After recounting a few Los Angeles misadventures last month, it got me thinking more about that Godforsaken cesspool cosplaying as some sort of cultural hub. I promise you, I'm not delusional or jealous. I'm very aware of LA's stranglehold on the music industry to some truly alarming degrees. It's where the money is. It's where the studios are. It's where the record executives are. Rampant capitalism's invisible hand can be felt non-consensually caressing every market in America, including music. Due to horizontal integration, it's pretty much a race to the bottom of California.
I remember reading Michael Azerrad’s New Yorker piece, looking back on his time with Kurt Cobain. If you have even a passing interest in music journalism, do yourself a favor and read his book "Our Band Could Be Your Life." Anyway, in the piece, he talks about when he first met Kurt and Courtney in 1992, at their cluttered apartment in not Seattle but Los Angeles. Less than a year after Nirvana blew up, they'd already decamped. I have a friend who's close with Gerard Way, and when I asked a question about living in New Jersey, I learned that Mr. Not Okay Himself was also living in Los Angeles and had been for a while.
The gravitational force is strong. All roads lead to Los Angeles...which means if you want to succeed in music, you must learn their ways and play by their rules. It is Rome.
And like the Romans in their day, Angelinos are convinced that Los Angeles is the whole world, with the rest of us poor cities living in it (except New York, the barbarous outside empire that can’t be conquered).
So, I have sliced off and cooked down some of their empirical wisdom into some bite-sized bullet points for this nudie mag.
One thing I hear over and over from citizens and denizens of the Empiral Seat of Music Power is that it’s all about the hook. Gotta hook ‘em early and hook ‘em good. They refer to the hook so often that you’d think Lost Angeles was a city of fishermen. This seems to apply to music as well as television, and even literature, with the crushing dominance of minimalism in the marketplace. Apparently, the average consumer has the attention span of a goldfish, or at least that’s what everyone in the Imperial Cult thinks.
This all-important hook not only needs to arrive within 30 nanoseconds of the song's start, but apparently, it needs to be repeated until the listener can literally hear nothing else in their goldfish brain. Not only is this sacred truth going to be told to you by producers, writers, and performers that moonlight (and daylight) as wait staff in the City of Angels, but they teach these lessons in college courses. I wish I was making this up. Imagine entire university courses dedicated to revealing the secret to chart success is just saying the same thing over and over again. I guess cults do love mantras.
And like a mantra, you gotta make sure those hooks are easy for your acolytes—I mean followers—I mean consumers—I mean customers to sing. All snark aside, this one isn't something I really have an issue with since music is supposed to be a communal experience. It's also why I love punk rock. The very essence of it (confirmed by all the early pioneers) is that anyone can do it. Anyone can sing it...often because the singers couldn't sing that well to begin with. Ironically, if you were to present a punk song to these Angelinos, their very first "note" would be to learn how to sing.
In case you weren't aware of what the hell I was talking about, a hook is basically a chorus. But they don’t call it a chorus in Los Angeles, they call it a hook. For the life of me, I still cannot discern a describable difference between the two words. I only know that if you say the word "chorus," they'll respond with, "Oh, you mean the hook." Ave Imperator.
All roads lead to Los Angeles, and they expect you to head there. Regardless of the internet’s democratization of access to music and the prevalence of high-quality recording studios literally everywhere around the country, the LA-ites insist that you need to live there to “get it.” Almost every musician I know who's moved there has moved back broken and empty-handed, so I'm not sure what the benefit of performing for these hook-obsessed cultists is. They can just reject you via email.
At the end of the day, data don't lie, and really, it seems that if you want to succeed in music, you gotta be young and attractive. Look at the last few megastars to top the charts. If you’re too old to be Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend, you’re getting no help from the music gods in Los Angeles. Even if you follow all the fisherman's above-listed advice to the T, expect nothing but rejection and disappointment if you don't have a shelf life record labels can bank on. Retreat across the Rhine to live amongst the other Germanic barbarians in the woods, where you can make your little Bandcamp EPs that no one will listen to in peace. Perhaps one day, Rome will fall.
