Music industry's bad mix

This weekend, viewers of Saturday Night Live were treated to a surprise. Timely, witty political satire? Heavens no, that would be asking too much. I'm talking about the musical lineup; in what is becoming more and more common, a rock band, Sum 41, provided backing music for a rapper, in this instance Ludacris. The result was an ill-advised train wreck of a performance that likely left many fans scratching their heads.

This is the music industry's best wheeze of innovation, and it falls well short of the mark. If the combination seems a bit random, look no farther than the Jay-Z/Linkin Park album Collision Course that debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Top 200 recently and moved 370,000 units in the first week. Numbers like that make everyone in the business sit up and take notice. Ludacris and Sum 41 are clearly the poor man's version, not in terms of talent (although many would give Jay-Z a comfortable edge over Ludacris as a rapper, despite his need to "bite" rhymes from UGK standout Bun B), but in terms of record sales.

So it's easy to see why Sum 41 would change their schedule mid-tour, canceling several shows just to come to New York for one song well outside of prime time, in the middle of promoting a new album (in which, according to ultimate-guitar.com, they trade in their "pop-punk roots for crunchier guitar riffs," whatever that means). A positive reception from fans would not just help sell the CDs that both artists have out currently; it might also pave the way for an entire CD of compilation songs. Is the world ready for LudaSum? Or Sumacris?

These sorts of compilations have always been better in theory than in practice, since the days when Anthrax and Public Enemy brought the noise with 1991's "Bring Tha Noize" remix, a collaboration that, while not terribly good, was an important and impassioned defense of rap's very existence, among other things (like "turning it up" and "bringing the noise"). More than anything it's rough, especially by today's standards of production, which is probably because its creation had more to do with the two groups in question deciding themselves to do a song together than a 55th-floor business proposal. Whether you give the song points for that depends altogether on how much you hate the music industry.

A far safer route on many levels was the fusion of rap and rock simply within a rock band, crowned "Nu-Metal" by the people whose job it is to sit around and think up names for things. Unlike the Elvis hijack, this wasn't about making black music palatable for white audiences, but a rather perverse opposite: a mass white audience's hunger for black music packaged in a manner that lets fans feel like legitimate fans, i.e. white guys from California who played guitar and rapped. For those who knew they weren't straight gangsta, but still liked the art form, 311 and their ilk were the way to go (which is why you owned that CD in seventh grade, just like everybody else).

But even that was better than simply taking two groups with enough fans to justify the massive copyright fees a compilation entails and hastily pasting some tracks together, hoping for the best. I find this trend objectionable not because I believe in segregating musical styles (please), but because the recent experiments have been nothing more than barefaced appeals to fans' pocketbooks, and as such, the results have been poor. While it is not the cause, it is definitely a symptom of an industry that is choking on its own tedious, stale product: artists, artists everywhere, and not a one that thinks.

What is really sad isn't just that mainstream music companies are bad at this, so much as the fact that individual DJs and even fans themselves tend to be so much better. The next generation of music fans will not grow up making mix tapes or burning CDs; for them, creativity will come in the form of the re-mix. Drawing on the sum of their musical knowledge and mp3 collections, these kids will bring an energy to this art form that will unlock its potential for innovation. There is great potential in the mixing of musical styles, as anyone with a pirated copy of ACID Pro will tell you (although it is, admittedly, much harder than it looks). And as much as enhancing the good, re-mixing can cut out the bad, keeping us safe from the "1, 2 Steps" and "Macarenas" of the world.

Now that's what I would call music.

Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Tuesdays.

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