From Emmerald,

Emm: What’s up in New Orleans?

Gilles: I just want to go there. They’ve got that French thing there. I’d love to go to Atlanta as well, yes. But I don’t want to go back to other places in the states. Like I went to Detroit; it’s such a dark city, isn’t it? I mean I don’t mind going there and hearing the music because there's some great stuff coming out of Detroit, but I don’t really want to go and play there. There’s a film I saw, I think it was filmed in New York, but it was dark like Detroit. “21 Grams”, have you seen that film yet?

Emm: No, I haven’t seen that.

Gilles: Yes, it was a really heavy film. It was nominated for an Oscar, I think. I actually, I was in Australia on tour and I was like I am now, a bit jetlagged, and I was like three days in and I had to do a gig that night, and I wanted to do something. It was three in the afternoon, it was too hot, so I was like I’m going to see a film. So I went to the movies in the afternoon in Brisbane, but the film was so heavy in dialogue I had to leave half way through.

Emm: (laughs) I’ll have to check that out, but I’ll wait until I’m in the right mood for that. What were you doing in Brisbane?

Gilles: I did a festival. It was a tour; it was a really good tour actually with Miguel Migs, Bugz in the Attic, Soul to Soul, Blackalicious, Gang Starr, Mad Professor, Nitin Sawney. It was a really good lineup, some reggae, some broken beat too. There were like twenty-five thousand people at the show in Sydney.

Emm: Wow.

Gilles: Yes, we did Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, yes, the middle of nowhere.

Emm: Yeah, literally.

Gilles: Yes, it was fantastic. New Zealand’s actually much better for music, but I like going to Australia because the girls are better looking there. (laughs) That’s not true actually; I prefer it in New Zealand. But then the weather’s always better in Australia, a little bit. It goes to ten degrees hotter. New Zealand’s like being in England in the summer. How did you discover Worldwide?

Emm: I was looking for that Irfane song. (laughs) “Just a Little Lovin’”.

Gilles: And how did you hear that?

Emm: At the Jazzanova show. Jazzanova played down in Athens Georgia, and they played that, “Just a Little Lovin’ “.

Gilles: Right.

Emm: And I was like what the hell is that?

Gilles: Right.

Emm: So anyway, and I guess I must have done a Google search for it and it probably came up on a play list of yours.

Gilles: Wow.

Emm: And then I found the show. However, I have the “Incredible Sound of Gilles Peterson”, which is one of my favorite CDs, and somehow I never connected that with your radio show.

Gilles: And then you just sort of, then you listened to the show?

Emm: Listened to the show and I was like…

Gilles: And was it good quality?

Emm: (laughs) Yeah, it was alright for an internet radio show.

Gilles: Right. And then you got onto the messageboard. It’s great having that community, the messageboard. But it’s a bit weird sometimes. You kind of, I mean the people are really, really nice, the people who are on it, are really, really nice cool people, they’re not… they’re not the people you’d think.

Emm: You would think they’d be crazy.

Gilles: Yes, a little bit. I was thinking if I was to go away or something, it’s almost, even though. . . I mean I do know most of them now, but I’d feel really, really sad about it, if I had to go.

Emm: Oh, yes, yes.

Gilles: You become emotionally attached to the people there.

Emm: Absolutely. Like when I started my new job, with the transition, I couldn’t be on the messageboard all the time, and I was missing all these people I have never met, it was strange.

Gilles: Yes, yes. The people there are really dedicated. But they could be that dedicated and they could be a little bit -- it could become a bit too anal and boring. I mean it does get a bit boring sometimes I have to say. But there are a few people on that board who are really intelligent and interesting and say some really cool things that are not related necessarily to music, it’s just a lifestyle.

Emm: Yes, yes, I think that’s what everybody likes about it. Like we can all talk about music, but we also talk about other things. We could talk about sports. We talk about movies. We talk about food. We could talk about whatever, and that’s what’s really cool.

Gilles: Are they controlling it a bit too much? They have a controller, don’t they?

Emm: Yes, the mods. They get blasted. (laughs) But I've only gotten whacked because I’ve done stuff I wasn’t supposed to do, like if I put an email address on or something. I never had a post whacked because it was inappropriate or off topic, but I know other people have. I don’t know how they come up with what’s off topic though.

Gilles: I’d love to get pictures up of some people on it.

Emm: Oh, that would be awesome. We need a little facebook, like a yearbook or something. (laughs)

Gilles: Have you spoken to anyone, does anyone mail you?

Emm: I have corresponded like with Dayo, Ade P, Bailey, and Marilyn, and I’ve traded CDs with Matiji and Paulboards. . .

Gilles: He writes really well.

Emm: Ade P? Yeah, he’s an amazing writer.

Gilles: There’s a guy on there from Japan, I think, Samba Magic. That’s the other great thing. There’s people from all over on there, not just the U.K. Like I had no idea you were in the states. I just thought okay, Emmerald, whoever that is. (laughs) But there’s all kinds of people.

Emm: Oh yeah, it’s great. The musical knowledge on that board is absolutely insane.

Gilles: Yeah. It used to be quite heavy man. Like, I used to get a lot of criticism, which is great, of course, but then again you sort of take criticism to heart a little. But it can be kind of difficult.

Emm: Yeah, that’s got to be hard. I wonder sometimes if people are more cautious about what they say because they know you’re reading it.

Gilles: I don’t know, but I like that. I like for people to be comfortable and say what they want to say. I think it’s an easy community for people to feel comfortable in.

Emm: Yeah, I think people are honest for the most part. And it’s cool that they can be. What’s really cool is that you actually check it out. I mean, you could easily be like, oh these crazy kids, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Gilles: Is it a bit addictive?

Emm: Uh, yeah. (laughs)

Gilles: From my point of view, sometimes I wonder like. ..if it’s an ego thing. Like I wonder what are they saying today. (laughs) It is good though, because I really get a lot of information from it. You learn what people really like.

Labels: Music

From Emmerald

What started as a simple and inexpensive CD purchase ($7.99 at a used CD shop), literally changed my whole outlook on DJing and music. I’d just started learning how to mix records when I purchased “The Incredible Sound of Gilles Peterson”. Like all DJ larvae, I was trying to make sense of my records and trying to determine how best to convey the collection of sounds I’d amassed. Since I started relatively late in the game, my collection reflected my broad taste in music as it had developed over the years. It wasn’t a large collection (still isn’t), but I had everything from Sixousie and the Banshees to John Coltrane to The Bar-Kays, to 4 Hero, and I had no clue if any of that would ever make sense together, until I heard Gilles Peterson.
A master of what he terms “joining the dots”, Gilles’ weekly radio show “Worldwide” on BBC Radio 1, and his various compilation CDs (“Incredible Sound of Gilles Peterson“, “Worldwide Programme” 1, 2, and 3, and his 2 “Trust the DJ” comps) have paved the road for those of us searching for the strand of harmony that connects various, sometimes incongruous, genres of music. Every Wednesday, for two hours, Gilles takes his listeners on journeys through jazz, funk, hip-hop, and dance, through the old and dusty, the new and never-to-be-released, classics and classics-to-be. For his faithful listeners, Gilles sets not trends, but standards, conveying and inspiring above all else, a pure love and appreciation of music. Gilles taught me that music has a life all its own, and the best way to determine how to put songs together, is not only to listen, but to watch and feel how and where each tune grows. The dots come together naturally; you’re just there to draw the line.


Emmerald: You must receive a ton of music a day. How do you decide what gets played and what doesn’t get played?

Gilles Peterson: Well I tend to look at labels that I know first of all. And my radio show goes through a production company, so I have a producer--

Emm: Is that Karen?

Gilles: Yes, that’s Karen. A lot of music gets sent to her and the real rubbish, she’ll clear out. So before it gets to me most of the rubbish is gone. But if ever I find out that Karen’s not given me a record that I like that she thought was rubbish, it’s always bad for her, (laughs) so it hasn’t happened for a while. I’ve only got two hours on the radio and it’s quite an influential radio show. There are a lot of bands and artists and producers coming through who want exposure. So I feel I have a responsibility to those people that I listen to their music. And that means that I play a lot more new music than I used to.

I try not to listen to too much music on the day of a show, so I tend to hit my music on Mondays and Tuesdays. Otherwise I could end up listening to music all day on a Wednesday. I do three different shows. I do the one on the BBC; I do a syndicated show which goes out to lots of different stations around the world, and I do a show which is for things like British Airways. I keep really busy with the shows and other things. For example, coming here in Miami this week, I’ve had to record two Radio 1’s, two syndicated shows, and a British Airways show all like in three days, which is a lot you know. So, anyway, to cut a long story short, I usually try to pace it with my music. I clear my music out regularly as well. I used to keep everything, and then I realized I can’t do it. I just can’t live with all this stuff. I’m so badly organized as an individual anyway that if I had too much music there it would just kill me, so I do clear out my music often. I mean obviously the stuff that I’ve played and I like, I’ll keep, but all the other stuff that’s half and half, I just clear out. Every now and again I realize I’ve made a big mistake and I’ve let something go that I’ve heard some DJ playing somewhere in a club. Then I’m like oh my God, I used to have that album and I got rid of it. That kind of thing happens but that’s the way it goes.

Emm: How long have you and Karen worked together?

Gilles: Well I had a guy called Benji B who used to work with me. He came to me when I was working on Kiss FM. He was like fifteen then and he was still at school. And he said he wanted to work on my show and so I started got him into Kiss, and we just became really good friends. He came all the way through until I did Radio 1. Now he’s become a DJ and a broadcaster himself, and so last year we had to basically let him go so he could do his own thing. When I started off at Radio 1 he brought in Karen as an assistant producer for himself so she’s been there for a bit of a while. She’s given the show a really nice twist. She's my little angel.

Emm: How does your syndicated show differ from your Worldwide show?

Gilles: I do the syndicated show at my house. And there’s less talking, more music.

Emm: Is the music the same?

Gilles: Sometimes. I kind of amalgamate them a bit, but it depends. Sometimes I’ll do a completely different show for both of them.

Emm: Do you plan out what you’re going to play on your shows?

Gilles: Not really. I mean I have some idea of what I want to play. But there are definitely times when I bring records to play, but I don’t end up playing them, you know.

Emm: You're doing a new night in Paris?

Gilles: Yes, I’m doing a night at the Rex Club in Paris. The thing about the Rex is that it’s a techno club. It’s the club where Laurent Garnier made his name. It’s a rave club, quote unquote. So it has a reputation for being quite young and ravey, but it has the best sound system in Paris by miles. Last year they asked me to come and DJ for the fifteenth anniversary of Rex. I think it was their fifteenth or twentieth year. I played there with Laurent Garnier, and they had all these other different DJs; it was a really good set of people. I’m half French so I’ve always been going to Paris, but I’ve never really had a good time there because there's always something wrong with the sound, or the people are just not into it or whatever. But in the last year it’s really changed in Paris, so I’m really happy to get on the train and go there on Thursdays and pop it out. It’s really massive; it’s great fun and a there’s great sound system at the Rex, so I’m really enjoying it there.

It’s funny, Paris has got a few musicians, good DJs, but they’ve never really had a club scene, no club culture. Like England’s done really well with this music and taking American music and kind of repackaging it a little bit and creating a club culture. And in America, the club culture scene was obviously really important in Detroit and Chicago, but it was quite gay a lot of it. A lot of the house music was very gay so you had to really want to go and get that music. A lot of people would not play in those sort of places. Whereas in England, club culture is very essential to carry on with everything. I think club culture has been really important to spread a really good circuit around the world. Japan and Germany have taken the club culture thing, and they repackaged it really well for themselves. And you’ve got the music festival down here and all that stuff.

So yes, so that’s Paris. It’s good in France. I’ve already been on the radio in France actually. They’re into jazz there as well. They’re quite intellectual, the French. They like to talk about the music. They’re the kind of guys--if I’m DJing immediately after I’ve finished they all discuss it, you know what I mean. They’ll always have a meeting. They enjoy the breakdown of the thing more than they do the thing itself. Some people go to see film, go to the cinema, they kind of enjoy talking about it more than actually seeing the film, that’s what the French are like.

Emm: So have you see any kind of drop off in the London club culture? There seems to be a drop off in dance music in general. The music isn’t selling that well, and some artists seem to be having a hard time with it.

Gilles: Not really for me, because I’ve got the radio, you know. And I’m lucky that I can always travel, so I’m not overexposing myself in one place. If you play every week in the city, you're not special to that city. Your people just take you for granted and it’s like whatever. I can always travel, so I can always be fresh wherever I am, and luckily the scene is very international. And, I mean I still do my residency in London now, I play there when I can if I’m in town.

Emm: Is that Bar Rhumba?

Gilles: Bar Rhumba, yes. London isn’t about being hot or selling out Fabric or whatever, London to me is just where I love to go out. On a Monday I’m in my town, London people come and see me. We get a couple of hundred people. I always have the best time in there and I have my fans and my people who work in there, and I can let off and have a good time. But I don’t think about it like if I’m going to play then, I’ll just do once every three months in London, then I’m going to be a real big pull. I don’t look at London like that; do you know what I mean?

Emm: Yes, yes.

Gilles: But I think club culture has definitely been hit. There are all sides of the scene that seem to go through these things. I’m really pleased that the dance thing has gone anyway, I mean has gone down, because it was rubbish a lot of it. And a lot of the people involved in it were rubbish as well. I didn’t really want to be associated with those sorts of people in what I was doing, because it was just cold and corporate and everything. So I’m kind of please that everyone's come out of that, and then the people who are really into the shit survive. It’s the men and the boys thing. I’ve been DJing for twenty years now and I’ve been through so many ups and downs and in the end you just keep going. If you’re hit listed, if people like you at the moment it’s great but if they don’t, then I don’t care either. That’s how I approach it, and I’m still enjoying it and making it.

Emm: Cool, that’s good. Twenty years?

Gilles: More actually, it’s twenty-five, yes, I’m forty this year.

Emm: How did you initially get into radio?

Gilles: I started my own pirate station. I got some transmitters and stuff. In those days pirate stations didn’t go on for twenty-four hours. They’d go on for like four or five hours on a Sunday. There was one station called Radio Invicta, which was the first black music pirate in London back in the day, and they lost their equipment. Their gear got taken by the home office, by the police, and they were like, oh my God, we haven’t got a transmitter. And they’d heard there was this young boy that had a transmitter. The guy who built their transmitter put them on this annoying little bloke who lived in south London (laughs). So they the called me and they said can we use your gear. And I said, well as long as you give me a show.

Emm: Right, sure.

Gilles: I was seventeen by then and I started working for Radio Invicta, and that was really cool, because that was where the best DJs were and they were playing good shit. It was like just all soul so it was quite urban. It was very much to the London audience rather than the suburbs. In England you’ve got two scenes. You’ve got the kind of urban scene, and then you’ve got the suburbs. And so if you look at like the DJs who are here in Miami, people like Pete Tong or Judge Jules, they’re very suburban, you see what I mean? And these stations were very much more urban, so they were blacker in a way, but it appealed to a more mixed crowd. So for me being on that station, it was really cool. From that point onwards, I started working at little clubs. My mum didn’t know I was DJing, so I’d have to lie. I’d tell her that I was just going out. I used to work in a gay club actually, on a Sunday. And I’m not gay, but I mean basically I’d go there because they kind of liked the look of me. I used to do nine to one on a Sunday and they wanted gay music. They wanted a kind of gay disco, and I played more boogie kind of stuff like Prelude, D Train and Unlimited Touch, things like that. I started getting a bit of a black crowd coming into the club, and the gays started complaining because it wasn’t a strictly gay thing anymore, so I got barred from that. That was my first sort of travesty. And then I started working in clubs all over the place. I had to earn my money, you know, because I didn’t have a job and I’d fucked up my exams. My studies had gone out the window. I was really into football. I was a sports boy when I was little. I played quite seriously, football, and rugby amazingly.

Emm: Which is your favourite football team?

Gilles: I’m an Arsenal fan. Yeah, so I was doing a lot of sport but then suddenly I just got into music and that really took me away. I never really thought of it as being a career thing, as a child. My mum and dad left England when I was seventeen. My dad is French, so they moved over there, but I stayed, and I just made it on my own. I made a living, so I’m happy about that.

Emm: How do you compare the experience of being a radio DJ versus playing out? Are there aspects of one that you like better than the other?

Gilles: Well, I’ve got a family and I’ve got kids and so I need to do a little bit less DJing and clubbing, but I love it. That’s the thing; it gives me a lot of energy which I hope I bring onto the radio. I think that’s what gives my radio show that edge in a way. I’m listening to music from a club and radio perspective. So I can hear how certain records work. If I’m listening to them at home, I’m like that’s alright. But if I’m playing in a club, certain records just take a whole different light. So in that respect I think the show’s been a quite good line between the club and the home with the headphones kind of thing. And actually I get more money doing gigs. That’s my main source of income. You don’t really make a lot of money on radio, in England anyway. I don’t know but it’s probably the same here.

Emm: I’m sure it’s the same here, yes.

Gilles: The money side is good, but the real the truth is I love DJing. I still love going out and meeting people, and it’s when I’m in clubs that I hear the other DJs playing and that keeps me in the scene. Part of what I do is upfront and I’ve got to be upfront. You’ve got to be on it. Maybe there will be a time when I’ll just stop and find a new role. I mean, I want to do a jazz show, really, that’s what I’d like.

Emm: Yes, I’m sure you do.

Gilles: I get into trouble if I play too much jazz on Radio 1.

Emm: Really?

Gilles: Well I don’t really get into trouble; they don’t dare say anything to me. They’re very cool with me actually. But I hear “if you play too much of that jazz, you don’t get a better show”, (laughs) and I want a better show so it’s a fine line. So I think, again, the whole thing about what I do, you know, if I can play “Impressions” by John Coltrane next to new tunes. That’s what it’s about for me. The show I loved recently was-- I don’t know if you heard the Roy Ayres show? That was a great show.

Emm: Yes, definitely. That was one of the best shows I’ve heard, honestly.

Gilles: If you can just spend time with people and let them talk. I mean the thing is with these legends you’ve just got to set it up right. You can’t just go up to them at the end of the gig and say can we do an interview. That’s really one of the most fantastic things about this job, the fact that you can listen to these people talking. They’ve got so much to say. I want to get more with them because there’s not that many of them left and they’re going to fade.

Emm: Right.

Gilles: I wish I had interviewed Miles Davis, and big people like that. I interviewed Q-Tip last week though, and that was good. It was over the phone. I really want to meet him.

Emm: You’ve never met him?

Gilles: No, no. I mean, I know a lot of those people but I’ve never met him. I don’t think Q-Tip likes Europe. He’s a New Yorker. He’s very New York. Whereas people like Madlib or Jazzy Jeff, those guys, they see what the UK has and what it can do for them.

Emm: Right.

Gilles: Q-Tip’s just a home boy from Brooklyn or whatever, but yes, he’s my hero actually.

Emm: Yeah?

Gilles: Yes, I think he’s my hero. Because when he put out that first album, that freaked me out.

Emm: The one that got shelved?

Gilles: No, the very first, the first…

Emm: The first Tribe album?

Gilles: Yeah, you know with “Push It Along” and all that stuff, that was just amazing. It blew De la Soul apart, which, I mean I like De la Soul, so that was just like spot on. That was spot on because it was hip-hop and it was a bit dark. I like it that way. You need that record in every record collection. And then he went off and did “Low End Theory”, and he got Ron Carter to play bass and I was like you’ve got it going more than anyone. And now he's just done this film, he’s acting and he’s good. The thing is, I didn’t realize that his house burnt down, you know?

Emm: I heard that, yes.

Gilles: With all his records.

Emm: Yeah, that’s crazy, very unfortunate. Actually, speaking of record collections, tell me about yours.

Gilles: Well my record collection took my life over and I had to leave my house. I truly had to leave my house.

Emm: (laughs) I believe you.

Gilles: So I had a house in Finsbury Park, which is near Arsenal in north London, a flat, a four bed roomed flat actually. And I had my wife and we had the kids there. And then by the time the baby was one, the records had--there wasn’t any room for any adults or children. So either we had to move out and buy a big house for everything or—then,I thought actually no. What I’ll do is I’ll buy a house down the road. So I live down the road now and my records are in the house. I’ve got like, I’ve got six bedrooms worth of records. Big rooms, big rooms. I’ve got a lot of records. I’ve got some good records though. And that’s very important as long as you’ve got quality, that’s very key.

Emm: Right. Quality is number one, right. There’s a lot of music out there and a lot of crap.

Gilles: Yes. I’ve spent a lot of money on records, a lot. I mean I’m really bad. I mean I’ll spend all my fee. I’ll do a gig and it will go that way. I’ve done that all my life. If I’d have saved all that money…

Emm: What does your wife say about that? I mean clearly she deals with it but…

Gilles: There are no records in our new house, so it’s fine. We don’t have a record player in our house. We’ve got a CD and that’s it. And I think it’s important also to have my other space. We have a really lovely house, a lovely family and I’m very much in love, and my wife kind of accepts my job. Not really in January, February or March though.

Emm: Yeah?

Gilles: Because I go to Australia in January, it really fucks her up. Because it’s cold she’s got to take the kids to school.

Gilles: So that’s not a good one. And coming here for the week I had to work on that one pretty much. But we get on, it’s all OK. She understands. I was already fully into it when she met me.

Emm: Oh, yeah, so she knows it’s an occupational hazard. You have to know that.
Gilles: Yes. It’s not easy though.

Emm: Absolutely, it’s not.

Gilles: So who do you think is going to win the elections this year? Is Bush going to win again?

Emm: I would say so, barring something really crazy. I mean, he’s so powerful, and is still pretty popular.

Gilles: And he’s quite good in a way. I mean I hate to say it. I’m not a Bushite whatever, but I just saw him doing a few speeches when he came to England and he's got better at that.

Emm: Talking? (laughs)

Gilles: Better, yes, he’s got better at that. He’s got a bit better standing in England.

Emm: Yeah, it seems like he has. You know I love to watch Question Time. I always wonder how Bush would fare if Congress could just fire off questions at him like that.

Gilles: Do you get that here?

Emm: Not the show “Question Time”, but the parliamentary questions. They show it on C-span.

Gilles: Oh, oh yes. The parliamentary question time, where they’ve got the cameras in the House of Commons.

Emm: Right. I love that.

Gilles: It’s pretty controlled though, I think.

Emm: I bet. I wonder if Blair gets the questions ahead of time, do you know?


Gilles: I don’t know, I’m sure he does. Nothing really surprises him.

Emm: I liked Blair a lot when he was--- I guess it was when Clinton was in office, and they were boys. I really liked Clinton too, though. I was really surprised Blair bought into Bush and this war thing the way he did.

Gilles: Yeah, he had to. I couldn’t believe how he sold his soul on that one. He came across as very admirable. He had a lot of humility as Prime Ministers, people in power go. He came across as very honest, and he just basically, he was told you’ve got to go with us. And he had to lie through his teeth to go. Actually, last year, when we were here, the day that I did my show from here, he was on the seven o’clock news, which is midnight England, and when I started, I could hear the news bulletin saying how America, all the allies had just started bombing Iraq. It was such a downer. And so it just felt really strange being here actually.

Emm: Yeah, I remember that. Such and unfortunate day. So what’s next for you? You’re here in Miami this week and then. . .

Gilles: Well I’m doing a show in New York on Thursday.

Emm: That’s cool. You don’t play over here in the states that often.

Gilles: No, I don’t really. I really want to play in New Orleans too, man.

Labels: Music

By JON CARAMANICA
DURING a show at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa this summer, the Cool Kids took the stage dressed like extras in “Do the Right Thing.” Mikey Rocks, 20, and the duo’s main rapper, wore a baggy, bright red tank top with silver lettering, and Chuck Inglish, 23, sported a striped Polo shirt; both wore fitted baseball caps with brims flying high. Midshow, the two slid into the signature song “88,” a carefully constructed burst of reminiscence with spare, crisp drums backing a fusillade of era-appropriate references: Cuban-link gold chains, Cazal eyeglass frames, stone-washed Guess jeans. In the crowd, some fans waved gold ropes and vintage sneakers, and a young woman in a floral-print dress did the high-stepping Kid ’n Play dance from the 1990 film “House Party.”

Released in May, the Cool Kids’ debut EP, “The Bake Sale” (C.A.K.E./Chocolate Industries), is a vivid and unusually potent revisiting of what is commonly referred to as hip-hop’s golden age (spanning the late 1980s and early ’90s), both in its spare, drum-heavy production values and in its neatly structured rhyme patterns. Never mind that the two performers aren’t old enough to have experienced the scene firsthand.

“That’s what we sound like; I can’t help it,” said Chuck Inglish, who produces the Cool Kids’ music with a meticulous ear. “But I’m into emulation, not imitation.”

Increasingly, the Cool Kids are not alone. They are part of a small but newly influential hip-hop subculture — call it meta-rap — created by a generation of artists raised wholly within hip-hop culture, making music that is a commentary on what came before it. In hip-hop, which can be ruthlessly forward-looking, this is a novel development, and it has made for compelling and diverse music from acts like the Cool Kids, Pacific Division, the Knux, Kidz in the Hall and Plastic Little.

Not all these artists are as committed to a specific sound as the Cool Kids are, but they express their nostalgia in other ways: in lyrical references and rhyme patterns, in the selection of drum sounds, in their choice of clothes. While much current mainstream rap tends toward street-life fantasias and thug-love odes, these meta-rap artists are far less ostentatious, preoccupied with authenticity and topically narrow. As a result most of their music exists at the margins, little acknowledged by radio or television but extremely popular on the Internet.

Musically, this may be the most promising underground hip-hop movement in a decade, feted by old-school loyalists and genre outsiders entranced by its obsessive commitment to style. But even as the movement creeps toward broader recognition, it has already generated its share of backlash. These artists are often dismissed as “hipster rap,” as if they’re wearing their old-school references as nothing more than fashion. The result is a hip-hop generation gap.

“It’s the instant gratification aspect,” said Eskay, proprietor of the hip-hop blog NahRight.com, which has prominently featured many of these artists. “You can be an expert in anything in about a week now. The backlash is, these kids are young; why are they trying to recreate something they didn’t experience?”

Rap has had its countercultures before, of course. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, New York’s Native Tongues crew, which included De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, presented a bohemian alternative to the growing gangster rap scene. In the ’90s, Los Angeles and the Bay Area were home to independent scenes interested in rewriting the rules of lyricism.

But while intragenre nostalgia figures regularly in other styles of pop — rock has a long history of sifting through its past for new inspiration — it has never had a place in hip-hop. It’s not that rap never looks backward. Thanks to its innovations in sampling, it has helped keep various other styles prominent in the collective pop memory. But borrowing from other rappers has traditionally been considered taboo. And largely it still is, so many of these artists use elements of the past as building blocks, which they then reconfigure to their own ends. Though the music shares many characteristics with hip-hop from decades past, “in the climate of the industry right now, it’s considered experimental,” said Be Young, 22, of Southern California’s Pacific Division.

“People are students of the game,” said Double O of the Chicago duo Kidz in the Hall. “The late ’80s and early ’90s was hip-hop’s Harlem Renaissance. You can find traces of that in all of these new artists.”

With two full-length albums to their credit, Kidz in the Hall, who met while students at the University of Pennsylvania, qualify as veterans of the new movement. On their latest album, “The In Crowd” (Duck Down), they even enlist golden-age artists like Camp Lo, Buckshot and Masta Ace for cameos. “I’m an academic at heart,” Double O said. “Even when it comes to music, I’m going to take pieces out and reinject them on an academically creative level.”

The New Orleans-via-Los Angeles duo the Knux also takes its bona fides seriously. “I am very schooled on what happened in the ’80s,” said Krispy Kream, 25, half of the duo. “Some of these cats wasn’t even born till the ’90s.”

How they translate those influences is unique, though. The duo’s debut, “Remind Me in 3 Days,” to be released in October on Interscope, is self-produced — the Knux has performed often at songwriters’ nights at Largo, the Los Angeles club spearheaded by the producer Jon Brion, who has worked with Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann — and recalls in places early OutKast, the Clash and the Police. The texture, though, is unmistakably from the golden age, with fast-rap cadences and raw, almost haphazard-sounding drums.

“We recorded songs in the worst way possible,” Krispy Kream said, “so you get a certain feel from it, like an old hip-hop record from 1990 or whenever.”

His brother and band mate, Rah Almillio, 23, considers it “a punk approach, hip-hop as it used to be — not perfected, not overpolished.”

In a sense these meta-rappers have become keepers of the flame for the genre’s old guard: neo-traditionalists in eccentrics’ clothing. “There’s always nostalgia; it’s a byproduct of capitalism,” said Jayson Musson, 30, the frontman for the Philadelphia rap satirists Plastic Little. “Especially for the kids who weren’t really there, that era becomes hypercool, like the ’50s and the Beats.”

Mr. Musson described his music as “rap, but almost an investigation of rap, very aware of the genre and its structural elements.” Plastic Little has released two albums, the self-released “Thug Paradise” and “She’s Mature” (Tonearm), both packed with hip-hop in-jokes. This inquisitiveness also comes out in Mr. Musson’s writing and art. For a time last year, he was a columnist for Philadelphia Weekly, and in 2002 he put out “Too Black for BET,” a collection of posters that poked vicious fun at hip-hop orthodoxies (the most memorable of which speculated on the sexuality of Jay-Z).

“The music is like the writing,” Mr. Musson said. “It’s got to be funny or deconstructive.”

In recent years there has been no shortage of deconstructionists in rap’s mainstream, the most noteworthy being Kanye West, André 3000 of OutKast and Lupe Fiasco. And this is a particularly fertile moment for alternative hip-hop styles: the electro-influenced club-rap of Spank Rock and Kid Sister, the liberal-minded college raps of Asher Roth, the surf-rock hip-hop of Shwayze, Wale’s hybrid of go-go and rap, and the stream-of-consciousness fantasies of Charles Hamilton.

These so-called hipster rappers have been successful at carving out their own niches, finding audiences in unexpected places. The Knux had a song featured on an episode of the HBO series “Entourage” last season. Plastic Little recently toured Europe with Mark Ronson. And the Cool Kids have been prominently featured in a national television ad for Rhapsody, Microsoft’s online music service.

There may well be a ceiling for this movement, though. “The music is just not mass appeal,” said Cipha Sounds, a mixshow D.J. on New York’s Hot 97 (WQHT-FM) and a host on MTV. “I enjoy some of it very much, but it’s nothing I can really play on the radio or in the club.”

And sales of these artists have been modest, though none have yet released an album with a major-label push like the Knux will receive, according to Steve Berman, president of sales and marketing at Interscope Geffen A&M. But he warned that “their success may not be measured in the old-school commercial ways we used in the past.”

Apart from Kidz in the Hall and Plastic Little, none of these groups have even released proper full-length albums; blog hype has gotten ahead of them, forcing them to hone, and perhaps calcify, a sound very early in their careers. “Everyone’s looking at them before they’re ready,” said Kidz in the Hall’s Double O of his peers. “They’re going to have to put out a product before their time.”

Or, perhaps, to suffer the indignity of having their style copied before they get a chance to truly capitalize on it. “We’ve got a lot of friends at record labels that got inside scoop on what’s happening,” said the Cool Kids’ Mikey Rocks. “It’s been said they’re trying to create their own Cool Kids. There’s going to be clones and Cool Kids Juniors all over the place.”

If the Cool Kids have their way, though, they will have evolved by then. In between tour dates, the group has been working on its debut album, tentatively titled “When Fish Ride Bicycles.” And there is always more history to mine.

“After this LP,” Chuck Inglish said, “I’m thinking about recording everything to tape like it’s 1991 and seeing how that sounds.”

Labels: African Americans, Music

On May 20, 2008, Barack Obama won the state of Oregon. No matter what opinion people made about Obama "not being ready to lead" a bi-racial man with a Muslim father and a Christan mother had taken one more step toward entering the Oval Office. The mauling he gave Senator Clinton in several predominantly White states in massive numbers seemed unthinkable.
Or was it?

In 2000 author Robert Greene penned the 48 Laws of Power. His groundbreaking bestseller gives a modern twist to classical war strategy. Greene's in depth discussion on the effects of mastering of one's emotions can easily be seen in the Clinton vs. Obama skirmishes.
Greene expanded his unique approach to observing warfare in The Art of Seduction and The 33 Strategies of war.
He is arguably the foremost sought after strategist in business, politics and war - our Prince Machiavelli of modern warfare, if you will.


In watching Barack Obama's rise, it is hard to not see a pattern of his victories closely connected with the 48 Laws of Power and the 33 Strategies of War.
At times Obama appears to have been playing a magnificent game of political chess from the start of his bid for the Oval Office. I sat down with Robert Greene to discuss Senator Obama's tactical and strategic movements in his campaign. While everyone seems to have their site locked into the DNC convention, Robert Greene advises that we all prepare ourselves for a protracted political battle.


AB: Lets start with Law 24: The Perfect Courtier. You say that individual "thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.
"

RG: I never thought about it before, but it does make perfect sense. If you wanted to psychoanalyze it a little bit. With his background, in being bi-racial and having to navigate in different worlds...If you look at his Kenyan father, then you look at the White side in Kansas and Hawaii- he's been towing a line between the two worlds. And if you read his book, he's asking "Where do I fit"? It's a really interesting story, I like his books. He's always had to learn how to be the courtier. He's always had to be diplomatic. How not to offend this person or that. These two sides had very different sensibilities, while he's trying too figure out who he is. So, I think its in his nature. Its not a fake thing. Some people learn to be the courtier later in life. Its a nice quality, but some people can feel like its a little bit manipulative. But I think its very deep in his identity, from his multiracial background. I'm not sure, I can only speculate.


Its very nice. He's very graceful. He does not get angry. I thought the one moment where he blew it a little was in a debate with Clinton. It was in January I believe. He kinda lost his cool. He got a little bit angry and testy. I supported him early on. He was my first pick. For while I felt a little bit alienated from him. I did not think he was tough enough. I wanted to see him fighting back. But I understood later on that that's very hard for him to do. It does not play well. For the position that he is in, trying to be the first Black President. For him to show anger at a White woman was strategically not gonna play. So, he lost it a little bit in this one debate. But he never repeated it. I mean, its not really a strategy on his part, but its very effective.


I was just reading before you called about him speaking in Florida. He was meeting with Jewish voters. It was kind of interesting to see him charming them again, winning them over. I can make references to Jewish people and Jewish culture that are very appropriate. So there he is being the courtier.Its a quality hat will serve very well in his campaign. Bill Clinton was a master at it. He could talk to Hollywood liberals and then he could go to a factory in Ohio.


Now, some people don't think he has the common touch. I think there is a bit of truth to that. Maybe he is not comfortable with the White steel worker in Pennsylvania. But he has a different kind of power. A different kind of charm. I think he'll actually get over some of these supposed weaknesses that he has with White voters. I think he is very much a courter.


AB: The first law I think I openly recognized with Barack is Law 32: Play to Peoples Fantasies. There you say "The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
"

Now, I do not mean to imply that he is fraudulent in spirit, or an actor. But, I don't think I have seen someone in my lifetime who has been able to mentally and emotionally move masses the way he does. I can only compare it to watching old footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe Malcolm X.


RG: Or JFK.


AB: Perfect example in JFK. It looks like his change theme has drawn millions of people into what they want to see in America. It seems like he creates this dream for you of what America can be, but leaves room for you to impose your dream on top.


RG: I think you're right. We don't like to bring sophisticated psychology when discussing these things. The fantasy always kind of plays a line between a vague hope with a little bit of reality thrown in. If you put too much reality in it obscures. If you put too much hope there is nothing we can really connect to. So, throughout the ages the people who have been able to master this know how to make the perfect illusionary quality. Its like watching a good writer writing a novel.


Barack makes change inspiring. But he does not fill in too many details. Strategically that's very smart. The problem with America in the 21st century is that the country is so splintered. It's cracking up into smaller and smaller niche markets and groups. By region, by ethnicity and all these things. So that makes it hard to connect the whole country together. Its hard to get over all that and bring people together with a message. The only way you can do that is to be very inspiring and not being too concrete with what you are offering.


I can refer to John Kennedy in 1960 when he ran for President. He kinda drove the Republicans crazy with his vagueness. He never really said what he was going to do on a whole score of issues. But he talked about the new frontier and bringing back a certain spirit in America. It really connected in that moment. I think the people around him, like David Axelrod who have backgrounds in marketing an advertising are crafting a story. They are trying to do more of a JFK, or even Regan type campaign. They know that this is the moment for that. Because Americans are very disillusioned with probably the worst President we've ever had. Things look very bleak.


AB: The fantasy law connects directly to Law 45: Preach the Need for change, but never reform too much at once. I think he's hitting law 45 right on the nail.


RG: How so?

AB: Because he keeps the discussion of change very nebulous. Mainly though Obama keeps you believing that A) that change can happen, and B) that he is the agent for the change you want to see in America. One of his best qualities, and something I think Senator Clinton should have embraced was Law 46: Never Appear Too Perfect. He never lets you forget that he's got a wife and kids and that he has his own struggles with cigarettes or whatever. I think 46 keeps people listening to him.


RG: You and I may feel that way. But I'm wondering if other people don't see that in him. I saw him yesterday in his speech after he won Oregon and he said "I'm not perfect, I've made mistakes". I think that kind of humility is very endearing. But I think there are a lot of people that he doesn't connect to. They see him as kind of arrogant and over educated person who is looking down on them. Its funny how its subjective. So to you and I we think he does embody law 46. Other people think that he doesn't do it enough.


It's all fake though really in the end. Because Hillary is eating hot dogs and drinking beer acting like shes one of the yokels. They made one hundred million dollars last year. She comes from a wealthy background. Certainly more elite than he is. Its all fake in the end. But I think that part is subjective in the end. He's going to have to work a bit on his image. He's gonna have to connect with that NASCAR crowd a little bit.


AB: Moving beyond Hillary and looking toward McCain, are we moving from power to the war? If you could tell him to study only 3 of the 33 Strategies of War what would they be?

RG: The one he should study, and has actually done pretty well so far is Strategy 20: Maneuver Them Into Weakness. Its a Chinese concept. I struggled my hardest to bring this to the Western audience, because its not easy to explain. In the East, its the position you take that matters. Everything is related to something else- nothing is isolated. What you want in war or strategy is to take positions that put your rival in a corner and have less options than you.


The Western approach is not like that at all. The Western approach is to go straight in at the enemy and kill as many as you can.


In politics you want to get to a position that allows you to go here or there. Obama did that brilliantly from day one and Hillary messed it up. Here he is moving toward the general election. How can he move John McCain into positions that are untenable? That's the game. You can already see the position he's trying to put McCain in is, "He's Bush" But how do you make that case? Its one thing to say. Its another thing to make people feel it. If he can make people in Kentucky and Pennsylvania feel that McCain will make us live through four more years of the hell we've been living through it will be very effective.


But it can't be just with words. You have to do and show- its interesting to watch. Now, very fortunately, the Democrats control Congress. For instance the vote to the GI bill that just occurred. It will force McCains hand to show that he supports Bush. If he doesn't, he'll alienate his right wing base. In the Power book we call that putting your enemy on the horns of a dilemma. You go right, you are screwed. You go left, you are screwed. If he votes for the GI bill, he looks like a Democrat. If he votes against it, he looks like he's Bush again.


Obama has to keep his options fluid. You don't wanna commit to anything that's gonna screw you in the end. Any kind of position for instance on the economy. He did that in one debate but I don't think that's going to come back to hurt him. Don't say exactly that you'll never raise taxes on this. Keep it a little bit vague. Give yourself room to put McCain in very uncomfortable positions.


Another law from the war book is Strategy 28: Give Your Rivals Enough Rope to Hang Themselves. You never stop a man who's killing himself. McCain has a temper. Its the old Bob Dole thing. Love him or hate him, he's got a temper and its legendary. So he's got to frustrate him and bait him into things. Seeing John McCain lose his temper. It does not look so good. He looks like a cranky old man.


I talk about this in my book in regards to Lee Atwater. He's kind of a satanic figure in politics. He did that very same thing in 1988 with Bob Dole. But I'm afraid its a very powerful tactic and could be very effective on John McCain. I already saw, with the GI bill he got very testy.


War Strategy number 12: Grand Strategy. Its the most important in the book. Its that you plan, and that you do it looking far ahead into the future. You don't want to be someone that's attacking into the wind everything something new comes into the election cycle. Politicians muck this up again and again. Because its not an election that takes place every week. Its in November. One day. There are going to be setbacks. There are going to be things that you did not plan for happening. I mean, Democrats are really bad at this. I mean pathetic bad. If you have a grand strategy, it makes you consistent. It keeps you going in that line, when it seems everything around you not.


So much of the bad stuff happening, with Clinton losing this state or that state- it could have pushed him off course. But it didn't. He stayed pretty consistent on message there. If he follows those, it'll be a slam dunk.

Labels: Music, Politics and African Americans, Strategy

Man Who Beat Coke and NFL Starts to Study Diversity in Ad Agencies

By Ken Wheaton

Cyrus Mehri, one of the nation's top civil-rights attorneys and a man who has been dubbed one of Washington's most feared lawyers, has turned his attention to the ad industry's woeful diversity record.

Mr. Mehri declined to discuss whether a lawsuit was in the works but said his firm was behind the preliminary results of a study obtained by Ad Age. Any way you look at it, the fact that a top civil-rights attorney has commissioned a survey of diversity in ad agencies does not bode well for the agencies whose ranks are still overwhelmingly white.

The study, which isn't complete yet, is being conducted by economist Marc Bendick Jr. on behalf of the firm. According to the summary, Mr. Bendick looked at census data and figures for similar "persuasion" industries (media, law, philanthropy, high-end sales) and came up with benchmark percentages of minorities one could expect in an industry such as advertising. Whereas, according to the benchmarks, African-Americans would be expected to make up 9.5% of the professionals in advertising (a number even lower than the 13% in the general population), it turns out they make up only 5.8%. On the executive and managerial side, African-Americans make up only 3.2% compared with an expected 7.2%.

That amounts to a 39% shortfall in African-American representation among the industry's staff and a 56% shortfall among managerial employees. Unlike previous efforts, this study takes into account the entire ad industry, not just a handful of agencies operating out of New York. The figures include employees and managers at African-American-owned shops; Mr. Mehri said he expects the numbers to be even worse when those agencies are not factored in.



'Purposeful discrimination'

"If this was 1970 and they had this shortfall, I could be sympathetic," he said. But, he added, "the preliminary results [of this study] are showing shortfalls that are rare to have in this magnitude in this modern day and indicate purposeful discrimination." He went on to say that the industry won't resolve this issue until it stops focusing on a false "supply" argument (not enough African-American candidates) and starts focusing on the people in charge.

Nancy Hill, president-CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, declined to comment on the matter.

Mr. Mehri, a partner at Mehri and Skalet, wouldn't disclose the firm's long-term plans in relation to the ad industry, but he made it clear he is not working with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. He did attend a forum held by the commission earlier this year on behalf of ad-industry employees who'd contacted him.

A look at Mr. Mehri's case history should worry the industry. His firm was behind suits against Texaco and Coca-Cola Co. that resulted in the largest discrimination settlements in history -- $176 million in the Texaco case and $192.5 million in the Coke case -- as well as dramatic reforms in both companies' employment practices. His firm was also behind recent gender-discrimination suits in the financial-services sector. The so-called Women on Wall Street Project has resulted in, among other things, a $46 million settlement against Morgan Stanley and a $33 million settlement from Smith Barney. Even when lawsuits aren't filed, Mr. Mehri leaves his mark. He, along with Johnnie Cochran, released the report "Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities." That report, backed up with the threat of a major lawsuit, led to the hiring of numerous African-American coaches.

"We're serious players," Mr. Mehri said. "We're going to do our homework. We're going to interview everybody who contacts us. We're going to build this up step by step. This is a world of difference compared to anything [the industry has] faced before."

Economist's perspective

Mr. Bendick, who's conducting the study, is an economist who specializes in employment and human-resource management at Bendick and Eagan Economic Consultants. He's done work for both employers and employees, the departments of Justice and Labor, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Most of his work doesn't involve litigation.

Mr. Bendick wouldn't comment for this story, but in previous studies -- such as "Changing Workplace Cultures to Reduce Employment Discrimination" -- he's touched on types of discrimination that may sound familiar to those toiling in the ad world. "They often derive from social relationships that informally limit access to information about job opportunities. They may reflect issues of 'social comfort' and personal style that affect whose comments get listened to, who is perceived as competent and who gets credit for accomplishments."

On the other hand, he told The Washington Post in January of this year, "If you ask what is the impact of diversity training today, you have to say 75% is junk and will have little impact or no impact or negative impact."

According to Mr. Mehri, the study won't be ready for several weeks. "I want to be clear that our firm has commissioned this study because we do our homework before we come in with guns blazing," he said. The study is meant to offer raw data, a look at causes behind the lack of diversity and, hopefully, remedies.

Leadership problem?

While Mr. Mehri wouldn't disclose what shapes those remedies might take, he was clear that the answer isn't more internships, scholarship programs and diversity initiatives -- which he sees as "rope-a-dope" schemes designed mostly to make it look like the industry is doing something about the problem.




"It's not a matter of forming affinity groups among the excluded," he said. "What needs fixing isn't the African-Americans; it's the white guy running the agency. We want to relentlessly focus on not the excluded groups but the excluding groups, the people who control the power and make the decisions. That's where people are running into barriers. The leadership has to come from the top."

He went on: "We know the industry has had various diversity efforts over the years. However, these efforts are going to continue to fall short until they understand they're operating under a false premise -- that the problem is the supply of African-American talent -- when the real problem is the lack of leadership at the top and their exclusionary policies and practices."

Mr. Mehri countered the argument that the problem is a lack of interest in the industry among African-Americans or a simple lack of candidates. "Supply is important. But you also have to shift the focus to a level playing field. So you can applaud the work that they're doing, but there's still going to be this revolving door unless there's this tenacious focus on a level playing field."

Labels: advertisement, African Americans, Music

By Steve Maich

We like the idea of endless choice, but most of us don't venture past the bestsellers

In October 2004, Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson published an article entitled "The Long Tail," in which he argued a novel hypothesis: the Internet had forever altered the way that businesses operate. Tiny niche audiences could now be serviced as efficiently as mass markets, and could generate prodigious profits.

The title referred to the normal distribution of sales on a graph: a short tall head (where a very few products generate the bulk of sales) that quickly drops away to a long and narrow tail of thousands of products that barely sell at all. Anderson argued that thanks to the Internet, with its limitless choice and easy searchability, people will start flocking into the long tail. Millions of consumers who used to opt for the most popular products, artists, films and brands will now be free to search out the obscure little gems that they always really wanted. The head gets shorter and the tail gets fatter.

The implications for business were potentially enormous. It meant that an online bookstore, for example, could do just as well by offering 10,000 books -- all of which sell just five copies -- as a traditional store selling 1,000 books 50 times each. In practical terms, Anderson argued, it meant that the age of blockbusters is over. Henceforth, he said, smart businesses would stop trying to build one or two massive hits in hopes of catching the hurricane wind of mass popularity. Instead, they would produce a broad range of products to exploit the widest possible array of niche interests and the limitless shelf space available on the Web. When Anderson expanded his article into a book in 2006, he summed it up in the subtitle: "The future of business is selling less of more."

Ironically (or is it paradoxically?), Anderson's book became one of the biggest blockbusters in business publishing. The author became a minor celebrity as a Web guru and a hot ticket on the speaking circuit. The book's title entered the modern business lexicon, casually slipped into conversation by everyone from CEOs on down. The mainstream is dying, they said. Ain't it cool?

Well, as you may have noticed, the era of the blockbuster has stubbornly refused to play along. Last weekend, The Dark Knight, a heavily promoted, big-studio blockbuster, smashed records with the biggest opening weekend for any movie, ever. A few days ago it became the fastest movie ever to break the US$200-million barrier in ticket sales, and it now seems certain that it will eventually haul in more than US$1 billion worldwide. That would make it only the fourth movie ever to do so -- and two of them have come in the past three years. In fact, of the 10 biggest opening movie weekends of all time, nine of them have come in the four years since The Long Tail put blockbusters on death watch.

But anecdotal evidence only gets you so far. To truly evaluate the usefulness of the theory you have to dive into the numbers, and recently Anita Elberse, associate professor of business administration at Harvard, did just that. Elberse pored over data from two services: Rhapsody, the online music store cited by Anderson in his book, and Quickflix online movie rentals. Turns out The Long Tail isn't flattered by close scrutiny.

Elberse found that although sales of obscure titles have risen, there are far more titles in the library that never sell at all. So, rather than the long tail getting fatter, it is getting longer and skinnier. More importantly, sales of those obscure movies and songs aren't coming at the expense of hits. In fact, more money is being channelled into the select few mega-blockbusters. As Elberse says: "The importance of individual bestsellers is not diminishing over time, it is growing."

It's also important to know a bit about who is buying those obscure movies and albums. They are a niche unto themselves -- people who watch a lot of films and listen to a ton of music. Elberse's study shows that if you're watching obscure movies, you are almost certainly a huge movie buff. You aren't watching art house films instead of Iron Man. You're watching those movies because you've already seen the blockbusters. Perhaps most surprisingly, those heavy users tended to rate the blockbusters highest. The more low-budget art films you watch, it seems, the more you appreciate The Dark Knight.

Frankly, Elberse's research feels like common sense to most consumers. Sure we all have a few unknown bands in our iPod, but by and large, things are popular because they're better than the alternatives. The explosion of options and choice doesn't change that. In fact, Elberse's conclusions wouldn't even be noteworthy if not for the enormous popularity of The Long Tail.

So why did Anderson's thesis take off like wildfire? First, because it promised a radical shift. We're attracted to any compelling argument that promises a fundamental change in the way we view the world, and history is littered with examples of revolutionary ideas that turned out to be wrong.

But perhaps most importantly, it pandered to our egos. It appealed to our inner snob -- the one that believes we're above the banal mainstream, and that the Internet will set us free to indulge our unique and sophisticated tastes. The truth is less flattering. We like to think we are, at heart, connoisseurs of Ingmar Bergman films. But most of us never get around to watching Smiles of a Summer Night because we were busy seeing Pirates of the Caribbean for the fourth time.

We all wanted to believe in The Long Tail, but we couldn't stay away from the blockbusters. While we all like the idea of endless choice, most of us are never going to venture far beyond the bestsellers list. Contrary to Anderson's advice, the future of business is doing pretty much what you've always done. But the emergence of the Web means there may be a way to wring a few bucks from the flops you previously wrote off as useless.

In Anderson's defence, that probably would not have fit on a book jacket.

Labels: Music, Stuff

By David hattenbach

How to make the whole brand greater than its parts

Here's a thought: The branding game has changed so much that the concept of brand integration is no longer a useful way to approach branding, at least with regard to media selection. In today's new-media landscape, bland integration is just a far too-simple, old-school concept.

It's time to rethink things.

I'm not suggesting we abandon integration principles. I'm suggesting we replace the concept of brand integration with a more contemporary concept I call "brand holism."

It's true that the emergence of new media has provided more opportunities to deliver a brand message in new and interesting places. On the surface, this is a good thing. (It's hard to argue that consistency and ubiquity are bad things.) But all we're doing with new media is adding boxes to the same old-media flow chart. We can do better.

We have the opportunity to do much more for our brands. We can be smarter about the opportunities inherent in each medium and their ability to add dimension to brands and intensify the relationships with consumers. It's no longer good enough to simply align the different parts of the media mix around one objective; we should ask the parts to work toward different objectives that support the whole. We should not be looking to make everything match. We should be looking at how the different parts complement one another anti create a greater whole.

Yes, it is still important to be single-minded, but single-minded doesn't mean we have to be narrow-minded. Today we have the ability to think wide and deep at the same time. As traditional media planning gives way to connections planning, we can see that there are many things we can do for our brands to make them more "whole"; things that were difficult or impossible to do just a short time ago. For example, today we can:

Narrowcast messages to targets that could not be reached effectively before.

Thanks in large part to the Internet, we can now create more complex communication strategies and narrowcast them to multiple target audiences at once.

Create engaging media experiences that help form brand expectations. If it's true that the medium is the message, then it follows that the media experience is the bland. We should use new-media opportunities in ways that convey or contribute to the overall brand experience and define who we are through actions rather than just words.

Connect users and develop communities that will create and propagate brand advocates. We are all hardwired to want to connect with people and belong to something. Today, we can easily connect with our most passionate fans and give them elevated access to the brand via privileged information, special offers, VIP status, etc. Through these communities, we can turn users into loyalists and loyalists into advocates.

Foster real-time conversations with consumers. We can use social media to establish mutually respectful and transparent two-way dialog with our customers. The rewards will be deeper consumer insights that could lead to more relevant products and services, enhanced credibility and greater satisfaction among consumers.

Provide new and interesting context that heightens brand relevancy and deepens brand meaning. We can use new-media opportunities such as branded content to help brands become more culturally relevant and flush with cultural capital. Consumers can come to know our brands not only by the messages we send, but by the places we've been.

The point of brand holism is to no longer look at media as simply a way to deliver messages. We should use media in a complementary way that delivers greater value to the brand and to the consumer. In other words, use media to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. That's the kind of ROI I'd like to see.

Labels: advertisement, Music

By Noreen O'Leary

How a host of new agency realities are pushing boomers out before their time

Earlier this month, a judge set a December trial date for a $30 million age-discrimination suit by a Universal McCann media exec, George Hayes, against the agency and its corporate parent, Interpublic Group. Hayes says he was fired by a younger boss who believed young people at the agency "got it" when it came to new media in a way that older staffers did not. In addition, Hayes claims, his former boss viewed "age and experience as a hindrance, rather than a benefit."

The two sides seem ready to go public with the private concerns of a generation of industry execs fearing displacement at a time they should be in their peak earning years.

Valid or not, the contentions of Hayes-a former evp, client services let go at age 53--ring true for a large number of other executives on the street who are arguing their relevance.

Even within the youth-obsessive traditions of the ad industry, there's a new sense of gloom about the career prospects for mid- to upper-level employees. Creative executives, who have obviously always felt the need to. exude a hipness born of cutting-edge culture, now feel it tenfold thanks to the fast pace of digital technologies and emerging delivery channels. Now others are feeling youthful pressures in a media world and larger consumer society informed by technological change. But the issues are more complicated; they're as much about compensation and changing skill sets as they are about tenure. Factor in the current economic downturn and client budget cuts that create an incentive to lose higher-salaried employees, and it's no wonder some in the industry see an overt ageism taking hold that could make a new minority: those over 50.

"Baby boomers always say that 40 is the new 30 [and] 50 is the new 40. In advertising, 50 is the new 65. As soon as you hit that barrier, you're considered old," says Dorothy Higgins, 54, who is consulting after being laid off earlier this year from one of the industry's media companies.

That barrier, in fact, may be dipping even lower. Says one of Higgins' peers: "It's now starting at 40 or 45. Unless you've gotten to a certain stage in your career where you have one of those bullet-proof jobs--where you are extremely key to a client--you're vulnerable."

Not to be discounted in all of this is the fact that with "CMOs getting younger, you have a casting issue," says Nancy McNally, 53, a former top executive at agencies like Ammirati & Puffs and clients like American Express.

Industry observer Rick Kurnit, a partner at law firm Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein & Selz, agrees that client-casting issues play a role and points out that it cuts two ways. While younger CMOs may relate better to agency staffers in their peer group, he says, older ones look for the agency perspective on new media creative they themselves may lack. There may also be an element of being in the wrong career place at the wrong time. Boomers climbed their careers ranks in a different agency world. Amid new unbundled economic realities, CFOs, demanding that 75 percent of payroll come from client income, can attain cost savings more readily by cutting higher-salaried staffers. The newly empowered client-procurement people look to buy agency hours at cost and young staffers are obviously cheaper. "None of these factors reflect the merits of these [older] people, unfortunately," Kurnit says.

One industry HR exec acknowledges there's a shortage of opportunities for senior people. "The industry's existing bias toward youth and hipness has become more extreme now because of the digital transformation," he says. "The recruiting priority is to find people who are becoming more proficient in digital communications, and the basic assumption is that anyone 50-plus is not going to be that. There's a deep-seated feeling that people of a certain age have a bias toward traditional media--and it can be hard to put them in front of clients for that reason."

The other new reality: The larger contraction within the ad industry. Martin" Kohli, a regional economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, says that from May 2007 to May 2008 advertising and related industries lost 11,900 jobs, or 2.5 percent of its employment. Job losses were concentrated in three industry segments: ad agencies, ad distribution and direct mail. (In contrast, public relations and media-buying agencies both managed to increase employment over the year.)

"Looking back, one of the striking things about advertising employment is that after falling from 2000 through 2004 and then growing through 2007, the industry did not get back to its May 2000 level," Kohli observes.

Says Susan Friedman, head of her eponymous recruitment firm: "There are so few job openings anywhere, it's painful. This slowdown is deeper than the one in 1991. It's more like in 1981 and it's going to get worse."

To put that into perspective, during that recession, U.S. unemployment levels, around 11 percent, were higher than any other time in the post-WWII era.

Friedman notes that another challenge in the current job market is relocation. Older execs, with more expensive homes, may not be able to sell their residencies in this real estate downturn.

Some say the industry is merely undergoing a realistic correction in compensation, giving people what they're worth in today's digitally focused market. "I was talking to someone recently who was making $350,000 and now she's willing to make $225,000-250,000," says Friedman. "Five years ago, there were no salary concessions. Your salary was tied to your ego. Now, it's, 'How low can you go?' Creative people with only a traditional background will not get another job in this business, period. But if that person embraces all the new forms of advertising, they'll be worth a lot."

How much more? "If you have 'interactive' or 'digital' in front of your title, you'll be paid 10-15 percent more in compensation," says Amy Hoover, evp at the industry's largest recruitment firm, Talent Zoo. "Traditional shops don't have much of that and they're building expertise."

Recruiters expect creative job candidates for interactive positions to have Web sites with online portfolios or to send links to digital work they've produced. "If someone sends over PDFs or their books for a digital position, you discount them immediately," says Hoover.

And again, it's not just creative execs who may need to recalibrate their compensation demands. "There are an awful lot of people of a certain age out of work right now," says one industry leader. "I don't think it's solely the fault of agencies. [These unemployed execs] need to reconfigure their expectations."

Indeed, among out-of-work execs who spoke to Adweek, one was willing to take a 50 percent reduction from a peak earnings period in order to land a job. Another was willing to be more flexible on terms, opting to take a 20 percent pay cut, work four days a week for less pay or take a lower wage, with bonus.

Nonetheless, there's concern about a devaluation of experience. One senior-level media exec, let go during a downsizing, describes a current opening for a leader of global media strategy for Visa--a top-level job requiring considerable coordination within the client organization as well as management of outside agencies, The salary base is $150,000, with experience requirements of seven to 10 years. Previously, a job like that would have a base of $185,000-195,000 and require 10 years of hard-core media experience, the exec argues. One Manhattan headhunter concurs, sniffing at the compensation package: "The base and experience for that will work in Kansas, not New York."

Recruiters also say that employers often pick staffers with less experience than they requested. "People say they want someone with 15 years experience and then they pick a person with six years," says one. "I suspect they just wanted the younger people all along, but it would be illegal to say that."

Indeed, recruiters say there's a new employer shorthand for candidate requests, with terms like "rising star" and "up-and-coming" used to skirt legal issues.

"They mask it by saying they want someone with a lot of energy, a lot of technology or digital, but I know what they mean," says one source.

While creative and media execs of a certain age are bearing the brunt of the industry's digital change, the game has changed in account management as well.

"It used to be a lot simpler: So and so grew up at Y&R or O&M, has telecom experience, lots of client skills. That's a thing of the past," says one industry recruiter. "Five, 10 years ago, if you were the perfect car guy, P&G woman, you had a resume everyone wanted. It's different now; that consistency, and loyalty is not rewarded any more.

"It's a big problem. If you're 45-plus and worked your entire career in an ad agency, you're going to struggle if you don't change," she continues. "You must become an early adopter… We want diverse work experience, people [who are] digitally fluent or open to becoming so, and that's where people 30 or younger may have the advantage.… If you're not willing to change now, you'll be extinct in five years."

But that reinvention may not be so easy. Jeri Dack, a 58-year-old media exec who has worked at agencies like DMB&B, MediaVest and MPG, got her first real taste of digital while serving as director, digital media at TargetCast and is now refocusing her career in that direction. With a diverse industry background, Dack is not used to being held back when trying something new.

"I've never felt discrimination before, gender or age," she says. "Now I feel resume discrimination. You either have to be young and working in digital or to have had your start in digital. People like me go out and are interviewed by a person who is 30, with their feet on the desk, who says, 'You've only been doing this for 18 months.'"

Dack sounds more frustrated than bitter, as did others interviewed for this article. That's not to say there have not been humiliations. Some have been let go by younger bosses only to have their former positions slightly changed and filled with younger, cheaper staffers. Another tells of receiving a call from a contract freelance company for a last-minute new-business pitch and being offered $40 an hour--about a quarter of what she gets on the open market. Others describe freelancing in new-business pitches with the knowledge they're good enough to win the account, but not likely to be hired after the agency lands the business.

Many digital practitioners, however, lack the integrated vision and skills of those more traditional media execs.

"My big frustration is that digital agencies that do creative barely have any understanding of digital media and no understanding of marketing," observes Dack.

Says another unemployed media veteran about her last job: "I said to a [younger, digital] colleague, 'I'd like to work across clients and build a much more robust program across media.' He said, 'That's fine, as long as you understand the purpose is to drive traffic to the Web site.'"

Within digital shops, some more-senior execs have found it a difficult cultural mix with aft office full of predominately younger staffers. One exec, let go from her job earlier this year, said at age 39 she felt it was frowned upon when she left at 6:30 p.m. to go home to her family. Her colleagues, many of them living with roommates in Manhattan apartments co-signed by parents, would hang around the office and then head out to a local bar and do shots together.

"When you have kids, you learn to be efficient," she says. ''You get into the office early, eat lunch at your desk and not go out to two-hour media lunches or spend two hours on Facebook. I'm in the suburbs with a mortgage and kids. We didn't have much in common and I felt like an outsider."

After being laid off, the exec interviewed at some other digital shops and encountered more of the same: bosses and colleagues in "Teva sandals, tattoos and piercings. That's not me, not my culture," she says. She's now in the process of setting up her own consultancy. (Other laid-off media execs say they're focusing their job searches outside the industry to content providers who appreciate their experience and background.)

The exec, realistic about why she thinks she was let go, says agencies are gambling with young people of limited client experience: "OK, you can change the job title or description and get one of them for $50,000 less and they're OK if everything is going well. But when there's a problem, you need someone with experience to face it and say, 'This is how we fix it.'"

Adds Dack: "The easy part in this industry is learning a discipline. The hard things are client management, collaboration, strategy, mentoring and teaching."

Bob Greenberg, the 60-year-old founder of interactive agency R/GA, understands the frustrations of his more-traditional industry peers. He admires their skills in client management, creative and strategy, all of which, he says, is as relevant to R/GA as it is elsewhere. But he notes that companies like his can only take on so many of those execs and retool their skill sets.

"There's a lot of agency musical chairs happening right now and there are more and more people 40-plus left without a chair when the music stops," he says. "They. can't retire, but they're not trained for digital and their salary range is high. We're competitive with traditional agencies when it comes to pay, but it also means when we hire them it takes a year to train them from an investment perspective. A younger person aged 25-32 already knows what we do. They live a digital, multi-channel life already and you don't have to train them."

Former Ogilvy & Mather North American CCO Rick Boyko, 59, now the head of the VCU Brandcenter, says he left the business five years ago after his frustration at not seeing it change quickly enough. Agency execs that have fallen out of step with its transformation, he says, may have only themselves to blame.

"I don't think there's a new kind of ageism in our business today," Boyko says. "It's always been, and always will be, a young person's business. We help shape and create culture. To do that you have to be in tune with the culture of the time. Culture almost always comes from the streets and clubs of inner cities, yet most agency execs move to the 'burbs and do not stay in touch with what's going on. They become comfortable and complacent. They stay in the same job for too long. To stay current in this business, you have to kick yourself in the ass and challenge yourself."

KEY INSIGHTS

New casting issues are arising with clients who assume agency executives of a certain age harbor a bias toward traditional media.

A compensation correction is under way: Traditional execs will have to be more realistic about what they're worth, while hybrid thinkers and digital staffers are in big demand.

Employers are finding new ways to mask age bias as they select candidates with less experience than is required for the position.

Labels: advertisement, Music

By Benjamin Palmer

Web designers should consider how using a site reflects upon the brand

In the interactive world, we have a discipline called User Experience, or UX for short. We've got a whole department of people that thinks about it. It's the first phase of many online projects and it's a part of every interactive RFP that any company receives. It's kind of a big deal in the online universe.

You may have heard of this. Or perhaps you've heard of Information Architecture (IA), Experience Design (XD) and/or User Interface Design (UI), terms sometimes used interchangeably with UX. Regardless of what you call it, the key is understanding what the discipline is and what it does.

The first thing to understand when getting your head around UX is that it's an umbrella term for different disciplines that have been converging and co-evolving for the past couple of decades. These include User Interface Design, Information Design, Usability, Interaction Design, Graphic Design, Information Architecture and Human-Computer Interaction. (How's that for a lot of jargon?)

Less important than intimately understanding each subdiscipline is the idea that at the center of all of this is the user. (In the true fashion of the UX community, even the usage of the word "user" is heavily debated.) Ultimately, UX is about fostering a deep understanding of the people who use your Web site, how it fits into their lives, and the empathy necessary to create design solutions that lead to great experiences.

Talking in strictly digital terms, UX is that amorphous middle ground where it's not really graphic design per se, or the art direction, but it's how we structure and craft a person's interactions with the stuff we create. Where does the navigation go? Do we put this on the main page or on a secondary page? Will anyone care about that thing if they have to click twice to get there? Is this interface as easy to use as it could be?

On the surface this just seems like a trendy way of saying "making a Web site." And that's definitely a part of it. But for us, there's more. We've been thinking that the process that goes into thinking about UX should apply more holistically to a brand's overall behavior, so you can make some user-centered marketing.

I like to start with the notion that the audience actually cares about what we're doing. This isn't always a flawless starting point, but it works most of the time, and is at least fairly true if you're talking about a Web site. Whatever the circumstances, if someone ends up on your site, they're there on purpose. Something caught their eye and led them there, and they want the experience to be a good one.

So, giving a crap, check. This actually puts you in a good place to do your job, because you get to think about being nice to your audience. What do they want or need? How can you help them? How can you make this work for them? You get to think about them as individuals who want to have a nice moment with your brand, find out some exciting information and/or do something new.

In more traditional advertising, the thought might be people actually want whatever product or service you're marketing, and what you're doing is less about convincing them or interrupting them, and more about announcing and making available to them in the most interesting way possible. It's getting them super amped about a decision they kind of want to make anyhow.

Let's use the darling of UX people everywhere as an example: the iPhone. Looking at Apple.com's product marketing site for the iPhone you may wonder, how hard does this site really have to work? IPhones sell themselves. But after spending some time with the content on Apple.com/iphone, it's hard not to want to run out and get one even if your spouse wants you to make the overdue trip to Ikea. And what is it that's exciting you? The features? Yes. The industrial design? Yes, of course. But also, the way those icons move around and wobble. The way the camera rotates when you rotate. The way you can pinch in on a Safari page. The user experience.

Looking at it through the eyes of Apple it's almost blindingly obvious: a quality user experience can drive sales and adoption, and it can become an advocate for your product or brand--just like marketing.

As the owner of a digital marketing company, this becomes very interesting. The UX gang is charged with thinking of the user first when designing a site. Coincidentally, so are our marketing guys. But in many shops, despite the "user-centered" nature of both these groups, they're often at odds. The marketing guys might be thinking of the user in terms of, "Will this initiative emotionally move the user enough to think about this brand more often?" And the UX guys might be thinking about, "Will the user feel like clicking on that button or would they prefer it be a link?"

What if we added more to the UX designer's plate? What if we not only charged them with thinking about the interface, but also how that interface reflected upon the brand?

It's glaringly apparent, but it's only now entering into the UX conversation. When looking at Vista or Mac OS X, it seems obvious. But it goes deeper. Even now, I can think of three to four brands I feel negatively toward because their sites are so hard to use. There are companies I'll work to avoid just because their sites have given me grief. Wouldn't their marketers want to know that? Shouldn't the UX people be considering this possible impact on the company's operations?

UX and marketing a brand on the Web are inextricably related. Again, perhaps not the deepest insight, but it's time we recognize it and account for it in a methodical way.

Labels: advertisement, Music

Aggressive moves build new model for music industry

By Brian Hiatt

WHILE THE MUSIC business as we know it collapses, one company is sweeping in to pick up the pieces: Live Nation, the world's largest concert promoter, made another set of aggressive moves beyond its core business in recent weeks, striking broad deals with U2 and Jay-Z. "Live Nation is growing very, very fast," says U2 manager Paul McGuinness. "It's going to emerge as one of the centers of the music industry, if not the center of the music industry."

The U2 pact guarantees that Live Nation will promote tours by the band for twelve years, as well as handle the band's merchandising, run its Website and sell its tickets (financial terms were kept under wraps). The $150 million, ten-year Jay-Z deal (which was not finalized at press time) is even broader, much like the $120 million deal Live Nation made with Madonna in October: The company will release his future albums, promote his tours, handle his merch and partner with him on various entrepreneurial ventures under the name Roc Nation.

After a series of acquisitions and other moves, Live Nation is becoming a company like no other in the history of the music business, with tentacles extending into ticketing, recorded music, merchandising, fan clubs and artist Websites. By committing to releasing albums by Jay-Z and Madonna, it is taking on roles traditionally performed by major labels. But more important to its bottom line, Live Nation is also treading on Ticketmaster's territory. The company — which books more than 150 venues worldwide — will dump Ticketmaster beginning next year, instead offering tickets through its own system, which will allow sites such as U2.com to sell directly to fans.

In the past two years, Live Nation also bought Musictoday, which runs artists' fan clubs, and Signatures Network, a leading music-merchandise company.

"There are a whole bunch of products that are based around live concerts that we've never participated in, where we didn't have the infrastructure," says Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino. "We really just moved into that infrastructure and became a vertically integrated music company." Ever-decreasing sales for recorded music give Live Nation an advantage. "For us, it happens to be great news because the live show is becoming the center of the wheel for artists. [Most] of their revenues are coming from the road, which is a very different economic model. We say to artists, 'If we're going to do your tour, what else can we do around that show to maximize our revenue and do a great job for you?'"

It also helps that, unlike record companies, Live Nation will deal directly with consumers online, allowing it to offer, say, Madonna or Jay-Z MP3s to fans who just bought tickets to their shows. In this scenario, albums become just another form of merchandise.

Some in the music industry question whether Live Nation is overpaying for artists: They doubt that Jay-Z and Madonna have the longevity to justify the multiyear pacts, and they challenge why the company paid U2 a presumably huge advance for the right to promote tours it would have likely promoted anyway. "With Jay-Z, no one in the record industry would have made that deal," argues Randy Phillips, CEO of AEG Live, Live Nation's biggest concert-promotion competitor, pointing out that Jay-Z has never been a U2-level force on the road. "Too much money. If you're looking for a rationale for what Live Nation is doing, you're not going to find it in a business model that makes sense."

He adds, "They're trying to figure out how to move the needle on their stock price, or they're looking for a buyer. And they feel having all these big names and assets will help." Live Nation lost nearly $12 million last year, and its stock price has been trending downward.

Rapino insists that Live Nation will sign very few Madonna- and Jay-Z-style deals. "It's hardly a scalable proposition," he says. He notes that Jay-Z's current arena tour with Mary J. Blige is expected to gross $30 million, likely making it the most successful of the rapper's career. And he says the U2 deal, which partners Live Nation with a band that has earned $706 million on the road over the last twelve years, is a no-brainer: "When you've got one of a handful of bands that can sell out stadiums worldwide, you don't want to leave that one to 'Oh, we've got a great relationship — let's not worry about them,'" he says. "And now we're in a true partnership with the greatest band in the world."

Overall, Rapino adds, all of the new businesses Live Nation is entering — from T-shirt sales to recorded music — have far better profit margins than live concerts: "We have learned that if you have a longer relationship with the artist and you have more revenue streams with the artist, your model is much more robust."

"Live Nation is going to emerge as one of the centers of the music industry — if not the center."

Labels: Media, Music