Dead Kennedys guitarist goes after the modern music industry | Hacker News Reader

Dead Kennedys guitarist goes after the modern music industry

santacruzsentinel.com

66 pointsrottyguy49 comments

When the HN headline mentioned "DK frontman" and "goes after the modern music industry" I was kind of incredulous because the original singer Jello Biafra had a reputation of taking advantage of his fellow bandmates through the Alternative Tentacles record label he controlled (which released all of the DK records). I admired Biafra's caustic lyrics which nailed so many things that are wrong with our government and society (then and now) but it seemed a bit hypocritical for him to take the moral high ground on the ills of the music industry.

Turns out "frontman" in the article is now guitarist East Bay Ray working with a pretty much reformed band. No mention of Jello or the other 70s/80s members, but you can get an idea of the convoluted history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys

Explain the hypocrisy, please. I'd seriously like to understand that. Last I heard, he tried to keep from having good his music from being used in a TV commercial. And the impression I get from this article, not only were the rest of the band pissed he wouldn't sell out, they were torqued that he was supporting smaller "no name" acts, which is kind of what YC does, in a way, right? http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/Dead-Kennedys-legal-feud-32...

In 1997, an employee at Alternative Tentacles Records discovered that DEAD KENNEDYS had been underpaid $76,000 in royalties over a 10-year period. Biafra did not tell his fellow band mates about the underpayment but instead attempted to use the band's own royalties as a bargaining chip to get the others to sign to his label in perpetuity worldwide. Later, a whistle blower at the label informed the band that these were actually royalties owed to them and when confronted, Biafra refused to compensate the band without a court order. Left with little choice, the band voted to cut Decay Music's ties with Alternative Tentacles and filed suit in October 1998 to have Biafra recognize majority vote and for back royalties.

A jury ruled in favor of Decay Music after a three-week trial in May 2000, finding that "Alternative Tentacles Records engaged in fraudulent conduct" and that "Biafra breached his contractual and fiduciary obligations to plaintiff [DEAD KENNEDYS], even though the royalties were finally released to the band in January 2000." The jury also found Biafra and Alternative Tentacles were "guilty of malice, oppression and fraud" in committing these acts. (1)

Biafra's attempts to dissolve the partnership and gain sole custody over the Kennedy's music was also denied. (2)

1. http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/jello-biafra-gets-shot-down...

2. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/dead-kennedys-beat-je...

Thanks for the reply. Agreed that both sides had issues. Ego can get you to do crazy stuff. Wonder if that $76k was worth it in the long run.

Ok, we replaced 'frontman' with 'guitarist' in the title above.

Eh, if it were Jello, I would have been incredulous simply because Jello going after any industry is probably to be expected, whether one might find that hypocritical or not. I'd have questioned if that was really news at all.

Anyway, I tend to characterize the DK break up as an irreconcilable dispute, and neither side really seemed to be in good standing, or more in the right than the other.

Jello's ego was hyper-inflated, but he was clearly a serious business man, as is demonstrated by the persistence of his label. He's highly intelligent, and his real mistake was probably hubris, at the end of the day.

Meanwhile, the others were also intelligent to match, but probably might have compromised the nature of the band in the long run, simply by being reasonable people with a rational outlook. DK were more about shock value (albeit high-brow shock) than they seemed to understand.

The breaking point that imploded the band was Jello's insistence that H.R. Giger's Penis Landscape must be used as an album insert, and its conflict with obscenity laws, and the classification of pornography. Greed played a role, but it was more about him over-riding the votes of the other band members, and him and his ego treating them as subordinates. It was many other things besides the money.

I was a late teenager who'd just discovered the DK in college and, being a sci-fi horror nerd, I was very aware of H. R. Giger, especially for his work in Ridley Scott's _Alien_.

I ordered Giger's "Penis Landscape" through the mail order offer included with the DK's _Frankenchrist_ (I think that was the album), and had the poster sent to my childhood home where I knew I'd be for the summer.

My very traditional Korean mother received the delivery and destroyed the poster before I even laid eyes.

To this day, I am irritated and dissatisfied whenever I think about how awesome it would be to have that poster.

Traditional Korean sexual mores 1, Punk rock gothic aesthetic sensibility 0.

> Turns out "frontman" in the article is now guitarist East Bay Ray working with a pretty much reformed band

According to the wikipedia page you linked to, only the singer (Biafra) was replaced. All other band members were active (with some interruptions) since 1981.

For a long time punk rock industry vet his arguments sure sound a lot like my dad's.

"Modern music is garbage and you kids today don't know anything."

I don't know where this guy is, but I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that more music is being made now by more diverse groups of people with better technology than at any other time in history.

I'm not saying garbage isn't being made and bought, but to ignore the actual musical revolution going on at the same time is just damned shortsighted.

And ironically for an aging punk rocker the exact same thing people said about his music when he was still young.

I dislike Kim Kardashian (who is mentioned in the article along with Bieber), but contrast her to previous sex symbols: rather than have someone else make money from her sexuality, she's created and distributed her own porn, made a bunch of money doing it, and used it to become a pop culture figure without any obvious talents asides from self promotion.

I dislike Bieber too, but he was a Canadian kid with a giant guitar on YouTube who could really sing. The ability to become well known without agents / labels at the beginning of his career means now he has them he's probably taking more home than he would have if they'd been there as a distribution gateway like they were in the 90s.

absolutely. He says the musical spectrum runs from Johnny Rotten to Sid Vicious. Two members of the same band. That's an incrediably blinkered view point

No, he was talking about just punk; the full quote was "On one end you have Johnny Rotten, where he’s smart and sarcastic and aware, and on the other end you have Sid Vicious, a heroin-shooting ignorant person."

Worse than that, I'd say. The new revamped Dead Kennedys are essentially complaining that they're finding it too hard to make serious money from 30 year old material. In the 15 years or so since they reformed, they've not apparently written or released one new song.

The closest they came was when they played one of their old songs in concert with the lyrics reworked as 'Mp3 Get Off The Web', which was essentially a complaint that it was too hard to seek rent in the modern recording industry.

If they were actively trying to record new music to compete with the newer musicians they're moaning about, and finding that hard, it might be easier to sympathise with them. As it is, the new Dead Kennedys are just a cover band which collects royalties (and the collection of royalties seems to be their main focus).

I still have my Dead Kennedys albums from the first time round so I don't have any need to buy them again, and younger kids have younger musicians to listen to. Who do the Dead Kennedys think is going to pay money for them to rerecord 30-year old material?

I couldn't agree more, sure there's lots of coverage on Kanye, but you can ignore it and listen to the ridiculous amount of indie artists out there instead. (New Animal Collective album is good!)

It's a golden age for indie music of all kinds. There's an unbelievable amount of talent out there - not even counting how easy it is now to find good music from Eastern Europe or Thailand or other places that used to be completely off the Western music map.

It's not a golden age for making a living as an indie artist. The unbelievable amount of talent makes it hard for anyone to break through, or even to scrape by.

I don't think Bieber and Kardashian are any worse than their equivalents in previous generations. There's always been a lot of manufactured product sold by image in pop, all the way back to vaudeville and music hall.

But I think the 70s and especially the 80s hit a sweet spot for cost-of-entry which kept dabblers out while promoting some of the strongest talent.

Now people are a lot more likely to be making music at home than paying someone else for it. Software synths and samplers have become the modern parlour upright piano.

It's good in a way, but it makes it much harder for the talented artists who are selling music to stand out from those who are selling an image and a lifestyle brand.

And way, WAY more music sucks even worse now than at any other time in history.

If you don't know where to look (or maybe more importanly how to look for it), then confronting the horrors of the default mainstream pop nightmare set before us, and being unable locate something that suits your tastes can feel truly hopeless, and leave one completely bereft of satisfaction.

I don't think that's a contraversial statement.

The shining examples really do get buried in an avalanche of gruel.

Meanwhile, experiments like Black MIDI are tangentially interesting, but not actually useful.

> increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for independent bands to exist at all, he said

Uh, no.

These old-timers still think a healthy "independent" music scene is one where an infinitesimally small number of garage bands get lucky and land distribution deals with indie labels, and maybe make a couple bucks.

What we have now is real music independence - being able to DIY record your band and instantly distribute the sound to the entire planet, for free. You can also DIY record and distribute professional music videos, communicate with your fans in real-time, and take payments from anyone in the world.

What a time to be making (and listening to) music!

The only people complaining about this are the guys who ran small labels in the 80s and 90s - they're just bitter that they're no longer needed, and that major labels still exist.

>> "being able to DIY record your band and instantly distribute the sound to the entire planet, for free. You can also DIY record and distribute professional music videos, communicate with your fans in real-time, and take payments from anyone in the world."

Not of that matters unless you can get people to discover your music. That's where labels come in. Once you get enough people listening to your music you can get to support someone on a tour and you should grow organically from there but that first hurdle is impossible for most people to get over, regardless of how good their music is.

> Not of that matters unless you can get people to discover your music. That's where labels come in.

No, that's where curation comes in.

Labels are just curators. That role has been taken over by Tumblr, Facebook, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, etc. I've discovered orders of magnitude more bands just by rabbit-holing on Tumblr than I ever did reading an Alternative Tentacles catalog.

Labels are also marketers. You can pass the curation role off to other people (bloggers for example) but they need to have a way to discover the music in the first place and that is usually pushed to them by labels.

Labels were promoters. There used to be serious shenanigans involved in getting records into the charts - when charts still mattered.

DJs would be - let's say - "encouraged in creative ways" to promote music. (I know one band who got airplay after delivering a lawn mower to a DJ. Because he needed one. That was one of the more legal things that happened.)

The top DJs could make or break careers. Everyone understood this.

I'm not sure how many people realise that labels still exist, and they still do a lot of PR. In fact A&R spending has increased over the last few years.

But it's a lot more diffuse than it used to be, and it's no longer as easy to influence the market as it was.

So labels take far fewer risks, and they do what book publishers do - wait until they find an artist with a buzz and a following, and then try to hype them.

Why the faux-demure attitude, with the "let's say"? Call it what it was -- outright bribery, known as "payola" in the music industry. It's been widely documented -- Google it.

>That's where labels come in.

Or youtube or Pandora. If I were trying to get a band going today I'd blanket the internet with my music and try to make money off of live shows and t-shirts. All it takes is one popular video and everyone knows who you are.

What the labels used to bring to the table is control of shelf space in record stores and control over what gets played on the radio. You just couldn't get around that cartel no matter how much people liked your music. But shelf space is a commodity of dwindling importance, and people don't go to the radio for new music any more.

>> "All it takes is one popular video and everyone knows who you are."

Totally agree. But you make that sound easy :) The only way that's really going to happen is it you get extremely lucky or make something really gimmicky that can go viral.

> you make that sound easy

How was getting signed to a label, even an indie one, any easier? At least now it's all up to you creating something people want instead of convincing a gatekeeper you're worthy.

> The only way that's really going to happen is it you get extremely lucky

You mean, like getting signed to a label?

Getting signed to a label seems easier to me. An indie label isn't hard to get your music in front of and if it's good they'll sign you and you can focus on the thing you do well while they promote you. Remove the label and you need to be a good musician, marketer, promoter, you need to make lots of connections a label would have already had access to etc.

I don't think it's easy no matter what you do. That was always the case, though. There must be thousands of serious musicians for every one that makes it.

You forgot the part where you make no money off the record you put out because digital services pay artists crap and the supply outpaces the demand significantly. That being said, the last 60 or so years have really been an anomaly in how much money you can make from music.

True. But the same could be said about almost everything (last 60 years being been an anomaly in how much money you can make for X) - housing, banking, paintings, vintage wines/cars, etc

Right, but twice in the last century the structure of the music industry went fundamental shifts in how revenue is generated. Not many industries can claim that.

> the last 60 or so years have really been an anomaly

Correct.

Musicians have to figure out how to make money from ways other than selling recordings, just like they did for thousands of years before recording was invented.

Recordings aren't scarce anymore, and that's a major net benefit for society.

Except before you either worked for a concert hall, had a patron, or it wasn't your main job. Two of those three options are no longer very viable.

Well, no, substantially more people are complaining. Bands, because there's no money in it any more unless you are one of the top 10 bands. No, it wasn't always that way - many, many more bands were able to make money from music than now. As a fan, with no credible music press to help discern the good from the shit you'll just never hear about the really good bands because the signal gets lost in the noise of all the shit. The same thing is happening in publishing; endless dross churned out meaning that the good books are harder and harder to identify.

> As a fan, with no credible music press to help discern the good from the shit you'll just never hear about the really good bands because the signal gets lost in the noise of all the shit.

Throw darts until you find a band you like. Then, go to their Facebook/Bandcamp/Soundcloud/Last.fm page and you'll find a bunch of "if you like this you'll like these" links to other bands, or even a list of musicians the band endorses.

This is the modern equivalent of flipping through the radio.

Grooveshark used to be really handy for solving the discovery problem. Too bad the record industry managed to shut it down.

More people that don't understand that the music industry business model has changed. Not only this but the competitive environment in which the industry operates has also changed (ie music is not as valuable in the eyes of the average listener due to things like video games taking that attention space).

Plenty of great music is coming out at the moment, from exactly the type of indie labels they lament not existing anymore. It's just the successful contemporary indie labels have appropriate business models to deal with the current environment. The days of making millions selling plastic boxes are over. Time to move on.

Needs more Jello

There's always room for Jello.

Jello is still out there, writing new music (some of it very good) and touring with a new band, with all the anger and energy he's always had.

The current "Dead Kennedys" are playing songs from the 80s that they mostly didn't write, and generally being apolitical.

Some argue that the Sex Pistols were a _boy band_ orchestrated by Malcolm McLaren...

> Reliably or not, Mr. McLaren explained his strategy for packaging and selling the band in the 1980 film “The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/arts/music/09mclaren.html?...

If he's gonna compare "now" with "back then," and the artists he picks from "now" are Bieber & Kardashian - two of the most vapid and heavily promoted mainstream household names, available by glancing at the nearest tabloid headline - then he needs to pick similarly vapid, heavily promoted, mainstream household names from back then. And there were plenty. Doesn't he remember?

People in the 1950-60s said The Beatles and Bob Dylan were trash. It's called change, get used to it.

Pretty confident Kim Kardashian will be considered an icon some day in the same sense as Marilyn Monroe, Madonna or whoever else was considered crap during their peak by the old guard. Heck, Donald Trump shows she might even be President if she wants to.

Considered an icon...of what?

Moloch, I assume.

There was a lot of deservedly forgotten popular music from back then too, though. There is every chance that Kardashian will fall into that category.

Showbiz Kids[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COJXQatf9c0

"Show business kids making movies of themselves, you know they don't give a fuck about any body else."

> will be considered an icon some day

I wager she'll be remembered more in the way people look back upon Vanilla Ice or NKOTB.

Having grown up in the 80's I think the article is BS. The net has allowed a thousand flowers to bloom. The recording industry isn't gone but you can do an end run around it these days. When I was a kid you got the crap pop du-jour and that was all. These days you have zillions of avenues to new music.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com