The new Hold Steady album came out two Tuesdays ago. Like literally tens of thousands of Americans, their last album Boys and Girls in America took me by surprise and instantly infatuated me with its musically widescreen Springsteenism and the wry examination of the intersection of adolescent hedonism and adult responsibility. It sent me back to the ramshackle glory of their first two disks…though it must be said that, for whatever reason, Boys and Girls in America doesn’t seem to be aging well. I’m not sure what it is, but I listened to it on the way home from a party the other night (seems like the perfect time, right?), and it just wasn’t grabbing me the same way. I don’t know.
Either way, if you are interested in lyrics, you need to pay attention to the Hold Steady. From a purely mechanical level, Craig Finn is a virtuoso, dazzling with half-rhymes, twisted internal rhythms, and some surprisingly compelling resolutions that really shouldn’t work, but do.
But there’s enough critical mumbo-jumbo jaw-wagging about Finn and company on the interwebs. That’s not why I’m doing this…there’s an interesting reversal about Stay Positive – a reversal of industry practices and how labels are pushing artists.
A little background is in order…we are now in the digital age, where online retailers like iTunes are accounting for more and more sales. In order to entice consumers, every major retailer (or coalition or retailers) wants what they call “exclusive content.” Buy this CD at Best Buy and get an exclusive DVD (which may very well be shit shot on a crappy home camera and edited on someone’s Mac)! Buy this album as a digital download on iTunes and get an exclusive unreleased track (which was probably left off the album for a reason)! When an artist delivers a project to a label now, they are also encouraged (may be forced) to deliver this dubious bonus material. Frankly, it undermines the artistic process in two ways:
1. If you, the artist, have a good song that just doesn’t work as part of the album, you are expected to let the label use it as a bonus track for iTunes (or another retailer) – thus isolating and limiting the track’s potential. Sure, once the window of exclusivity expires, you can put it somewhere else, but chances are it will be difficult to make it part of a coherent statement and will wind up on some odds’n’sods compilation down the road.
2. If you, the artist, have a song that is a steaming pile of horse pucky that you don’t want anywhere near your album, you are expected to let the label use it as a bonus track for iTunes (or another retailer) – thus exposing your soft creative underbelly to the kind of people who buy your album on iTunes to get the bonus material because they want everything you’ve done. In a nutshell, you are rewarding your most loyal fans with your worst music.
I’m amused.
So, back to Minneapolis’s finest (now Brooklyn’s finest, because that’s what you do – you move to Brooklyn), the Hold Steady. I am not sure of the entire tale, but basically the new album Stay Positive was released on iTunes early…two or three weeks before the street date of the CD. Maybe copies had leaked, and the label wanted to combat file-sharing and such. Because the iTunes version was released early, retailers were getting the shaft – people who were big fans, buy it on street-date kinda fans, were already going to have the album. So the label put the bonus tracks on the full-scale physical release, instead of bundling them to the digital release. The first 50,000 copies of Stay Positive come with three extra tracks (inexplicably stuck together as one long track on the CD). Kinda cool, but it made me thing a great deal about how the content-mad culture out there may be driving a dagger into the heart of the album as a medium for expression.
Maybe I’m overthinking this.
As for Stay Positive? It’s good. It’s darker than Boys and Girls in America – it’s the morning after, perhaps. That said, I feel like the band feels a little stuck. They’ve made three great albums, and expectations continue to inch upwards. There are moments when I get the feeling they are unsure of what to do, of how to wrap up songs and phrases, when to let an idea lapse and when to pursue it. Then again, one could take that very uncertainty as an artistic expression – we’ve all been there.
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