Eminem v. Pynchon

[Doug Millison]

Media industry consolidation has been ongoing.  TimeWarnerAOL epitomizes the
larger trend.  Today's global, integrated media empires are quite a bit
larger than the first feeble attempts of so-called "conglomerates" in the
70s.   Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, Gerald Levin all have far more
power, and the ability to promote product across media and national
boundaries, than media industry executives had back then.  Check out Global
Concentration:
The Media Ownership Chart at http://www.mediachannel.org/ownership/ and the
links there to more info on the consolidation of the media industry over the
past couple of decades.

I don't know that you could ever make any fine political distinctions based
on rock and roll or musical tastes (Zappa did a great job of exposing the
phoniness of "hippies" judging people based on style in his one Top 40 hit:
"There will come a time when everybody who is lonely will be free to sing
and dance and love. There will come a time when every evil that we know will
be an evil that we can rise above. Who cares if hair is long or short or
sprayed or partly grayed, we all know that hair aint where it's at.  There
will come a time when you won't even be ashamed if you are fat." -- quoted
from memory, not vouching for accuracy, "scuse me while I kiss this guy".)
But it is true that in the 60s and into the 70s, here in the U.S. (the
cities I'm most familiar with, anyway -- Dallas/Ft. Worth; Phoenix; San
Francisco) a clear distinction seemed to exist between Top 40 and Middle of
the Road radio stations and "underground" FM stations that played albums and
"non-commercial" music (which was of course produced and distributed by
large record companies) and which in fact was the medium by which
"non-commercial" acts became commercially successful, by exposing their
albums to consumers.  My understanding is that most of these FM stations
have been gobbled up by larger companies (and further consolidated into the
big media empires); I know of no commercial FM stations in the San Francisco
area that play anything but rigidly controlled lists of specific songs and
performers (determined by focus group testing and other market research
techniques), including the so-called "alternative" stations.  Some local
college FM stations range far beyond these boundaries, however, in some ways
approximating what underground FM radio station dj's did in the 60's and
early '70s.


"Eminem, I guess, can do what he likes in the future, can put out as many
records his artistic imagination provides & doesn't have to sell himself to
any record company or MTV or whatever."

I find this a romanticized view of Eminem.  If he strays too far from his
successful formula (which his record company channeled him into in the first
place, if I understand correctly),  his corporate backers will cut him
loose.  He could easily wind up like MC Hammer (a local celebrity, he's a
gospel preacher now, from what I gather), selling off the gaudy trinkets,
big houses and cars, etc., scrambling to make ends meet.

Untangling Pynchon's take -- as reflected in his writings, of course -- on
contemporary music in the larger cultural and economic contexts is something
he seems to invite us to do, if for no other reason (and there are of course
other reasons) than the People's Republic of Rock and Roll in Vineland