Prince and the art of making yourself scarce

Among the surprisingly strong feelings I experienced after Prince's passing (especially while watching some of the relatively-high-quality concert videos people have been posting) was a kind of shame at having taken so long to recognize how good he was. Part of the reason the strength of the feelings have been so surprising is that I was never a big Prince fan. This wasn't the normal level of regret one feels when an artist dies that you may have taken for granted. This was a sense that I might have been a much bigger fan of Prince had I listened to more of his music. But the answer to the question of why I didn't listen to more of his music, I think, has much to do with the unique way Prince produced music and managed access to it.

On the one hand, he produced a huge amount of material. This may have diluted his "brand." I don't mean "brand" in the commercial/corporate context, so maybe that's not the right word. I just mean that when I thought of Prince, I thought of all the music I hadn't listened to. It's subjective whether the material was consistently good (and it is rare for any artist to produce a lot of consistently good material; far easier to produce a few ground-breaking albums, call it quits, and leave the audience wanting more), but the mere fact that there was so much of it raises this question: where do you begin? The choice to listen to Prince wasn't whether or not to spend $10 - $40 on a few albums (as the choice might be to buy all of Guns n' Roses' oeuvre). There were hundreds of songs, and while there is some consensus that his earlier albums were among his best, there were plenty of gems scattered throughout the rest of his career. It would seem random to buy one late-era Prince album and ignore the others, but buying them all would cost a lot.

This leads us to the unusual way in which he regulated access to the music. Ever since 1999, the year Napster went mainstream, musical artists have had to balance the added exposure that comes with free distribution with the fact that giving things away for free is no way to make a living. Streaming music like Spotify and Youtube's Vevo channel are kinds of compromises that allow artists to make some money (arguably too little) while music consumers are able to listen to whatever they want either for free with advertising or for a small subscription fee. The more artists transfer over to that model, the more appealing the service like Spotify becomes. From the perspective of the music consumer, you could keep paying your monthly fee to Spotify and get to listen to what most new artists produce, or you could pay 10 bucks to listen to one album by one artist. The shift in value was incremental and difficult to notice - it wasn't like a single label or artist deciding to provide their music in a certain way tipped the scale. But at some point, the scale tipped. Music is as valuable to individuals and society as it ever was, but the value of individual artists or songs shifted when we started consuming music in different ways.

Thinking about how I missed the boat on Prince until now makes me think about how we recognize artistic excellence in today's world. I get a sense that there is a kind of skepticism about it now, a desire to ask, "how good could he possibly be? Wouldn't more people have been listening to him and making a bigger fuss about his music over the past several decades?" The question of who gets celebrated as a musical genius isn't just a question of subjective judgment of talent (though it is that, too). It's a question of how output and access influence our estimates of excellence. If something is even moderately awesome, we all hear about it, see video of it, and post it on social media right away. Encountering some of the videos of Prince's performances is so jarring because we've become accustomed to a world without secrets (and that includes secret genius). It's one thing to unearth an under-appreciated artist or work. This practice has become commonplace online: a sophisticated content curator spends hours digging through the detritus of YouTube so that we don't have to, and presents us with an overlooked or forgotten work of genius.

Prince's work was different. It was sitting there in plain sight; it just happened to be behind a paywall. That wall came down (at least temporarily) in the wake of his death, and it really did feel like something brilliant that had always been in your immediate vicinity had been suddenly revealed, rather than feeling as though a curator dug up a hidden gem.

I also get the sense while watching videos of the unbelievable live performances that Prince wasn't made for the world of sampling and covering, of copying and pasting, of virality and memes, not only because of what he produced and how he managed access to it, but also because of his performance of self. A large part of the appeal with Prince is the performer, some un-copyable charisma that he had. Whereas a Beatles or Metallica melody might sound interesting if interpolated by another artist, a cover of a Prince song would just make whomever was covering it look positively un-charismatic by comparison. Access to Prince's live performances is (or at least was) limited to begin with (similarly, this is a reason why Hamilton can still be a phenomenon in the age of digitally reproducible art). It's true that when the artist dies, the recordings (including the recordings of live performances) will live on, but the recordings are once-removed from the actual ecstatic experience of being there, with the performer, with the crowd. So watching them also makes me sad. Once the performer dies, the party's over.

What gets written about in Media Studies?

I just went to a talk about the portrayal of women in shows and movies about the spiritual/supernatural in the late 1990's. Of course, the key text that the scholar was examining was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. the speaker described people's reactions when she told them she was writing about Buffy. Generally, people reacted negatively because so many media scholars (particularly those working in the feminist or cultural studies traditions) write about this one show. This was followed by a justification by the scholar as to why she was writing about this one very-written-about show. It was part of a larger trend that she was examining, it ran for a relatively long time (6 years), and it was fairly popular.

The idea of one show or movie being "better" than another is one that most media scholars, I would expect, would reject. And yet it seems impossible to get away from, because we must write about certain texts and not others. What do we base our selections on?

What we love: My problem with this is it will lead to a few shows/movies being written about a lot while most other shows/movies don't get written about at all. This seems to be happening in film studies. There are a million papers about The Searchers, which isn't a bad thing per se, but shouldn't the number of films that scholars examine and write about be larger? Shouldn't we aspire to examine a diverse set of texts, however one might define diversity? Also, there are plenty of hyper-articulate, passionate, super-smart people who write about texts they love on the internet. They're called fans. Part of the discipline of media scholarship, part of what sets us apart, is our willingness to consider texts that we don't like. Examples: Buffy, The Searchers.

What is popular: I like this strategy, but only if it pertains to films/shows that are popular over a long period of time in multiple cultures, and ideally, independent of the degree to which they were promoted (extra promotion gives some shows/movies an unfair advantage over other shows/movies that would've been just as popular had they had the marketing muscle behind them). If it is desirable to have the deepest knowledge about the greatest number of media experiences, starting with the most popular experiences seems like a good idea. Example: The CSIs and Law & Orders.

What isn't popular: Scholars often take it upon themselves to act as a corrective influence on readers' tastes, trying to counteract the effects of extensive mainstream marketing by "rescuing" lesser known works that are usually aimed at marginalized audiences. This isn't so much about enlarging our collective understanding about how media and culture work as it is about acting is opposition to the private corporate influence on culture. Examples: Stan Brakhage, Queer as Folk, soap operas (yes, I know soaps are "popular" in that they endure much longer than any other text, but it depends on how you look at it. Individual episodes are disposable in the way that news reports are disposable. They don't have a long shelf life).

What did/could/should have an impact on culture: Even if a show wasn't particularly popular, it may have exerted a significant influence on culture or cultural form thereafter. A show like My So-Called Life wasn't very popular when it aired. I doubt that its very popular now (DVD sales and all). And yet its hard to argue with the fact that every teen drama that came after it resembles it in many ways, and that no show that came before it was quite like it. Ditto to Arrested Development, which has spawned a ton of voice-over single camera comedies that might usher out the era of sitcoms (fingers crossed). Its exceptionally difficult to anticipate what shows/movies will have the greatest influence in the future, but if we look back, we can see some unpopular-yet-influential texts. Unfortunately, a lot of scholars try to promote texts they happen to like as highly influential (or possibly influential in the future), but this is just textual boosterism, plain and simple.

Selecting Purely at Random: No one I know of does this, but it strikes me as a good way to go about studying media. If you did it enough, you'd get a pretty good (that is to say, unbiased) sample of all media. Thus, the conclusions you drew about the texts you happened to look at would be generalizable to a much larger portion of all media than any other selection technique. I was going through old TV Guides for some research and kept seeing shows that I knew no scholar or fan was ever going to write about, and this seemed like a shame to me. Again, if we want to form larger theories about how media works, we should broaden our horizons to include texts that don't fit into any of the above categories: the truly mundane texts.

Some texts can fit into more than one of these categories. My next project: taking a survey of texts written about in scholarly journals and those written about on blogs, to see what categories and texts we've got covered and which ones need covering.