Karl Whitney: Independent message fades within art’s stifling corporate structures

The corporatisation of culture and fear of losing sales puts pressure on creator independence, generating a surreptitious conservatism

Steve Albini was fiercely independent and a severe critic of the music industry and its exploitation of young bands. Picture: Jim Bennett/WireImage

The notion of independence has been on my mind lately. Mainly because the rigorously independent producer and musician Steve Albini died, leaving behind him a legacy of quite astounding records, including Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me and Nirvana’s In Utero. 

What was notable about him, beyond the exacting quality of his work and his habitual acidity (and occasional obnoxiousness, at least earlier in his career), was the unpretentious and critical approach he adopted towards his own industry.

He didn’t call himself a producer — instead he was an engineer who recorded the band. 

He refused to take a percentage of the royalties of an album he worked on. Instead, he took a flat fee, and his rates are still there to see on his studio’s website. 

Everything was transparent and his style was resolutely unshowy.

Albini was a close observer and severe critic of the music industry. 

He wrote an article for Chicago journal The Baffler in 1993 called ‘The Problem with Music’ in which he painted an unsparing picture of the desperate efforts bands make to impress what were then all-powerful major record companies. 

Producer and musician Steve Albini died leaving behind him a legacy of quite astounding records, including Pixies’ 'Surfer Rosa', PJ Harvey’s 'Rid of Me' and above, Nirvana’s 'In Utero'. Picture: Paul Bergen/Redferns

He went on to estimate the costs involved in recording and touring an album for a major, concluding that, after all the effort they’ve put into the process, and after selling a quarter of a million copies, by the time the costs have been subtracted ‘the band members have each earned about [one-third] what they would working in a 7-Eleven’.

‘Some of your friends are probably already this fucked,’ he concluded.

With time, the nineties notion of selling out has apparently been superseded by a more pragmatic framework where artists are unafraid to take everything they can and to tailor their work for a perceived market to maximise sales and attention.

It’s not just in music. It happens in literature all the time — although the stakes are often much lower. 

Dan Sinykin’s recent overview of what he calls the conglomerate era in American publishing in his book Big Fiction — the period, from around 1960 onwards, during which corporations hoovered up smaller publishers and mushed them together, leading to the big five who pump out most of what we read now — illustrates the success that authors enjoyed when they diverted their talent towards genre fiction: horror, westerns, crime, big shark attack, whatever.

Sinykin calls the kind of influence that agents, editors, marketing staff, publicists and other layers of publishing play in the delivery of a book corporate authorship, implying that the author isn’t acting alone — that it’s a group effort in which, inevitably, an author’s efforts at innovation are curbed (or at the very least, the author, shrewdly, learns the rules and adapts accordingly). 

All good if everyone gets rich, I suppose. But most writers, even if they jump through the hoops that are set up for them by the corporate authorship system, still don’t make anything close to the minimum wage.

Albini was right, basically, and his lessons don’t only apply to his own industry, but to the rickety world of publishing on which the legal underpinnings of the music industry were modelled.

Essentially, when writers are rewarded by an industry and a market for saying the right things — things that please readers — they seem less likely to voice opinions that might potentially make others unhappy. 

Perhaps this is natural: even if you sell a million copies of your book, there’s no guarantee your next one will, so you need to do everything possible to make sure that you don’t mess up. Irritate a portion of your audience and that’s fewer sales.

That breeds a conservatism in supposedly progressive writers that’s often unremarked upon in the literary pages of our newspapers. 

Many younger writers — Sally Rooney being one of them — have spoken out about the events in Gaza, but others are less forthcoming.

In the third week of April, I happened to be in New York, so one sunny afternoon, with a couple of hours to spare, I walked up Broadway to see what was going on at Columbia University, where students had occupied part of the campus in solidarity with Palestine, demanding that, amongst other things, their institution divest from investments in companies that profit from what is currently being investigated by the International Court of Justice as a genocide carried out by Israel.

The normally publicly accessible campus had been locked down, with students and staff required to swipe in. 

Many students’ bags were being searched and leaflets and flags in support of the protesters were confiscated. 

Many younger writers — Sally Rooney being one of them — have spoken out about the events in Gaza, but others are less forthcoming. Picture: Getty Images

At a locked gate on Broadway protesters within campus chanted out to supporters on the sidewalk who had been corralled between barriers by police.

Although the protesters were peaceful and good-natured, the police were edgy. An SUV stopped on the other side of Broadway, beeped its horn, and the woman driving waved a keffiyeh — the patterned scarf that has become a symbol of Palestine — from the window to cheers from the protesters and crowd. She drove off, and a police jeep followed, its blue lights flashing.

A couple of weeks later the police stormed a building on campus and arrested students who were occupying it. 

The local and national media treated the students like radical extremists — exaggerating their position and obscuring their real aims. 

You don’t have to have seen them with your own eyes to be sceptical about the abuse they’ve been subjected to by an America which would rather distract itself with unreality than confront reality.

 ( Star Wars’s own Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, appeared at a press conference in the White House a couple of days after the Columbia activists were forcibly removed.) 

You don’t have to have witnessed it, but it probably helps.

In an interview with The Guardian Colm Tóibín, promoting his new novel Long Island, mentioned that he had to sneak past police onto Columbia’s campus, where he teaches, to reach his office to talk to the journalist over Zoom. 

It’s not like he was unaware of what was going on outside, but if he did comment in further detail on it his remarks haven’t made it into the published piece.

Instead, the pro-Palestine protestors are in there for a little bit of colour, but no more, before the author stresses his support for Joe Biden and the importance of keeping Trump out — a position that would have seemed relatively uncontroversial if Biden hadn’t played such an important role in the murderous and potentially genocidal events that the students were protesting. (It’s important to note that Tóibín has a history of being interested in and sympathetic to Palestinians’ plight.)

Students and pro-Palestinian activists face police as they gather outside of Columbia University to protest the university's stance on Israel in April in New York City. Picture: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

In early May, a peculiar piece appeared in The New Yorker written by Zadie Smith. It took newspaper reports of campus antisemitism at face value without considering the layers of distortion and misinformation that might have been imposed between her and the reality of what was going on. 

In a strange pseudo-philosophical parlour game of an essay that it’s fair to say failed to meet the moment, Smith sided with a hypothetical Jewish student who felt unsafe on campus. 

(Such students undoubtedly exist but their voices have been amplified by the US media to suggest that antisemitic abuse on campus is the norm, playing into the hands of the right who disingenuously characterise the protesters as a hate mob.) 

Smith did this rather than seriously engaging with the protesters’ perspective. 

The latter, after all, are risking their futures to tell America and the world that peace is preferable to genocide and that communicating that message can’t wait until after they graduate.

The urgency of their message implies also that a writer shouldn’t refrain from having an opinion about Gaza until the subject is safely in the rearview mirror. 

At such a pivotal moment, when writers cease to be engaged and acute observers of the present, what’s the point of them?