The rise of a music industry that is moving away from concepts established by the same patterns that today contradict each other is growing. If we look at the relationship between record labels, sponsors, managers and artists with their respective audiences, we will find significant changes in recent years. Today's sound world has obviously changed, not because tastes, trends or bands have changed, but because the entertainment industry forces us to be entertained at all costs.
A few weeks ago, Cuban television showed an interesting musical film from which we could extract some solid truths about the world of show business -unknown to many- and its ways of doing things. Age of rock was released in 2012 and is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name. It tells a story of, against the sonic backdrop of rock around, a controversial fictional figure named Stacee Jaxx, a legendary heavy metal musician, around whom are woven several very clear allusions to the pragmatic workings of the industry.
In the film, which covers the 1980's, several theses are recreated and one of them was to introduce a character who wanted to purge the city of Los Angeles of everything that smelled of rock' n' roll, calling for protests and burning records in front of the theater where the plot unfolds, stirring up the stereotype that it was music inherent to sex and drugs. So much for fiction.
Isn't that a clear allusion to what happened in 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago? Under similar arguments, several frantic radio talk show hosts summoned their fans to the ballpark to burn records of disco stars, ending the night in riots when a hysterical mob invaded the field. It is sadly remembered as Disco Demolition Night, and it was a blow for the genre and its followers to be neither radioed nor recorded, forcing disco music to a sonorous and commercial banishment. But the big question is why the industry kept quiet and did not mobilize its resources to revert what happened? Was it afraid, or did it already have a replacement for all those artists?
According to another approach to the film, some promoters and producers already saw rock as obsolete and wanted to bury it to make room for new trends. Thus, Stacee Jaxx's unscrupulous manager gets a young rocker singer involved (not before ripping away his heavy metal superstar dreams) and creates a pop band for him called Guyeezz z, thus sentencing the death of rock and branding the new band as the sound of the moment, when in reality it bordered on the musically and visually ridiculous. Coincidences with real life? Didn't groups like that flood the radio and the arenas in those same years?
These two examples from this fictional film, based on musical chronologies, can lead us to several questions: Does a sound genre die a natural death, or is its end induced by the industry? Who dictates it: the public, record labels or artists? Why does a musical trend die? Something indicates that nothing is so casual and, many times, money is more important than good art, including those who love to burn and shred records.
Translated by ESTI
