On The Charts, Off the Covers. (Long but thought provoking Article)

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There was no way to hyperlink to this article, so I had to copy it.
Its a long article, but well worth the read.

ON THE CHARTS, OFF THE COVERS
For Hip-Hop Acts That Boom, The Media Have No Room.
Calling out around the world, Jim Farbet, a music reporter for New York's Daily News, broke a story earlier this year that no one wanted to dance to. He called out the factionalism that splits American popular culture, separating music into black or white and segregating pop aesthetics. Noting the difference between recording artists' commercial success and media coverage, he reported a sad fact that has long been suppressed: The culture is going in one direction while the critical community and the press are going in another. Examples are annoying and frequent female libertine rapper Li'l Kim being judged from the Chicago Reader to The Village Voice as a sex worker rather than an artist with little mention that her image came from a conscious creative collaboration with the late rapper Biggie Smalls; celebrations of the white Midwestern trio Hanson that avoid the group's imitation of the Jackson Five and hip-hop production styles; Spice Girls promotion that neglects the British quintet's imitation of the hip-hop girl group T.L.C.
The charts, Farber learned, showed a fount of racial favoritism and prejudice in journalistic practice that presumably serves the music biz. It exacerbates the differences in the way white and black Americans experience the musical culture and fosters a biased sub-industry, validating who gets on magazine covers. Even cross-fertilized, supposedly democratic American pop fractures record company departments into race-based camps, and eventually determines the apportioning of significance in cultural studies.
"We're like a big archeology dig," said a black music publicist, summing up how black musicians are treated in cultural journalism. "Black acts don't get discovered until their shelf lives are over, then critics look back and see all this creativity that at the time was completely overlooked." Her job, getting press and media attention for a label's black acts in the mainstream media, is so frustrating that she keeps her resume updated. Like many of the publicists interviewed for this piece, she insisted on anonymity.
Publicists are a substratum of the music industry but essential to its operations--the volume control of the biz's voice. Thus, the protection of one's identity for fear of retaliation indicates the powerful connection between record companies and media--in rap lingo, a crucial conflict. There's a secret understanding that how contemporary media tell the story of popular music culture isn't just reporting--it contributes to current and future cultural perception. When it comes to telling the story of black artists' influence on the industry and on the culture, reportage goes wack, and cultural history gets distorted.
Since the 1991 implementation of SoundScan, the system of tracking record sales reported in Billboard's weekly charts, there has been conclusive evidence that popular musical developments are not being accurately reflected in the mainstream media. As the Daily News noted, "album charts in the past year have seen hard-line R&B acts like New Edition and R. Kelly outsell big rockers like R.E.M., Sheryl Crow and even Van Halen." Rarely has there been a week in which the Top 10 charts did not show black acts (i.e., identified as r&b or rap or dance) occupying at least seven of the ten positions--usually no fewer than eight.
But the coverage in leading pop music publications--Rolling Stone, Spin--and mainstream general-interest publications that emphasize pop music in their arts coverage, like The New York Times and The Village Voice, inverts the sales ratio. A look at Rolling Stone and Spin cover stories alone demonstrates this incongruity. Just one example: At the time Boyz II Men broke Elvis Presley's chart-topping record, no cover story announced the shift in pop taste. In any one year, of those magazines' covers, two might feature a best-selling black act. It makes a black publicist's life hell, but worse, it distorts the picture of how popular music thrives.
"Oh, it's a big lie," one of the few black male publicists admitted. "U2 [frequent Rolling Stone cover stars] isn't really that important to people. Billboard's charts prove it, sales prove it. But magazines say otherwise." Another journey woman who has worked at several different record labels clarifies: "I don't think it's outright misinformation or a conspiracy or anything. It's the nature of people's different tastes. THE people editing music magazines don't represent the larger public, they represent themselves and they put their tastes before. the public." The disparity is not just because of the biases in taste of the gatekeepers of the music world (record execs and critics); it's also due to differences in how white and black Americans experience culture. Such media biases construct a dangerously "alternative" view of whatever changes, advances and regressions occur in pop music. When "urban" music--an industry euphemism for black created music--came to be mostly identified as rap (peaking in the late eighties and early nineties), "alternative" was the industry's answer. The term resonates: White rock and roll, emerging this time from America's white fringes, became the mainstream media's preferred alternative to rap. And the music industry itself followed suit, signing "grunge" acts like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains with the same hunger they had shown for rap several years earlier. The white alternative reasserted a type of cultural domination, a virtual return to Jim Crow.
Editors offer a variety of excuses for their lack of coverage of black acts. One publicity executive relates a typical refusal: "'This artist isn't right, that artist is not appropriate, I don't know if our readers are interested in that,' they'll say. There's been a resurgence of r&b, but you'd never know it from magazines. It's because the white men who edit these publications don't get it. That's not always in Rolling Stone; it could be in Vibe," a monthly devoted to r&b and rap.
"If Teddy Riley [performer-songwriter and producer of Blackstreet and other acts] was treated like a white artist, he'd be Mr. Everything," artist/manager Barry Hankerson told Farber. Hankerson represents R. Kelly, the multimillion-selling r&b singer one publicist recalls strenuously pitching "long after he sold a million records." One critic complained, "You expect that at some level at Rolling Stone; you don't expect it at Vibe." Alan Light, the recently demoted editor of Vibe, defended the magazine's controversial slant by saying that r&b music "is the hardest sell to the mainstream media. It's the least respected genre out there."
This frustration over what a publicist called "a taste thing" goes to a key point, the rock magazines' proprietorship of U.S. culture. A West Coast publicist views the mainstream media's attitude as one in which "people only care about black artists when it involves scandal--when they're shot, naked or something sexual. If they've done anything scandalous, they've got a chance for mainstream press." That explains the disproportionate attention given to rappers who've had run-ins with the police.
Unlike Billboard, a trade magazine serving the industry, pop music magazines exist to create an interest in selected aspects of the culture; they boost favored artists and ideas while ignoring or debunking others. Publications, like flags, carry an ideology; pop mags promote the agreed-upon interests of the whites who own them (and read them), and this is a more consistent, if subtle, mandate than the blather about rebellion and genius. Proof is in the steady praise conferred upon white artists and denied to black artists, with critical attribution of intellect to whites, sexuality to blacks. No better example of this injustice exists than The New York Times's campaign against Michael Jackson---criticism apart from the news reports of his legal hassles. In the past three years, the Times has repeatedly run disparaging stories, each a bitter critique of the latest aspect of his career. This close inspection contradicts the implicit point: Jackson's strangeness, inconsequence and--in the United States--his "unpopularity." Hammering home this message suggests an effort to destroy the artist without regard to Jackson's interest as a development in the advancement of black pop. It reflects an agenda: The New York Times (or the class it represents) wants him finished. They've made it uncool to buy Michael Jackson. Jackson gets castigated for his disturbing cultural impact--he's had no Rolling Stone covers since his Thriller album of the early eighties, while the same magazine has declared, "Never has there been a rock star as complex as Marilyn Manson."
Even when editors use the alibi that a black act isn't selling, it still rankles. "Maybe they're not but neither is fuckin' U2," the West Coast publicist says. "There's not a publication that takes a lot of chances these days. Most of them want big-name acts now. There's so much competition and so many publications. They're after the 'It' band of the moment, and who that is very cyclical--it helps if there's a curvy white girl involved. TV actresses Jennifer Aniston, Jenny McCarthy or any blond bimbo who has nothing to do with music gets press attention. And it's not even a discussion."
Industry wisdom says all those millions of records aren't being sold just to a black audience. And yet the media's tacit restriction persists. Even the publications' annual awards issues convert prejudice into arbitrary qualitative measurements. From Entertainment Weekly to Rolling Stone, no black artist's album has ever been chosen the best of the year. Whites PJ Harvey, Liz Phair and Courtney Love won the Village Voice critics' consensus in years that blacks Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and Mary J. Blige made their most popular and significant albums. "There's this whole appreciation of pseudo-soul: All these white girls who want to be black girls are huge, yet all these huge black girls are not huge," said one publicist. "It's like someone has set the idea of what a rock critic is supposed to like."
Indeed, a philosophy has developed around the idea of pop music. Rock, historically an outgrowth of r&b, is now institutionalized by major press outlets and the weight of a thirty-year tradition as something distinctly different--a way for white artists and audiences to remain isolated in their self-appraisal and self-aggrandizement. "It's the 'pop music' thing," one P.R. professional said. "And I don't think they want to include contemporary black artists--they let in the old guys, Bo Diddley and those kinds of guys, but they don't want pop music to encompass hip-hop. Rap acts are not included in their concept of pop music; it's still Other. But in popular culture, it's totally consumed. Boyz II Men have had to become hugely popular to get any coverage at all. They just don't care because, rap's not pop music to them, and that critic's thing justifies it, makes it less pop music for them."
When editors do put a black person on the cover, more problems concerning perception and respect arise: "When they get a photographer who never shot a black person, it's not flattering," an East Coast artist manager complained. When this half-gesture occurs after the record has peaked, "It may not be a good-selling magazine based on that cover. The artist is not hot anymore, they waited too long, the artwork is horrible. Maybe it would work if you put edgy black folks on the cover, took fly photographs people would want to see." But weak responses to these rare, halfhearted efforts end up justifying the editors' reluctance: "Then they can say black people can't sell a magazine."
Just like the magazines, TV talk shows neglect black acts and favor white groups. Analyzing logs from late-night programs, Farber reported in the Daily News a huge discrepancy between black and white musical appearances. Another industry journalist explained that TV producers look to "a review in Rolling Stone or The Village Voice to see who's worthy." A publicist agreed: "At late-night TV,, it's on the host. Letterman doesn't like rap so there's none on his show. This is the fact unless record companies make a stink [i.e., threaten not to advertise]. A label president will make a phone call on white artists; rarely do they do that for black artists."
The rock press operates in ways that contradict the idea of pop as rebellion or open expression. It's a new form of the old racist hierarchy. The (mostly) white men in charge of mainstream music media limit themselves to their personal taste and thereby have created a spurious pop music aesthetic that prizes such things as rebellion and aggression over other human motivations. The black cultural tradition that perpetuates a spiritual or sexual approach to social activity is often misunderstood by others who diminish it through a new form of hierarchy--turning rockism (the preference for guitar-oriented up-tempo music) into racism.
Some black acts have adopted this mainstream perspective on pop--as in the macho rebellions of rap, which are a derivation of rock (white male) aesthetics--but it's done them little good in breaking the media's barriers. Public Enemy, famous for its lyric "Your general subject--love--is minimal! It's sex for profit," has partially adhered to a rockist idea. P.E. caused a revolution in the way rap was perceived by black and white audiences. Their politically informed pop sold two platinum and four gold albums without their once gracing the cover of Rolling Stone.
In the elusive moods impelling editorial fiat, ideas about significance and merit get tangled with subjective notions of taste. Do the mainstream media cover an artist because she or he has proven popular through sales, or because editorial judgment deems an artist worthy of attention? If the former, magazine coverage of pop would be governed by the sales charts--but it isn't. The latter holds sway, and though rarely consonant with popular sales, it is consistent with a tradition of cultural bias that's so widely held it seems natural and is never questioned. Since the advent of SoundScan, the pop world has learned to live with the paradox of big sales/little coverage, few sales/big coverage, because it's part of the way America has traditionally segregated its attention span and its genuine interest. Our bifurcated cultural approbation, separating respectable art from art that gives instinctual pleasure, reflects society's racial and sexual segregation.
Originating among the literate and empowered classes that sustain social biases, music reporting and criticism submits to cultural intolerance and restriction. Pop journalism is neither impartial nor innocent. By re-explaining music, it has corrupted our humanities.
~~~~~~~~
By Armond White Armond White is author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World (Overlook). His Tupac Shakur biography, Rebel for the Hell of It, will be published by Thunder'S Mouth this fall.

Agree? Disagree? Concur? Rebut?

― Lord Custos Omega (Lord Custos Omega), Sunday, 20 October 2002 23:26 (twenty-three years ago)

Where did this article appear?

― j.lu (j.lu), Monday, 21 October 2002 01:01 (twenty-three years ago)

In a magazine called The Nation, but the web version is stored on EBSCOHost, which is hidden deep inside the server at my college.

― Lord Custos Omega (Lord Custos Omega), Monday, 21 October 2002 01:12 (twenty-three years ago)

dunno how old this is but most of the examples are either dated or not very strong. but you definitely do see shades of this everywhere. it really seems that certain genres/scenes/movements get press coverage and visibility far far disproportionate to their actual success/sales, although it's definitely not always drawn along race lines. but really, the White Stripes get an awful lot of mag covers/features/tv appearances that others (black or non) with 10 times the sales don't even get considered for. but that's mostly a painful-need-to-be-hip thing on the part of the media than any bias/conspiracy, although you could definitely dig up some strong evidence of that, too.

― Al (sitcom), Monday, 21 October 2002 01:44 (twenty-three years ago)

Now it's the photographers fault!!! Jesus.

― dave q, Monday, 21 October 2002 05:33 (twenty-three years ago)

Surely there's also the principle that there's no point hyping a band who are already hugely famous and top-selling? Colour/creed be damned, it's all about the Benjamins!

― Charlie (Charlie), Monday, 21 October 2002 05:42 (twenty-three years ago)

Surely there's also the principle that there's no point hyping a band who are already hugely famous and top-selling?

Indeed. That's why Rolling Stone decided to put three promising young up-and-comers on the cover of their "Women In Rock" issue.

― Nick Mirov (nick), Monday, 21 October 2002 07:07 (twenty-three years ago)

'This frustration over what a publicist called 'a taste thing' - well that's always the rub for social revolutionaries, isn't it? It's not enough that people buy shitloads of these records and see the artists on TV all the time, the 'apportioning of significance in cultural studies (!)' is proof that buying rappers Maseratis is just another dastardly ploy of the status quo. (Plus I don't buy that a 'PR Professional' would use the word 'Other') Imagine that, editors not dictating articles via Soundscan, how counter-revolutionary. But then, consumers are so stupid that even reading stuff about artists who don't use sampled loops 'corrupts their humanity', the ultimate goal of the 'literate classes'. Does the R&B persecution complex have any limits? (Perhaps they don't get coverage because whenever somebody asks them an interesting question or calls them on something they whine about being misquoted, or being the victim of some conspiracy to somehow undermine them by putting them in heavy rotation at every shopping outlet in the world, or threaten to send heavies around to visit the editor?) Anyway, if you really want to read about these unjustly stifled and maligned artists, there are other outlets, y'know. Like this week's 'Retail Week' feature on 'Brian Williams of Cash Money Records...who is obsessed with Burberry and has even had the seats of his red Corvette upholstered in the famous check pattern'

― dave q, Monday, 21 October 2002 08:34 (twenty-three years ago)

Their politically informed pop sold two platinum and four gold albums without their once gracing the cover of Rolling Stone.

But neither did Julio Iglesias or Kenny G - Rolling Stone is a rock 'n roll magazine with a series of "token" artists from other genres thrown in occasionally, and covers reflect this. Has U2 ever graced the cover of The Source? Case closed, I say. And since when did PJ Harvey, Liz Phair and Courtney Love become soul artists? But on the other hand, a magazine that claims "never has there been a rock star as complex as Marilyn Manson" deserves ALL the criticism it gets and more.

― Siegbran (eofor), Monday, 21 October 2002 10:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Y'know what? Marilyn Manson *IS* the whitest white guy ever.

― Lord Custos Omega (Lord Custos Omega), Monday, 21 October 2002 10:52 (twenty-three years ago)

"said one publicist. 'It's like someone has set the idea of what a rock critic is supposed to like.'"

I am not the smartest man, but doesn't being a __ROCK__ critic imply that you like and write about __ROCK__?

If you write about R&B, doesnt that make you an R&B critic?

― Mike Taylor (mjt), Monday, 21 October 2002 19:08 (twenty-three years ago)

Black acts don't get discovered until their shelf lives are over, then critics look back and see all this creativity that at the time was completely overlooked.

This is also the case with 80% of the 'white' acts.

― Siegbran (eofor), Monday, 21 October 2002 20:29 (twenty-three years ago)

Good to know that TLC was the first successful female Rn'B trio, though...

[/sarcasm]

Holy shit, has this guy never heard of the Supremes?

― hstencil, Monday, 21 October 2002 20:52 (twenty-three years ago)

I am not the smartest man, but doesn't being a __ROCK__ critic imply that you like and write about __ROCK__? If you write about R&B, doesnt that make you an R&B critic?
I guess this guy feels cheated that Rolling Stone doesn't have a dedicated R&B columnist. (Y'know, not some white guy trying to pretend he's down, but some guy who actually knows what the phuck he's talking about. Unfortunately, theres only one Nelson George and I suspect he'd find Rolling Stone to be 'beneath' his notice.)

― Lord Custos Omega (Lord Custos Omega), Monday, 21 October 2002 21:57 (twenty-three years ago)

One quick note of semantic clarification. By 'dedicated' R&B columnist I mean both '...specializing in...' and '...very committed to...'

― Lord Custos Omega (Lord Custos Omega), Monday, 21 October 2002 21:58 (twenty-three years ago)

Surely there's also the principle that there's no point hyping a band who are already hugely famous and top-selling?
Yeah...like putting Keith Richards wrinkled carcass on the cover. Now you know why they had a "Women in Rock" issue....the scrub your mind clean of the image of Keith the Human Samsonite carry-on bag.

― Lord Custos Omega (Lord Custos Omega), Monday, 28 October 2002 19:41 (twenty-three years ago)

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