I would just like to chart how one song, "The
Anthem," by the totally inept neo-punk band, Good Charlotte, has been manufactured into a hit. The song is sort of my MacGuffin " you know, the thing that serves no purpose except to further the plot, just like the maltese falcon in the movie of the same name. The story of this song takes me on a picaresque journey through the greatest sports game of the past few years, Madden NFL Football 2003, to the song's reemergence on the MTV show, "Making the Video," and to its present day position on the Billboard Rock Charts at number 12. It is a story that shows a shift in the attitudes of the music industry and the convergence of forms of media in promoting a single cause.
It all began Fall term when I decided that a good way to do my work would be to buy Madden 2003. I'd never really gotten involved in Madden, but I decided that this year, lucky number 13 for the jolly football giant, would be my grand entrance. (As the Beastie Boys once rapped: "I am the king of [Madden]/ there is none higher, I gets [seven] points [every time I fire]" " so if you think you're good, I need a contest after posting a 99-5 record through fall and winter terms.)
But amidst wasting time playing this game, I imbibed the song lyrics EA Sports so cleverly named "Sports Trax," lyrics certainly worthy of Keats and Shelley. The theme song, Andrew W.K.'s "Party Hard," featured lines such as: "You,/ You work all night (all night)/ And when you work you don't feel all right/ And we,/ We can't stop feeling all right (all right)/ And everything is all right." Generally the themes of the songs in the game tell us that we shouldn't do any work and we should take it to the man and not follow the conformist order of the American dream, of two cars and a dog. Yes, and all these great thoughts were coming out of songs packaged in a video game costing 50 dollars, from artists who had undermined their integrity by selling the rights of their songs to a game.
Once upon a time, it was a sign that a pop star's career was on the down swing when he sold his song rights for a television commercial or another medium. However, something has changed in the structure of the audience and the music corporation in the last 10 years. Now it is possible for Britney Spears and Moby, among others, to sell the rights of their music and still remain viable commercial entities. The industry seems to recognize the commercial value of these pop stars and takes longer to spit them out like so many M.C. Hammers and Vanilla Ices.
To illustrate this point I would just bring us back to the success of Good Charlotte, a punk band that proclaims quite proudly on its web site that "until just four years ago, 21-year-old lead guitarist Benji had never strummed a single chord and front man Joel, his identical twin brother, had never sung a note." As a poorly executed, updated version of late '70s punk bands, Good Charlotte made a fairly melodic song presumably about teen angst called "The Anthem" that featured in Madden. At the time I didn't think much of it; apparently EA Sports didn't think much of it either -- under the "Top 10 Reasons to Get Madden NFL 2003" on the official website, their ninth reason cites music. Good Charlotte is listed fifth out of the six bands.
So it was surprising when I was flipping channels last term and came across an episode of "Making the Video" that followed Good Charlotte as they filmed their music video. Here was the restructuring of the music industry, that monolithic item we like to call "corporate rock."
In the next few months MTV systematically turned its strategies toward making the numbing "Anthem" into a hit. Because it controls multiple avenues of the media -- television, the internet and music -- MTV is able to control how its audience thinks. Furthermore, VH1, a subsidiary of Viacom, the company that owns MTV, is an avenue of further convergence of musical tastes. Before the merger of the two music networks, VH1 catered to an older audience and focused more on rock music; however, beside the endless countdowns on VH1, it is now hard to distinguish the two networks apart.
So what do we learn from all this? Well, that these corporations know what they're doing, as the song did become popular. Secondly, the rise of the multinational corporation seems to threaten some of the democratic principles we hold dear and invokes some of the early-twentieth century fears espoused by Orwell, and, to a lesser extent, by intellectuals in the Frankfurt School. The media is a powerful tool that, in the hands of people bent solely on economic motives, can pervert the ideals of liberty and representative democracy in our country. And the reason that you're reading this in the first place is because of that phenomenon.
