It’s likely that such a list would read as exceptional, but in fact it’s more often the rule. As the lucky one band signed annually in this country for every 300 that exist, Mary’s Danish was right to feel blessed. What the wooing label executives neglected to mention was that, according to Pollstar, only 225 of the 4,500 to 6,000 active artists being promoted and distributed each year will ever make any real money for their record companies — let alone for themselves. In an industry with $6 billion in annual record sales, 90 percent of all acts signed to major labels will be dropped — which translates to a one-in-3,000 chance of sticking. Even for the lucky musicians, it’s hard to understand that no matter how much the record company inflates their dreams, how savory the $250,000 advance sounds, the vast majority of them will never rise above the poverty line.
Yet it’s not the inherent bad odds that lie at the heart of the musician’s plight, but the record companies’ cruel habit of forcefully backing — and then so easily abandoning — their clients’ dreams. Toss a bunch of them up against the free-market wall, they reason, and see what sticks. And why not?
Musicians are us unplugged, we think — voracious in sexual appetite, jet-set in altered states, fingers up their noses to everything that makes us comfortable. We expect the smashing of guitars, the ODs, the girl going off in a four-letter flurry as she receives her Grammy. They speak for every syllable — every injustice — we swallow; where we have whispers, they have amps. (The Beastie Boys in concert to free Tibet, Rage Against the Machine doing the same for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ani DiFranco, Tom Waits and others for the Dead Man Walking concert.) Nothing gets sublimated as it blasts out of a Marshall stack, least of all injustice.
Right?
So why does a little story about dropped bands tie up the tongues of musicians, lawyers, music journalists and record executives alike? Why would a band that was fucked, literally — all members coerced into having sex with their A&R lady and then summarily dropped from the label — refuse an interview? Why would my buddy who has had five record deals in the last eight years, who has seen the ball dropped on his career over and over in swindles, label mergers, and executive power plays, and is now a year into waiting for a bankrupt indie label to release him from contractual bondage, pass on the opportunity to speak the truth? Fear, of course. He, along with the majority of dropped musicians, wants to work again, and in this town, breaking the Mafia-style code of silence means underlining your name on a blacklist that already has you listed as a damaged dream.
But some are beginning to speak up and be heard, among them Chuck D of Public Enemy, who laments in "Swindlers Lust," "either you own the master or it owns you," and Michelle Shocked, who sued Mercury citing the anti-slavery 13th Amendment. Imagine, in that â Anti–Hall of Fame, a series of TV screens playing video shorts of Shocked and other recording artists relating just how they got screwed.
We’d see Jen Trynin, a week after her homemade album is released and she’s taking phone calls from 21 major labels. Flown out from Boston in private jets, she begins an endless executive song and dance that culminates in one of the fiercest bidding wars in recent history. She signs a three-records-firm deal for $350,000 with Warner Bros. Within three months, Trynin goes from touring Australia to being dropped by the label, phone calls not returned. "People should know about this to burst their rock-dream bubble," she says. "The record companies don’t understand art, they don’t give a fuck. It’s all about each other and who’s impressing who . . . it’s like eighth grade."
Or there’s rap artist Damone Bush. In the space of two years, he goes from working in a lab testing for STDs to recording Anotha Level with Ice Cube and the Pharcyde, to partying in Vegas with his Priority label staff, selling 120,000 records, then being dropped, in debt, and being forced to take a temporary delivery job where he has the humiliating task of delivering a Christmas basket to an MCA executive who knows him as a professional rapper. His disillusion is so deep, he says, that for a year all he can listen to is Alternative.
Of the 20-some bands contacted for this article, Trynin and Bush were among the very few who would discuss what had happened to them. And then, of course, there’s Mary’s Danish. In the vast arena of silenced or exploited musicians, where bands tend to swallow life’s hardest lyrics and their museum dedicates millions to stories that reflect the experience of so few, their story emerges as a universal portrait of the music industry at the end of the century that gave birth to the record deal.
Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought Hopefully I take my place up with the sellers.
