Post by Tim Anderson, Old Dominion University

Let’s begin with Taylor Swift so we can get that out of the way: Swift stands tall, talented and influential. Her ability to call bullshit on not paying during a “promotional” period should stand as a reminder that the best weapon for a musician in the industry is knowledge. Historically, musicians have not received royalties when their music was being “promoted” through radio airplay and free copies. However, this promotion had nothing to do with Swift’s or any other artist’s latest release. The three-month promotional period is about promoting the Apple Music service. The latest streaming music service is an iteration of Beats, which was an iteration of MOG. As every Apple user knows, Apple does not invent technologies so much as refine them. In this case the five days I have been using the service has brought me to an odd conclusion: I am impressed, and am convinced that we have seen just the tip of what Apple Music can add to a counter-reformatory music industry of continually-concentrating publishers and labels.

I say this for two reasons. First, the June 8th presentation of the service at the annual WWDC was muddled and confused at best. Seeing Jimmy Iovine stumble and Eddy Cue dance awkwardly while they proclaimed another revolution simply felt forced, and now we know why. The service is hardly revolutionary. Instead, it is a very interesting and important entry into an already-existing streaming game. Even the new service of “Connect,” which purportedly connects artists with fans, feels like another version of Twitter or Instagram. Furthermore, Apple couldn’t even deliver the service on time and delayed new versions of iTunes for OS X several times throughout the day. These delays suggest that they were pushing to the very last moment to produce a product whose capabilities they have yet to truly conceive. In other words, expect changes, many of them, and expect them often as iTunes continues to mutate while Apple Music finds new ways to service its listeners.

Secondly, this is really about extending the iTunes application. This already-overloaded portal that delivers iOS updates, books, podcasts, movies, and more is Apple’s most important application. It most likely has your credit card and now it offers a very convenient and quality walled garden of a streaming service for a monthly fee. Indeed, the three-month promotion is Apple’s 90-day gift, allowing users to freely frolic in a garden of 256kps streams that seamlessly integrates in your iTunes. It will likely temper thousands of skeptical users into their service. And unlike Spotify, iTunes’ advantage is that it is the playback device that you’re most likely to use first when you play any music. By placing the streaming service in the iTunes app, Apple has, again, used its most important consumer-face application as the media-oriented Trojan Horse that it is.

As gifts go, the user in me doesn’t mind accepting this one. Although Apple consumes my data while it surveys every single stream and search I provide it, as a streaming service I find it a worthy successor to Beats and a competitor to Spotify. Please note: Spotify and the seemingly doomed Tidal offer comparable catalogues with better bitrates. However, the combination of convenience and the fact that I don’t stream through the most high-end equipment in the world means I will be using this service a lot more than I ever anticipated.

Truth is, until relatively recently, Apple had not anticipated offering such a service. Steve Jobs never believed that subscription models were viable when it came to music. Indeed, when Apple purchased the pay-per-stream music service Lala in 2009, it was rumored the streaming service was purchased primarily to acquire its engineers. Indeed, Apple quickly and quietly gobbled up the firm only after it had submitted a never-released iOS app to Apple’s App Store that practically turned an iPhone into a portable, cloud-based jukebox where users could license the infinite playback of any track for a dime. Impressed, Apple transformed the basis of Lala’s services into the form of Apple’s iTunes Match, a service that allows users to essentially store 25,000 songs in the cloud and stream them through an iOS device. Still, the acquisition of Beats Music pointed to something much, much bigger. Indeed, the 2014 $3 billion U.S. purchase of Beats happened in a new Apple, one that was almost three years beyond Jobs’ passing and willing to bet on becoming a competitor to the dominant music-only streaming service, Spotify.[1] Five days into using both services, my gut feeling is that Apple Music will be able to compete with Spotify. Furthermore, I suspect that the two will lead a new oligarchy of on-demand streaming services. As interesting as Tidal may be, its app and debut has stained it as a loser service that – along with Rdio, Deezer, and the all-but-forgotten streaming pioneer, Rhapsody – will be vying for a distant third place. These big two services, and little three to whomever, will be a very substantial portion of a near future of the industry that is based on data aggregation and mining rather than sales.

All of which makes me yearn for 2005. Ten years ago I penned a post for Flow noting that after multiple record chains shuttered and MySpace had emerged as an interesting distribution mechanism for artists, such as Annie and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, that we had “a chance to, like punks in the late 1970s and hip hop of the early 1980s, once again see what it means to get really small together.” If anything, the fact that I find the debut of Apple Music a pleasant service makes me believe that this chance has, for the moment, passed. With Apple Music and Spotify the legal alternatives to piracy have emerged and have found supporters such as Taylor Swift and Led Zeppelin. And while The Beatles have yet to allow their catalogue to become “streamable,” one of the last classic rock holdouts, AC/DC, has relented and placed their music on both Spotify and Apple Music. As more and more legacy acts have relented to a ever-improving technical capacities and new business models, streaming services are now in a position to dominate. And at $14.99 a month for my family of five to legally access eight million plus records, Apple Music is providing a walled garden of goods that, although they could not have imagined to be successful, sounds great and has nothing revolutionary about it.

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[1] Technically, YouTube is the dominant music streaming service. Indeed, rumors have abounded for the last two years that the Google-owned service would debut its own service, somewhat independent of Google Play.

Five out of the last six fall seasons I have been lucky to attend one of the most interesting new media industry conferences in the United States. Taking place in Washington, DC, the annual Future of Music Coalition Summit always provides substantial exposure to the numerous debates and struggles of many members of a legacy industry have had as a future of decentralized broadband, servers and users have wholly consumed it. Hosted by the Future of Music Coalition, a Washington-based institute founded in 2000, two years after Napster began a process that would disintermediate the recording industry, the coalition has always held an explicit interest in understanding and influencing the connections between business, arts, technology, and policy. This interest in establishing a dialogue between stakeholders has been reflected in every single summit, and this one was no different. Indeed, this is what makes the annual meeting unique. Not only does the summit’s location in DC allow the occasional FCC commissioner, Senator, or Congressional aide access the stage, it also allows representatives from numerous organizations to appear and make impassioned cases both for and against policies, technological innovations, and business models.

Such was the case this year, when attendees gathered at Georgetown University from October 28-29 for the 12th annual summit. While many of the debates surrounded seemingly arcane but important discussions about direct licensing deals, the importance of establishing a terrestrial broadcast right, or the need for better metadata, these were presented alongside more accessible sessions on the prospects for music journalism and seminars on entrepreneurialism for bands. However, the most controversial discussions surrounded streaming services. Unlike years past when streaming services were viewed with optimism as a potential legal solution that could pay musicians and provide an easy alternative to piracy, royalty rates from the likes of Spotify were heaped with significant amounts of condemnation for devaluing music. Canadian songwriter and President of the Songwriters Association of Canada Eddie Schwartz noted that the fact that a million streams on Spotify begets songwriters close to $35 meant that the service was hardly operating in a just manner. As a result, his organization and others are in the beginning stages of developing a new Fair Trade system of popular music where every aspect of the value chain would be certified based on issues such as whether or not that link was fairly compensating its workers and how transparent it is. Later that day, Tim Quirk, Head of Global Content Programming of Google Play, gave an impassioned defense of streaming and new music services, arguing that they don’t devalue music because ”it is impossible to devalue music” since it is art and, therefore, doesn’t have any inherent price floor. And so the back and forth went. Standing somewhere between the two was the infamous manager, Peter Jenner. While declaring “that you can’t control the Internet,” Jenner also reminded the crowd that even with the Internet effectively collapsing, in the history of popular music “most artists have been unsuccessful.”

The summit offered no singular solution or model to success, which is not surprising as there is no single way forward for every musician or service alike. As the ecosystem has metastasized and one music startup after another has seemingly come and gone, perhaps the most interesting insight that the summit continues to offer is that optimism for the future persists. Take, for example, the summit’s most inspiring panel: “Indie Missions: Nonprofit Models for Supporting Independent Music.” Four speakers took the stage for 50 minutes to explain how local musicians, non-profits, educators, and policymakers have begun to both conceive of and invest in Colorado to produce better, more vibrant local and regional music scenes. Involving Dani Grant of SpokesBUZZ, Storm Gloor of the University of Colorado-Denver, Bryce Merrill of the Western States Arts Federation, and a vegan hip-hop MC who raps about the benefits of local gardens named DJ Cavem, the panel provided insights about how a scene can take concrete steps to help creatives that go far beyond the invocation of the latest Richard Florida proclamation. One distinct offering was a program involving mid-sized cities which would like to connect their talents with each other. Titled ”Bandswap”, the program worked with 14 bands and eight cities so that local musicians and industry players could operate in such a way that they share each others resources, industry contacts, and community connections to plan tours and make their local resources regional. It is an example like Bandswap that is the reason I continually return to the summit. In today’s music industry, it’s one thing to hope for a better future. It’s a much different thing to see evidence of it.

Two pains in particular, advertising and getting local listeners on board, have proven particularly frustrating. In both cases the issue is the medium itself: podcasting may be well-established for early adopters, but for much of the general public the medium has a long way to go. “Whenever anyone is trying to sell my show to a potential advertiser, whether it is me or another sales person, and the first question is ‘what’s a podcast?’ the meeting is effectively over,” Frantz explains. “There’s just too much to explain about podcasting: it includes the issues of technology, different listening habits and even the idea that the ad is, unlike an ad on radio, permanent.” Even more frustrating is the experience that Frantz runs into time and time again when he meets former listeners who tell him how “they loved The Mike and Bob Show” and “wish it was still on the air”. When he tells them about his new podcast and that it is essentially everything that same as the old Mike and Bob Show, they all too often know nothing about how to get a podcast despite the fact that many of them own iPods, iPhones, and use iTunes on an everyday basis. “People enjoy commercial radio because of the convenience of it. You get in your car and you know how to get it,” Frantz explains. “Trying to explain how to download a podcast to someone who has been invested in radio all their lives is often like trying to explain to a caveman what an airplane is.”

Still Boneyard Industries continues to promote their network and have discovered that the best way to do so, just like anything else, is by generating word of mouth. Of course this has meant using mainstream social media such as Facebook and Twitter, but it has also meant doing appearances at local clubs to host trivia nights and promote an occasional bar night. Pocketing the appearance fees, Frantz and his associates use this money to attend specific conventions, buy promo materials, rent tables, and shake hands with fellow zombie lovers and sci-fi fans. In the case of Dork Trek, considerable growth has occurred as as a result of numerous efforts. These include the creation of free, custom Valentines for their listeners to give away and attending Star Trek conventions to make connections with fans and other Star Trek podcasters. What started out as a relatively weak podcast in terms of numbers of downloads per month, had grown to a healthy 7,000 per month by April 2012. After attending another Star Trek convention in May, Dork Trek broke the 10,000 download per month mark. The continual production and promotion of Bob’s Boneyard garnered the cast some unexpected national press when The Onion‘s A.V. Club gave the cast a positive review in a “Best Podcasts of the Week” column in April 2012. Noting that “The real appeal of the show is how Frantz straddles the line between “Adam Carolla-type regular guy” and “Chris Hardwick-type regular nerd,” the A.V. Club called Bob’s Boneyard “the comfort food of podcasts.” Still this experiment offers little clarity for the prospects of local podcasting. In an atmosphere where the economics of radio mean that more local radio performers are losing their positions, Frantz predicts,”that those former radio guys will go into podcasting and the people who lived in their local market and listened to their radio shows will listen. However, it will be a tenth of what their audience was.”

Although Frantz still toys with the idea of getting back into radio, he often tells others not to do so. “The way radio is now there is no place to cultivate your talents–there are no overnight shifts to learn your craft. Everything now is being voice tracked. When I was at Sinclair Communications we automated just about everything. There are no minor leagues of radio where you stay up all night and you figure out how to be on the air. Voice-tracking doesn’t really help any talents grow. You can’t learn radio by recording your breaks and throwing out those that suck. You need to listen to your tapes and work on how you can improve. It’s the only way you can grow what is essentially an amalgamation of skill sets needed to be entertaining over the air.” But for now Frantz and his colleagues remain dedicated to producing podcasts and recording them live from Virginia Beach. And although they have yet to figure out how to make money from their casts, right now they do it because they love it. Given that all of this new, unexplored territory, how long it takes for what they love to line their pockets is anyone’s guess.

If you want to listen to any of the Boneyard Industry Podcasts, including Bob’s Boneyard, Dork Trek, Torres vs. Zombies, and Get Mommy a Drink, just click on the above links of search for them in iTunes.

The other shows include Torres vs. Zombies, a zombie-survival podcast, Dork Trek, a “Star Trek: The Next Generation themed” podcast, and a mother-oriented podcast titled Get Mommy a Drink. The latter podcast consists of Frantz’s wife Stephanie and her friend, Sarah LeClaire Heisler, both of whom developed a program devoted to mothers who hate the idea that they should talk about their kids 24-hours a day. Launching in the summer of 2011, the podcast quickly became the network’s most popular offering. Foul- mouthed, obsessed with Duran Duran, and simply unlike any other “mommy cast” offered at the time, Get Mommy a Drink appeared as a recommended comedy podcast on iTunes. It found itself as one of the top comedy podcasts for a number of months, placing them in the company of comedy podcast celebrities such as Adam Carolla, Marc Maron, and Kevin Smith. After an initial stint of podcast fame, Get Mommy a Drink found its core audience of around 10,000 downloads a month and connected with an audience of spirited and dispirited mothers, women who never wanted to have kids, and self-identified gay men.

Get Mommy a Drink‘s success taught Frantz and his colleague’s two lessons. First, the power of finding and filling an niche at the national level. As far as podcasts goes, there was nothing like this in the “mommycast” universe. Secondly, it affirmed what Frantz began to suspect: the idea of turning a “local comedy program” into a “hit” may have to be abandoned. Even though the original Bob’s Boneyard flagship podcast is still the most popular in terms of downloads per month (close to 15,000 a month), Bob’s Boneyard posts three podcasts a week as opposed to Get Mommy a Drink‘s one and came with pre-existing audience from The Mike and Bob Show. In other words, Frantz discovered that his other niche-oriented podcasts, had “more room for growth”. Frantz predicts that “in two years Bob’s Boneyard may have the smallest number of listeners because the other shows are so niche.” As an extension of a local comedy radio show, the podcast lacks a focused topic and is competing nationally not only with all those other local comedy teams from across the nation that are no longer on radio and are now on podcasts, but with fellow podcasters. Frantz understands that he is at a severe disadvantage competing with many of them: “Dana Gould and Marc Maron live in LA and have been in the business for years. They are national performers that use their casts to promote their acts. They can leverage their celebrity and call someone famous to come on their cast. Guys like Adam Carolla has these connections. Even then someone like Kevin Smith is a huge podcaster and has just started making money at this.”

That question – “How to make money at podcasting?” – is a problem that plagues Boneyard Industries and will be explored soon in the third and final post on this topic.

If you are interested in listening to these podcasts, search for them on iTunes or click on the links above.

Indeed, in 2011, Hampton Roads, the portion of Southeastern Virginia where I live, suffered a significant media loss when a 10-year radio drive time show and career came to an abrupt end. Bob Frantz, aka Bob Fresh of Hampton Road’s The Mike and Bob Show on 96XFM, found his show cancelled. Ten years of any media project is exceptional, but in the fickle arena of local broadcasting, shows like The Mike and Bob Show were the rarest of birds in a post-1996 Telecommunications Act context. As a staple among the region’s testosterone-fueled audience of military workers, beach bums, and working-class commuters, The Mike and Bob Show was in and about the local. Local guys doing dumb local guy stuff that other local guys talked about. Like most drive-time shows, this included stunts at the beach, appearances at local bars and restaurants, interviews when comedians came to town, and, of course, giveaways to concerts and sporting events. Describing the program to me in an interview this April, Bob characterized it as “just guys ‘dicking around’ with no real format, working with no real clock. It was just friends hanging out and being stupid breaking balls, mainly just a lot of fun with Mike and I patrolling and delegating the chaos around us as complained about our bosses, friends, wives, girlfriends.” Immature, silly, and full of dick jokes – lots of dick jokes – it was the kind of program that most of my media studies colleagues wouldn’t bother with, let alone know much about. And if they did know about it most of my colleagues would either find it repulsive or kept silently embarrassed about their enjoyment.

Yet all it took to produce some eye-opening results that would seal the show’s fate was a less publicized but important analogue-to-digital media move, Arbitron’s shift from diaries to portable people meters in the Hampton Roads market in mid 2010. After the first book was released, The Mike and Bob Show, a program that had routinely claimed the number-two position with persons 18-34, was now pegged at dead last in the same demographic. Repositioning the show and jettisoning staff members couldn’t save the program from this method-driven nosedive. By the release of the first book of 2011, the show was effectively dead in the water and Bob Frantz’s professional radio career was done. With a buyout package in hand and a radio career in afternoon drive that had begun quickly after he graduated with a degree in history from Virginian Commonwealth University in Richmond, Frantz decided to begin a podcast. And, thus, Bob’s Boneyard, the flagship podcast of what would be an emergent network of shows, came to be.

Of course, these transitions are never that simple nor are they out of the blue. Bob had taken some time off from his show for paternity leave upon the birth of his first child and promptly watched every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show he both loved and seemed logical to mock on the air. However, even though the program could occasionally “talk Trek,” the program couldn’t find enough room for his own personal TV ramblings. Bob began to think about a Star Trek  podcast. He had become acquainted with podcasting as his 96XFM radio show posted a podcast and online videos of the show as a YouTube channel. When the program was effectively trimmed back from talking 35-minutes an hour to only 3- to 11-minutes an hour of talking in between MP3s, Bob suggested that the show should produce a podcast. The other members of the staff didn’t find the suggestion interesting.

 Whatever their reasons for not producing a podcast, Frantz shortly found himself without a job, time to kill before the paychecks and benefits ran out, and time to find a new batch of reasons. Let go in Spring 2011, Bob Frantz quickly decided within days to  follow the path of other displaced on-air personalities, such as Marc Maron and Adam Carolla, and begin a podcast. And like Maron and Carolla, Frantz drew from radio talent he once worked with on terrestrial radio to bring the podcast to life. Working with Alfredo Torres and Manny Fresh, the three decided to produce the podcast, Bob’s Boneyard, a program that would essentially produce much of the same banter – odd, offensive, and localized – that used to take place over the airwaves. Working with Stephane Frantz, Bob’s wife and soon-to-be podcasting colleague, the the four formed an LLC and moved forward with what would become a successful Kickstarter campaign that netted enough starting capital for computers, a board, and recording equipment and promotional materials.

What digital taketh, digital giveth, albeit one without any cash-flow and health care benefits. Trying to grow a profitable local podcast with advertisers and cultivate a significant audience would prove something different altogether and is the subject for the second part of this three-part post, which is forthcoming. In the meantime, those interested in listening to the Bob’s Boneyard podcast can visit their website or find them in iTunes.

Which may be more than one can say for New Orleans. As Treme’s second season offers its characters some sense of closure over the traumas of Katrina, the montage of New Orleans abandoned buildings, neighborhoods and crime at the end of Sunday’s program remind the viewer that New Orleans still doesn’t have the services and infrastructure necessary for its citizens’ safety and well being. As Davis spins Louis Armstrong’s “Wrap Your Troubles Up in Dreams” while he, once again, DJs for WWOZ, the shots of vacant lots, abandoned buildings and street crime remind the viewer that whatever resolution these characters find, the city is replete with less-than-happy endings. If anything, Davis’ silence and sucker-punch reaction to the end of Armstrong’s ballad reminds him and the viewer that the road for New Orleans’ recovery will be long and littered with the difficulties and struggles of a population that simply feels out of place anywhere else in America. Davis laments that “even if they make it hard where else would we go? Who else would have us?” sums up the conundrum that America’s greatest cultural treasure poses its residents two years after the water swallowed the city and the Federal government somehow forgot how to care.

David Simon makes his cities pose questions. They are his program’s main characters and their larger political economic problems of labor, services and wealth are never placed in the background. Simon often referred to The Wire’s portrayal of Baltimore as a kind of televised sociology. Treme, on the other hand, yens for musicological lenses and kitchen studies. If The Wire focused on a city’s lack of infrastructural resources and the impacts this had on its citizens, Treme has emphasized on the many skills, labors and laborers it takes to make New Orleans sing. Treme’s focus on how its culture and cultural economies are created and presented through music and cuisine has meant a majority of its almost 22 narrative hours watching musicians struggle with bar owners, the recording business, the law and each other. And for every rehearsal scene and onstage argument, we are provided a back-of-the-house moment portraying of both the pleasures and horrors of the professional kitchen.

The connections between the pleasures of the table and those of the ear are many. Temporal arts of the senses, food and music are intertwined because of their mutual  investment in experiential economies that do not travel well. That Delmond and Janette strike up a friendship as NOLA exiles in NYC in the second season is only logical. The two are both skilled artists that spend the season weaving their way back and forth from New Orleans as they tend to the needs of friends and family. Yet it’s more than that as both Janette and Delmond are trying to process what New Orleans means to them as people and, more importantly, their arts and artistry. Delmond’s recording projects and Janette’s dishes are grounded in New Orleans traditions, but without being grounded in New Orleans the two come to understand that while they succeed in New York they exist in the city at a significant loss. Their call back to New Orleans is not so much laced with the temptations of “opportunity”, but the need rebuild their home. As Janette, is told by her potential investor, “You have friends that want you back home”. These first two seasons of Treme have depicted this process of a unique labor force returning to a city that throughout history has thumbed its nose at change but has been forced to by the forces of nature. Yet as Big Chief Albert Lambreaux reminds earlier in season two when he explains to the filmmaker who wants to film the process him sewing his Mardis Gras Indian suit, “The Process don’t matter if you don’t have no result. Process, shit. The process… is just a lot of damn hard work.”

If there is hope to be found in Treme that all of this work will have a fruitful result it is in Antoine’s teaching and mentoring of young musicians in both the schools and on the streets. In particular, Antoine has taken one teen trumpeter named Robert under his tutelage. Robert appears in the very first scene of the second season playing the first five notes of “When The Saints Go Marching In” over and over as a sort of musical seed that, with proper nurturing and attention, may mature into a whole song, a whole set. Under Antoine’s guidance, Robert’s hard work is rewarded as he and his bandmates present their first public performance on a street in the French Quarter during Jazz Fest. Chaperoned by Antoine, the performance is the culmination of hope, hope which is the result of developed embouchures, many sour notes and broken rhythms. This is the hard, important preparatory work needed to make both the legendary local music and cuisine of the Crescent City. Neither of these are a given, but the sweet fruit of cultural work that elevates this labor at the expense of other items and services. Indeed, In one of the more important academic studies on popular music in the 20th century, Sociologist Ruth Finnegan notes that when she started to write about local music in Milton Keynes, “At first, I just took this local music for granted and, beyond a vague expectation that the necessary arrangements would just be there for me and mine, did not think much about it” (Finnegan, p. xvii). The two seasons of Treme remind us that although these arts may be New Orleans’ birthright and the foundation of their tourist economy, they are dependent on human traditions, people and cultures, all of which can be washed away and in need of homes.

Works Cited

Finnegan, R. (2007). The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (Reprint ed.). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

The season-to-season differences show up in the small details of its attendant culture. For the fourth season, one of those significant differences is the music. In its first three seasons, Mad Men is populated by the sounds of Percy Faith, Jack Jones, Perry Como, Ann Margaret, Julie London and Brenda Lee, among others. Throughout the series, Matt Weiner and Alexandra Patsavas, Mad Men‘s music supervisor, have chosen recordings that audiences immediately recognize as suitable and relevant to the program’s early 1960s setting. Each record and artist is deployed in a manner that reminds us that a Skeeter Davis record could deliver its fair share of critical commentary. What season four has witnessed is the substantial arrival of rock and roll. Note, not the arrival of a hypermasculinized rock, but a more nuanced version that is both fun and critical. It is a version that is sexy but doesn’t necessitate sex; global yet still somehow American. It is the British Invasion, it is Warhol’s Velvet Underground, and it is radically life changing. Rock in this context is not your parents’ music. Rather it is what hip hop is today: at worst your parents hated and at best put up with it. If you were lucky, they chose the latter because to deny you its place in your life would simply be too traumatic.

And it is here where we cue little Sally Draper’s Beatle-inspired scream from episode ten, “Hands and Knees”. While earlier this season we witnessed that Sally’s discovery of some of her sexuality as she watches The Man from U.N.C.L.E., her entry into adolescence will no doubt be cemented by a Fab Four concert as she is chaperoned by her father. Although Don dismisses Sally ‘s efforts to live with him (and thereby distance herself from Betty) in the previous episode, “The Beautiful Girls”, Sally is temporarily welcomed into Don’s New York life with the promise of Beatles tickets. As Don asked, “Can you keep a secret? You think your friends are going to be jealous when they find out that you are going to see the Beatles this Sunday at Shea Stadium?”, I wondered aloud if Don fully understood what this act would mean to Sally. That remains to be seen.

What is clear is that the British invasion of Sterling Cooper at the end of season two has resulted in a noticeably different firm and a noticeably different direction to the series. This has also meant moments of audible change. For example, the decidedly garage-rock, blues-based sounds of Britain’s The Nashville Teens are featured at the end of the fourth season’s first episode “Public Relations”. Both a nod to Draper’s rural past as Dick Whitman and the lie that Whitman/Draper uses to define himself to reporters at the beginning and end of the episode, “Tobacco Road” is positioned at the episodes end credits as a simultaneously raw and mocking counterpoint. We hear a similar use of pop music at the end the latest episode with Santo & Johnny’s late-1964 release of their instrumental version of The Beatles, “Do you want to know a secret?”. Most famous for their single, “Sleep Walk”, the duo’s instrumental take is neither rock nor roll, nor pop. Accompanied by woodwinds, the duo’s signature pedal steel arrangement is sweet and easy, stripped of any of The Beatles suggestions of intimacy. If George Harrison’s vocals promised a lover’s trust, Santo & Johnny promise nothing of the sort. In fact, Santo & Johnny’s version of the Beatles song, as well-executed as it is, is as excessive in its sweetness as the episode is in secrets.

About Don Draper’s question, “Can you keep a secret?” It is answered repeatedly throughout “Hands & Knees” with a, “yes, but I’d rather not”. Worse yet, those adhering to Draper’s and the firm’s desire to remain quiet are all too often Mad Men‘s women. One has to wonder just how much longer Joan can keep her composure given her most recent trauma and the fact that she is devoted to a distant husband and Roger Sterling’s reputation. Indeed, Roger, Don, and Lane’s secrets have simply become uncontainable and begun to erupt as accounts, identities and loves are lost. Even Pete Campbell cannot escape the fury of hidden truths as he complains to his wife about the plethora of office secrets that swirl about in “Hands & Knees”. Pete’s substantial hypocrisy (see season one affair with Peggy) is rewarded with him being forced to take a symbolic fall to protect Don Draper’s, and by proxy the firm’s, most substantial lie.

Yet as their cynicism and duplicity threaten most of the firm’s partners (I love how Bertram Cooper somehow seems to operate above the fray), I find hope in Peggy and Sally. As celebrated as Jon Hamm is for his work as Don Draper, he has nothing on Kiernan Shipka, whose portrayal of Sally will no doubt go down as one of the greatest acting jobs by a child actor on television in the history of the medium. While Peggy’s complexity has been a mainstay over the length of the show, Sally has emerged as her own person and she is anything but satisfied. The same is true of Peggy whose nascent feminism pops up in a conversation with a would-be suitor who disparages her plight by claiming that there is no comparison between a women’s struggle with those of African-American citizens. Peggy rejects this poet but continues to associate herself with an emerging counterculture. While Draper toyed with Greenwich Village beats in the first two seasons, they were always his exotica. This new rock and roll counterculture, on the other hand, is Peggy’s, and soon-to-be Sally’s, milieu. Peggy’s newfound friends come with a Warholesque happening in episode four, “The Rejected”. Her “scene” is replete with “Velvet Undergroundesque” background noise as well as a experimental films, gays, lesbians, artists, and writers who refuse to work for ad companies. In other words, anything that rejects straight society.

While Peggy’s encounters are somewhat new for her as an adult, one has to wonder what the Beatle fan Sally Draper will make of her teenage world of rock and roll to come. As the mop tops grow beards and go psychedelic, Sally Draper will change with them. How exactly remains unsure. A child of divorce whose father is a professional liar and whose mother has seemed less-than-motherly throughout season four, Sally will most likely turn to the psychic charms of rock. In a word, Sally remains as good a reason to watch Mad Men as any. Whether or not she will find satisfaction in her search remains to be seen. And I’ll be listening. Hopefully, I will be able to hear a secret or two.

Tim Anderson’s essay on popular music and Mad Men is scheduled to appear in the upcoming collection “Mad Men”: Dream Come True TV, ed. Gary Edgerton (I.B. Tauris) available in late 2010.

1) SCMS is big and small at the same time – This is my fifteenth year since my first SCMS and I see a lot of the same faces I have seen over those years in the hallways but less so in the seminar rooms. The effect of growth and specialization within the organization has effectively made it possible for TV scholars to see nothing but TV panels, film scholars to pursue their interests, and so on. On friday my interest in sound and music drove me to three panels, one on radio, one on music in TV and film (in which I presented) and another on music in Japan’s Imperial Cinema of the late 1930s. The care and quality of the work was terrific, however I fear the serendipitous connections that come from a lack of choice are being lost through emergent specialization. No doubt, this should be a topic for future conference committees who wish to foster both specialization and cross-pollination of thoughts and ideas.

2) Workshops are worth their weight in noisy buzz – Following the #scms hashtag (by the way I tweet at #scms and #scms10 as I believe that the #scms10 is simply more specific for this conference), the postings for the workshop I was in, “The Future of the SCMS conference” made quite a splash. This despite the lack of WIFI and in-and-out phone connectivity. It was easily the best attended most robust workshop have ever been involved with and the importance of it will come as attendees become more involved through their demands and concerns. As someone who really hates conferencing (the logistics of travel and uncomfortable lodgings, combined with a longstanding aversion/anxiety over obliged socialization make four days in another town quite stressful), I have found that new modes of social networking extremely beneficial. In fact, twitter has singlehandedly made my experience conferencing one of great joy by giving me a new mode of association. The workshop allowed me and others to bring this up and demand adequate WiFi. As we will see, this kind of noise is no substitute for organized engagement, but I believe that what result from this and other “noisy workshops” such as yesterday’s other most tweeted moment, “The future of publishing workshop”, will most likely be a spur for change.

3) The future of SCMS will be one of more transparency – SCMS is not an evil organization, nor is it secretive. However, to scholars like myself, someone who has wanted to be involved , it is formidable because it has never been clear to me how to be involved. Nominations to committees seem to require self-promotion, which I tend to find an unseemly necessity, and the question of “how do I get involved?” seems to betray a careerism that scholars of all levels must engage. Something that the “great economic reset” is offering us is a new moment of valuation and we must make ourselves valuable. The best way to do this will be with robust metrics and and the exposition of best scholarly and career practices. For example, I am happy that it looks like the executive committee is interested and actively pursuing a membership census to better understand and promote who we are. I am openly advocating for a survey that better understands a variety of metrics devoted to understanding the value gained from conferencing and precisely how members invest in the experience. Having such information at our disposal will not only allow us to articulate to administrators what the value of conferencing is, but also for us, as an organization, to be exacting and honest as to what we need to value and let go of over time.

Finally, my favorite comment of the time came from a graduate student who noted that she was looking for mentoring and career guidance from a future conference experience. Despite what many may believe, these questions of “how do I go forward?” and “how can I contribute?” still feel like secrets to many of us. While not every conversation need be recorded and every favor recorded, it feels like there is a demand for a new openness, an openness and transparency that will better enable our members and organization to operate and protect their interests. It is an attitudinal change that I have never felt before at any other SCMS conference. Stay tuned…

Formed in the wake of the 1970 Ohio National Guard shooting and killing of four students who were protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State, Akron, Ohio’s Devo has long held the perspective that humankind has regressed. Their most damning evidence has been that the corporate groupthink that has dominated US style management and has been the target of most of Devo’s artistic barbs has metastasized over the last thirty plus years to too much of the globe with disastrous effects (see global recession, a particular two-term US President with a MBA who managed the country into the ground, Windows Vista, etc.). Devo’s latest solution to the problem of corporate idiocracy: join em. Later this year Devo and Warner Brothers will release their first LP in 20 years, their first no major label since 1984. Twenty six years later, Devo’s energy domes have been recharged as they ride the crest of a fairly successful return to action. Last year’s national tour took Devo across the US as they played back-to-back nights where, in select cities, they performed the entirety of their two most popular albums, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo and Freedom of Choice one night at a time to sold out clubs and theaters. The Devo renaissance is in full force.

For me this comes not a minute too soon. A year removed from the eight-year horror story which was the beginning of this decade, the party responsible for this frightfest has never (and probably will never) admitted any guilt for driving the US into the worst set of crises in my lifetime. Worse yet, the new party in power has wasted a year trying to forge a politically-impossible middle with a group of ideologues who don’t believe in science and have contempt for any kind of rational governance. Given this equation, I don’t know which party is dumber. However, I do know that in 2010 it feels like de-evolution is now a fact of life. As Devo puts it, it is “a prophecy fulfilled”. And Devo’s new image fits the times perfectly: a corporate, focus-grouped driven set of artists that will happily produce collective art ala capitalism. In a recent interview with Billboard, Devo’s leader, Mark Mothersbaugh, the magazine noted that “the band is taking a consciously ironic ultra-corporate approach to the release, including focus-grouping every aspect of the album’s marketing.” The stupidity of “focus testing the future” is promoted in their most recent YouTube missive and Devo’s latest flash-based send up of online testing, The Devo Color Study. That latter example asks questions such as “Which color for the car makes you dislike the man more?” and “What color ink is this man writing his ransom note in?” in a voice that can only be described in an absurd computer/euro accent. You can’t help but finish the survey, receive your “Devo Color” (mine was red) and you are asked to share it on your social network of choice. It’s both a joke, an art project and and a business strategy. It’s something Warhol would applaud. It may even show up in Devocom’s bottom line. Whatever it is, Devo appears to be moving themselves and their audience someplace new. As band member and co-leader Gerard Casale puts it, “We feel like all our dire predictions have come true.” Casale continues, “Now, that it’s real, it’s time to move on.” In other words, Devo has re-engaged our culture once again right at the time when we need them most. Duty now for the future, indeed.

Less political but just as contentious in some quarters was the inclusion of The Who as the halftime act. There are a number of reasons for this debate, including the fact that The Who haven’t recorded and released any new music since 2005, and nothing of any cultural consequence since the early 1980s. As a longstanding staple of classic rock radio, the choice of The Who raised the eyebrows of many Internet critics and Twitterers. Watching the debate I couldn’t get over the fact that the children of “My Generation” were skewering one of their parent’s most iconic bands for being “out of touch”. I don’t know who should be playing the halftime show of the Super Bowl, but as far as rites go, The Who and the Super Bowl fit as well as you could expect. As comfortable as your dad/older brother’s well-worn copy of Quadrophenia, they are one of the very few musical acts in the world that a majority of the program’s listeners could say, “Yeah, I’ve heard of them at least once”.

This kind of mass recognition is the the point of Super Bowl programming, after all. In an era of fragmentation it’s the only media program left that has any kind of mass ritual component. Which, of course, is not only why so many debate its contents but why and how we , as scholars, should approach the program. So here’s a few suggestions for  media scholars and educator’s approaching next year’s event:

1) For those teaching media industries: even if you hate football and cannot stomach the thought of watching the Super Bowl, lead your students through a counterprogramming exercise. Even to the most inexperienced, it will become apparent that everything from television to local film theaters must acknowledge the presence of the 800 pound gorilla that will be SB XLV and allow you to drive home a number of points about media audiences and how media industries envision their composition and behaviors.

2) For those taking an anthropological or sociological slant on the games: A week before the game walk your students through local media sources in search of collective viewing options. This will allow you to illustrate how the program acts as a catalyst for explicit collective pleasures. See how churches, union halls, and other organizations use it as a moment to play together and ask them to discuss its importance to these groups. Also lead them to controversies where the NFL has shut down these parties and ask them to discuss how organizations vie for audiences. It will allow your students to better understand media programming act as explicit moments of sociality that sometimes confront other legal and financial aims.

3) For those teaching from a cultural studies point of view: After the program, ask students to list all of the debates that students participated in, both on and offline. If Janet Jackson and Tim Tebow have taught us anything, the Super Bowl is a moment where the connection between culture and politics become explicit. Use the opportunity in class to reiterate the most basic of cultural studies aims and make it clear that even if you didn’t watch the program, the fact that you could not avoid it may be the most interesting path of debate for scholars and students alike.