Cutting Out the Middlemen

It's easier than ever for artists to reach audiences directly. But is that always a good thing?

Nick Gillespie from the August/September 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Perhaps more important, artists can be notoriously bad judges of their own material, and once they reach any level of renown, they often seek to insulate themselves precisely from the sort of criticism that helps sharpen and focus their work. Middlemen--including record companies and producers and book publishers and editors--can provide helpful and often critically necessary feedback during the creative process.

Novelist Thomas Wolfe, for example, was infamous for delivering thousands of manuscript pages to his publishers, where editors such as Maxwell Perkins and Edward C. Aswell would sometimes literally cut and paste them into coherent narratives. In fact, the "editing" of Wolfe's manuscripts, particularly after his unexpected death in 1938, has generated serious claims that Aswell was effectively a coauthor of the novels The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again.

While Wolfe scholars might find his unedited manuscripts worth poring over, it's unlikely he would have many--if any --readers had he not been edited so aggressively in the first place. (Such disputes are common: A similar controversy has erupted recently over the author-editor relationship between Raymond Carver, the single most influential American short-story writer of the past three decades, and Gordon Lish, who radically altered--and relentlessly promoted--Carver's name-making early work.)

As a successful and respected record producer, Rundgren himself is well-known, if not notorious, for angering bands by insisting they do things his way in the studio. In 1987, for instance, he was hired by Geffen Records to produce XTC's Skylarking; though the album was highly regarded and proved to be the band's bestselling record, members attacked Rundgren in the press for his heavy hand in the studio

.

Of course, the battle of will between artists on the one hand and editors and producers on the other is nothing new. Nor are artists' attempts to do an end-run around the struggle by setting up their own shops. Rembrandt, Alexander Dumas, the actors who started United Artists in 1919, and rock acts ranging from the Grateful Dead to Prince to Fugazi provide examples of such entrepreneurship.

By slashing production and distribution costs, the Web certainly makes that process easier than ever, even as it increases competition for an audience's time. Whether such freedom is used wisely or poorly will be up to individual artists--and whatever following they manage to cultivate.