perfidy

Late last week I came upon a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that caught my fancy, called Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music. The abstract reads

This paper considers economic issues and trends in the rock and roll industry, broadly defined. The analysis focuses on concert revenues, the main source of performers ' income. Issues considered include: price measurement; concert price acceleration in the 1990s; the increased concentration of revenue among performers; reasons for the secondary ticket market; methods for ranking performers; copyright protection; and technological change.

For economists, this is actually a pretty interesting idea; I don't know of any solid studies that exist on the economics of the music biz.

However, I hadn't reached page two before I found something so egregiously lazy and wrong that I had to put the paper down and stop reading. Authors Marie Connolly and Alan B. Kreuger, both of that cidadel of Rock known as Princeton, of course have to start their paper by defining what the "Rock and Roll Industry" is in the first place. Leaving aside the incredible conceptual and grammatical slippage inherent in categorizing popular music over the last few decades as "The Rock and Roll Industry," the coauthors do a pretty good job of nailing down what their sample set will be:

Here, we will define popular music as music that has a wide following, is produced by contemporary artists and composers, and does not require public subsidy to survive. This definition rules out classical music and publicly supported orchestras. It includes rock and roll, pop, rap, bebop, jazz, blues and many other genres. What about Pavarotti? Well, we warned you that the border of the definition can be fuzzy. If the three tenors attract a large following and are financially viable, we would include them in the popular music industry as well.

So far so good, except for the weird decision to separate out bebop from jazz, and the continued insistence on using "rock and roll" as the defining paradigm of blues-based (mainly) white-people music as though Billy Joel can be comfortably put in a basket of commodities alongside Minor Threat.

But that's where the going gets really nutty. The authors write,

Why is popular music worthy of a handbook chapter? There are several responses. . . .[F]or many fans popular music transcends usual market economics and raises spirits and aspirations. In this vein, for example, Bruce Springsteen once commented, “in some fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity, if I'm doing my job right.” Dewey Finn, the character played by Jack Black in the hit movie, School of Rock, went even further, immodestly claiming, “One great rock show can change the world.” The rock and roll industry arguably started as a social movement intended to bring about political, economic and cultural change, as much as it did as a business. Certainly, popular music is an important cultural industry. [My emphasis]

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. "Rock and Roll" did not arguably start as a social movement yadda yadda, unless by "argument" you mean "irritatingly lazy statement that will cause people to argue with you." "Rock and Roll" did not start as a social movement except in the fusty cheap-pulp pages of Rolling Stone compilation books full of lazy mythologizing and glory-days reminiscing about the time in 1967 when the Airplane played that one benefit for the Diggers that raised some cash for some homeless people to eat with. Leary was there too! With LSD! Ahh...those were the days! What was the explicit sociopolitical agenda of "My Ding-a-Ling?" Or of the film soundtrack extract "Rock Around the Clock?"

"Rock and Roll," to use the authors' term, started for two reasons: for artists to get paid, and for artists to get laid. Just because the martini set thought Lead Belly's singing was perfect for their Worker's Struggle don't make it a movement. Just because Bruce Springsteen writes bad poetry about factories and bad cops doesn't make it a movement. No matter what it might from time to time temporarily become (and rarely for long, or to much end), the music business has always been a business, whether the incentive for the performer is increased social capital, a tangible good, or currency.

I don't mean to shovel all my vitriol on these two well-meaning economists, but it really bugs me that every time a new discipline discovers that music is worthy of study they feel compelled to try to reinvent the Stratocaster. In this case, it's as if dozens of journal articles, hundreds of books, and thousands of published interviews don't already exist in the popular press, musicology, sociology and history-- articles that have long since evolved a highly refined set of assumptions about the history of popular music that no longer have much room for arbitrary handwaving about Rock And Roll as a Social Movement For Uh Making The World Better And Stuff. That's high school term paper thinking. In internet terms, these authors have not RTFFAQ and are acting like total n00bz begging to be pwned. QED. DOA. SOL. etc.

Rock and Roll changes lives because people hear the music and are compelled to do something. It's internal; it's individual; it's atomized, ephemeral, and (unfortunately for economists) almost totally unmeasurable. Rock and Roll does not, NOT NOT NOT, change lives because an artist sits down in the studio and says, "today, I'm going to change the world." That's what got us "We Are The World! A paper on the economics of the concert industry need not even go down this road if it aims to be taken seriously.

As for the rest of the paper, I haven't been able to pick it up again thanks to my lingering irritation. The lesson for today is: even the most revolutionary theses can be derailed by lazy hand-waving in the introduction.