How the long tail killed the comeback
(here’s my submission to Longshot - enjoy!)
Unless a thing can go away, a thing can never come back. Take, for example, the first CD I ever bought: Queen’s Greatest Hits. (Cheaper on CD than cassette!) As a thirteen-year-old American kid in 1992, I had only heard of Queen because of Freddie Mercury’s death, which seemed to be part of the story of the AIDS epidemic, not pop music. But when the prominent use of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Wanye’s World induced forced exposure among culturally ignorant American youth such as myself, Queen had a genuine comeback in the U.S., where they’d had no real raison d’etre since Live Aid in 1985. For America, they had gone away, and then, triumphantly, they had come back.
The Internet, however, has made relative obscurity impossible, because it has made ignorance short-lived. As long as you can remember something from the past, you can plug it into Google and find out whatever happened to it in (0.27 seconds). Mercury’s death would today be accompanied by a deluge of YouTube videos. Pop music has become less a font of novelty than a deep-bore mine of cultural content for other forms, a supplier of artistically valid common knowledge that TV shows and movies can drop in as easy signifiers or build theme episodes around.
It’s also nearly impossible to have a comeback when the top level of success today would have been considered barely mid-level in pop music’s heyday. As the model changed for the music business, older acts pulled up the ladder and consolidated their fanbase as touring acts. Bands like Styx and Heart are still playing state fairs alongside current sensations like Rihanna, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any rock act from the last ten years playing venues of that size. Styx can’t come back because there’s nothing to come back to, no megastardom beyond what they already have.
Regardless of the long tail’s supposed benefits for smaller creators, in the case of pop music it serves as a kind of government cheese for former superstars, allowing them to maintain a comfortable enough standard of living that they all they ever need to do to remain in the public eye is keep on keepin’ on. Think of a band from the past with as little as one hit, and they’re probably still making a living touring if they haven’t broken up. Just one tour-booking company, the Agency Group, productively sends acts from 80s one-hitters A-ha to 90s modern rock staples the Toadies on the road. As pop music has ceased to make money producing new music, it opens up opportunities for the kind of endless recycling that infects legacy-focused genres like bluegrass and jazz.
Why should you care? Well, pop isn’t just about the music. It’s also a collective experience that works as a narrative, something we can draw power and meaning from beyond the central act of listening. The Internet’s neutering of pop’s possibilities for grandeur and Nietzschean will-to-power stories deprives us of seeing that reflected in our own lives. Instead of telling a tale about rags-to-riches achievement driven only by your own ambition, pop now tells its fans that, as long as you’re decent, you can reach a middling level of success and pretty much stay there forever, unchanging. What once was an arena for quintessentially American ambition is now a kind of cultural Peter principle.
In a way, of course, it’s pop’s own fault for peddling a lost-utopia story that located great and true music only in the past. But there’s no ignoring the fact that the music industry was run over by the cement truck of digital distribution, of course, and despite the seemingly bifurcated debate between digital utopians and music biz lifers, the casual fan deserve to have their pleasures defended, too. It’s a more ambiguous position to be in, but too often the casual listener becomes a pawn in arguments for either side. It’s possible, though, that the digital shift in music could both help and hurt listeners. That’s fine, but unless we want to lose some of the signal pleasures of pop music, we need to acknowledge what’s gone missing and think about ways we could fix it.
