(For those of you keeping score at home, that's three chapters written by men named Bob, and Robert is also the name of the book's primary author. Men take note: perhaps changing your first name to theirs is your first step towards success in the recording industry!)
There are also two chapters on what's wrong with the old recording industry model, one by leading session guitarist (and former member of Toto), Steve Lukather, and another a transcription of a speech given in 2000 by Courtney Love.
Courtney Love's speech is quite interesting: she certainly right that the artist is typically in thrall to his or her recording company. But both her speech and Wolff's gushing introduction to it ignore how her own self-destructive nature has harmed her career. And Wolff would have been better off quoting from it and interjecting his own thoughts along the way, particularly if he disagreed with something Love said, or at least ending a speech with a summation and his opinion of it and whether he disagreed with any of it.
Both Courtney and Lukather's chapters could have benefited by having their four letter words either edited out, or abbreviated. I realize I'm about to sound prudish, but I'm no angel in this department: I can curse like a sailor when talking with friends, or when sufficiently angry. But that doesn't mean I need those words to express my ideas in print, or expect them included when a speech is transcribed, and Wolff coarsens his book's tone by including them.
Hey Mr. Businessman, You Can't Dress Like Me...Or, Maybe You Can
There's an interesting irony which goes unexplored by Wolff: ever since the mid-1960s, businessmen, entrepreneurs, advertising and capitalism itself were frequently derided by musicians, who saw themselves as counter-culture artists functioning on an entirely different plane far removed from workaday self-employed entrepreneurs who have always needed to wear many hats while running a business. While Wolff's book feels like it could benefit from much tighter editing, it contains some novel ideas that a new generation of entrepreneurial musicians could stand to benefit from. DIY, indeed.
Article comments