Hollywood, Pop Music and Weightlessness

Hollywood, Pop Music and Weightlessness

Economics of Hollywood

When we think of Hollywood as a concept, as opposed to an actual place, it's one that we tend to associate with glamorous red carpet premiers, film starlets and, most importantly, giant box office blockbusters. From the Roman epics of Hollywood's Golden Age to the disaster pics of the previous generation to today's special effects extravaganzas, much press coverage, media attention and studio money is invested into the success of a few enormous releases every year.

In spite of our tendency to associate Hollywood directly with these practices, there is evidence that this is the exact approach that is destroying the artistic and economic capacity of our movie industry. According to Tony Kahn, narrator of "The Monster That Ate Hollywood

, the focus on investing prodigious sums of money in large-scale vehicles such as the Marvel superhero movies that currently dominate the theatre landscape has made it exceptionally difficult for films of more modest box office ambitions to gain access to studio money.

In addition to changes in the structure of the industry, there have been great changes to the technical way that films are made. Epstein (2005) describes the impact that technological advancement and computer animation have had on the industry, indicating that "the digital magic which allows the New Hollywood to achieve this potential may have somewhat less salutary consequences for the community that has in the past so powerfully defined Hollywood." (p. 349) This denotes that special effects and digital animation are not just subsuming content but also the role of the performer.

The result is a context in which fewer projects are made on an annual basis and, worse yet, a context where those which are routinely denied access are the more creative, unique and original scripts in circulation. The work by Kahn makes the argument that, in this context, it is extremely difficult for independent films of value to gain any kind of traction. Kahn asserts that this has, consequently, reduced the output of Hollywood to mere spectacle. Today, the institution know as Hollywood has largely been consolidated into just a few major studios, themselves all subsidiaries of larger media conglomerates with a single-minded interest in profitability and little connection to the art of cinema.

2. Popular music

Sadly, the patterns impacting the film industry are deeply intertwined with those impacting the world of popular music. Just as in Hollywood, the music industry has been largely consolidated into just a few major players. Also as in Hollywood, record labels have been devastated by economic downturn, both in a general sense and more specifically within their respective fields. Thurston Moore's insightful documentary, Money for Nothing, would reveal the beginning stages of what would become an outright collapse of the one mighty music industry.

The 2001 documentary foretells this downfall by warning of the consequences of creating a marketplace that discouraged creativity, embraced formula and trended toward a broad base of mediocrity. As the documentary indicates, the priorities of record labels shifted considerably as they became subsumed by larger media companies. A great example is Warner Brothers, which was known as a creative and progressive label for decades as the support of acts like the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty. With the internal disputes and the AOL Time Warner merger, the label's identity changed significantly. Its reputation for embracing the creative freedom of its artists, for gambling on progressive musical acts and for out-letting a wide diversity of sounds would be undermined by its interest strictly in surviving.

Ironically, an article by Beaver (2010) intended to decry the lack of censorship in gangsta rap actually demonstrates that companies allowing greater artistic freedom tend to succeed with greater longevity. According to Beaver, in spite of calls from communities to engage in censorship of violent or misogynistic lyrics, "the companies have basically ignored their critics and continued to market gangsta rap because for years it had been so highly profitable." (Beaver, p. 107) This shows the counterpoint to the current strategy toward safe streamlined music taken by the industry.

The result, in musician and documentarian Thurston Moore's opinion, is that for company's like Warner, Sony and EMI, the sheer motives of profitability created a new era of obstruction for artists of a wide range of styles, talents and ambitions. The music industry of the 2000s would be substantially marked not just by a terrible downturn in economic viability but also by a stunning rejection of values such as creativity, artistic freedom, originality or boldness. Where the most successful labels of previous generations succeeded by taking chances where others feared to tread, the 2000s would mark a disastrous retreat from these values.

3. Weightless work

The sweeping changes taking place in both Hollywood and the record business would be considerably hastened by the advent of digital film and music. This allowed for the occurrence of two major phenomena from which both industries are still reeling to recover. Namely, the proliferation of digital media has contributed to widespread online 'piracy' and in doing so has cut devastatingly into the profitability of old models for both industries.

The text by Coyle (1997) foretells of the economic insecurities associated with 'weightlessness' as a mode of innovation. According to Coyle, "weightlessness, symbol of the economic effects of the cluster of advances in information and communication technology, has much wider implications, however. Like any technical development, it interacts with other fundamental changes, such as demographic and social trends and the grand sweep of political history. These are playing together in ways that make us feel that ours is the age of insecurity." (Coyle, p. 9)