legal wrangling Mann and her manager Michael Hausman bought back the album and released it on her own label.
For Mann it was a matter of not being supported at Geffen. "Nobody really cares about what you're doing," she tells Harmony Central. "Literally no one really cares and I think it's very difficult to work in an artistic endeavor if nobody cares consistently."
The environment affected her so much that it became difficult to write songs. "I felt like I was writing for people that didn't care. I think that's one of the big drawbacks of being on a major label: You feel so removed from an audience, that you start looking to the label for some kind of input that you can use as encouragement that you're just not going to get. It's absolutely the wrong place to look for any kind of encouragement, but you are forced to spend so much of your time trying to get these people to notice you and believe in you because otherwise they're going to bury your record. That's really the effort that should be going into trying to get an audience to notice you and take an interest in you."
Michael Penn and Aimee Mann |
Michael Penn is another artist who has suffered at the hands of record companies that didn't understand what to do with a thirty-something singer/songwriter. Of course, it wasn't always that way. In the late '80s Penn signed with 57 Records, a subsidiary of Epic run by producer Brendan O'Brien. He had a major breakout in 1990 when his debut, March, shot up the charts based on the strength of the song "No Myth."
Three years later Penn released a follow-up, but he was seeing the writing on the wall. Resigned, which took another five years to come out, was a play on words (re-signed, resigned) and his latest, MP4, nearly didn't make it out at all. "Epic doesn't understand me," Penn states. "It was just begrudgingly that they put it out. They don't understand a male singer/songwriter. It's not the 'time' for that, according to their soothsayers. They're reading tea leaves that spell out boy bands and 12-year-old girls; I'm a guy writing songs about relationships and weird kind of concepts that they don't even want to think about."
Next Page: Goals; Nuts & Bolts; Lessons for Young Artists....
David John Farinella is a California-based music journalist. His
work has appeared at CNN.com and Launch.com. He is a regular
contributor to Harmony Central.
|
