Surrendering to the Suck

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and all the rest of the art plundering plutocrats have won. Finally? Maybe not even.

Welcome to the whorehouse: https://lnk.to/OxbowDSP

You’ve seen them on TV. Or movies. Or have read something they’ve said in print and suddenly, and eerily, it seems, that you’re more than quite clear: they’re talking TO you.

A friend met his wife this way. Saw her on TV and announced to all and sundry, “this is the woman I will marry”, the laughter and amusement of his gathered klatch of friends rang clear. It was…funny. What wasn’t so funny: he tracked her down and 12 months later they were indeed married.

Which unsettled his portion of the world.

Or like a friend said after I hung out with Bill Clinton in Los Angeles way back when such things were prone to happen: “all the crazy shit you used to talk about seems to be coming true.”

Which is, in all fairness, sort of unsettling. Like all kinds of magic it cuts at the threads of what is real and possible versus what’s totally unreal and totally impossible.

“Apple has Steve Bannon’s podcast, Amazon sells everyone’s books, etc. There’s no escaping the idiocracy,” said the label saints. And they were right.

But we love mystery and we’re born into it, or some variation of it, depending on which lies — tooth fairies, Santa Claus, Easter Rabbits, dead grandparents watching you masturbate — your parents decided to tell you. In the end though it’s probably a lot less mystery and a lot more affinity. Or even proximity.

So at a theater on West 4th in the Village I watched Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline of Western Civilization, a movie I’ve only seen once and never seen again. Not because it was bad but because I was already living it. Punk rock and then hardcore had been the twin engines of the becoming that was framing my being.

And through all of the nihilism and disaffected suburban malaise that Spheeris captured, my mind kept returning to an interview with the then, almost impossibly young, Chuck Dukowski, bass player for Black Flag. She had asked him, if memory serves, what he had been doing prior to hardcore upending both his life and his approach to life.

He grinned and started talking about opening up the brains of lab rats and, while wiggling his fingers to suggest just that, starting running tests on them. She doesn’t pursue and she doesn’t have to. He was smart enough to have the interests he had had and he had not at all abandoned those interests. This much was clear.

A year later I had him cornered by the entrance of San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens. I had seen Black Flag play once several months before. Dez Cadena sang. This is the first time I’d be seeing them with “new” singer Henry Rollins.

Hardcore Mind Meld. (Photo by Chester Simpson)

I was interviewing him, marginally, for a magazine I had started, The Birth of Tragedy. The interview subsequently led to the label he repped, SST, advertising in it, and beyond that, SST deciding to release OXBOW’s second Albini-recorded record Serenade in Red.

We don’t know if they used contracts with everyone, but we required a contract. My wife at the time was a lawyer and she had convinced me that though they were generally not worth the paper they were printed on, it was better to have your ass covered by one than not.

So we had cruised down to the SST offices and sat and mulled over the contract. Greg Ginn was there but we were talking to Chuck and I started chuckling.

“What?”

Well, there was a clause regarding their rights to our recording material on tapes, CDs, vinyls or any so-called “formats of the future”.

Formats of the future.

Like music pills? Or play pods? Or sonic sauces? Now I was laughing. Get the fuck outta here. Music was music was music. But not for the first time and not for the last time, Dukowski got in my head and wiggled his fingers around: “if you don’t think technology’s going to change music you haven’t been paying attention.”

But Albini was calling CDs the “rich man’s 8-track tape,” after another now-dead format. Label execs were whining about home taping killing the music business. TV, initially, was expected to kill film. And while everything was changing, nothing had really changed.

However, once music had been turned digital, the world as it was, had started to end. First went the record stores. I know because I had a record store. Then the indie labels. I know because I had an indie label. And I know…not all record stores or all indie labels. But most of the ones I knew.

Then Napster as the bridge to the streaming services, and ultimately the streaming services that serve up the music of the universe over your pocket phone. Formats of the future, indeed.

Now we don’t know that streaming killed our label, Hydrahead, but Hydrahead died after releasing OXBOW’s Thin Black Duke. Then OXBOW got picked up by Ipecac, who are slated to release OXBOW’s next extravaganza of glum, Love’s Holiday. It covers deaths, divorces, loves that feel criminally induced and a bunch of other real grown-up type of existential shit.

But then the emails started coming in. And they all said the same thing then: “why’s OXBOW no longer on Spotify?”

[T]he choice was/is stark: ignore and stay, rebel and leave, rebel and stay, or ignore and leave.

Had we been on Spotify? News to us who maybe really didn't so much listen to Spotify (re: old). Did we need to be on Spotify? Apparently, according to the pile of emails, yes.

Which is when hell started. We don’t know how easy you think it is to get your music up there but from our vantage point? It was hell. A hell of ISRC codes, WAV files, admins, passwords and research to find out who was staging all of the above over the last eight records on over more than three different labels.

It took months and desultory months. Emails on emails between us and the label guys at Ipecac who brought to bear what could kindly be called, “the patience of Job.” That’s JOB. As in the biblical character who was tormented by Satan at G-d’s behest.

Finally all the records were up and about to be staged, with an announcement on Friday, February 4th saying so.

Then Rogan and Spotify and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell happened.

In our 35 years on Planet OXBOW we’ve come to expect this on Planet OXBOW. And while Albini, again, laid out again why what Young and Mitchell did would not work for Indies, it didn't help us now mired in quandary land.

And the choice was/is stark: ignore and stay, rebel and leave, rebel and stay, or ignore and leave.

On the one hand ignoring and staying felt antithetical to the OXBOW ethos of generating uncomfortability wherever comfortability was found. Rebelling and leaving seemed, though the amount of money we’ve received from streamers constitutes pocket change, like cutting noses off despite faces. Ignoring and leaving seemed like a wasted opportunity.

So, rebelling and staying would be it. But how to rebel?

“Apple has Steve Bannon’s podcast, Amazon sells everyone’s books, etc. There’s no escaping the idiocracy,” said the label saints. And they were right.

Our very existence fuels the growth of the seeds of our demise. We are, to quote the mega-corporate-cinematic-creation The Matrix, “a virus”.

Which sort of means we’re genetically predisposed to being able to figure out a great way to have our rebellion and eat it too.

But isn’t it, at a certain point, like running into a burning house to rescue someone only to find out that the person you rescued was escaped Nazi Martin Bormann?

I don’t know but I am aiming to find out.

Next week…the OXBOW exposé on how Daniel Ek, the Swedish CEO of Spotify touched us. Inappropriately. Again and again. On the gentles.

How’s that for a first salvo?

#justice4OXBOW!!!

Me + CHUCK