Culture Vultures

DeWaard paints a bleak picture of the predatory capitalist behavior underpinning — some might say driving — the popular arts today. He primarily focuses on music, movies, and television, eschewing news media, video games, or more high-end cultural pursuits such as dance, theater, and opera. Paragraphs heave with figures and percentages, many of which are backed up by charts and graphs — this is primarily an academic work. But the author does make an effort to keep things light and accessible, comparing media barons to Charles Foster Kane and quoting Succession’s failson in chief Kendall Roy to explain private equity.

The book guides readers through the various acquisitions undertaken by these mammoth corporations that have allowed them to grow and grow, like the pixelated snake eating orbs in the old Nokia cell phone game. Disney, for example, has picked off Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel since 2006 — not exactly mom-and-pop entities at the time of their purchase. DeWaard charges the company, associated with childhood and innocence, with “cartel-like” behavior, such as demanding cinemas hand over a higher cut of ticket sales on its Star Wars franchise. What choice do the theaters have? The popularity of these movies means they must bend.

Turning his attention to the financialization of music, there’s a useful breakdown of the payouts artists receive from streaming platforms, and the lesser-known practice of “song management” investment firms vacuuming up beloved hits for the purpose of licensing or resale. DeWaard names Hipgnosis, a company headquartered in London, as the most aggressive of these firms, with 64,000 songs under its control, one thousand of which were number-one hits. Company partner and funk legend Nile Rodgers has presented it to investors as an opportunity “to establish songs as an uncorrelated asset class with attractive risk[-adjusted] returns” — something of a pivot, it’s fair to say, from his teen years spent as a member of the overtly Marxist Black Panther Party.

No cultural sphere has seen its business models usurped as regularly over the past few decades as music. In decrying the gap between superstar musicians and independent acts, deWaard correctly points out that “the ratio of global hits to the rarely seen or heard is wider than ever,” though we can partially explain this in terms of major record labels losing the control they once exercised over the means of releasing new material.

Home recording, online release platforms, and social media have lessened the importance of the traditional route of penning a record deal; even superstar artists such as Chance the Rapper have opted to remain as disentangled from large corporations as possible. With this democratization has come an explosion of material. Listening habits have also changed, shifting the goalposts in terms of what can and can’t be considered a “global hit.” Most pop songs simply don’t resonate in the way they used to. For all the things Taylor Swift has accumulated, even she cannot boast a collection of ubiquitous singles that the average person is familiar with.

Interestingly, deWaard charges the music industry with using the Napster piracy scare of the early 2000s to further commodify catalogs and consolidate its power under the ruse of protecting artists. He cites research that claims piracy does not actually negatively affect album sales.

While many would bristle at any defense of piracy — artists, whether they are in league with large companies or not, do need to get paid for their work — there has always been a socialist argument for it. Maverick music producer Steve Albini, known during his life to refuse royalties on the music of his clients, once put it like this:

The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free. There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

The View From Annapurna

All that said, many of those who are in principle opposed to such profit extraction will nevertheless try to close their minds to it while flicking through Netflix. That’s fine — people don’t always want to see how the sausage is made. But Derivative Media offers crucial analysis not just for leftists who oppose corporate behavior for ethical reasons, but also for consumers who simply want to be entertained, as deWaard examines how financialized culture adversely affects media itself.

At this point, it’s worth pausing to say that determining the quality of entertainment is, of course, extremely subjective. I personally think the Marvel machine has been a disaster for Hollywood as it monopolizes talent and resources, but others believe its scope and technical achievement place it among the industry’s greatest developments. Regardless, deWaard is rigorous in his pursuit of the capitalist pressures that he insists are negatively affecting popular culture, and many of his arguments are compelling.

DeWaard asserts that a class of wealthy funders is even having a damaging impact on the independent movie scene, pointing to the example of movie producer Megan Ellison, daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, who founded the highly successful — in terms of critical approval, anyway — Annapurna Pictures. As declared in the Hollywood Reporter: “There’s no executive now who has a greater passion for film — and not just the medium but a particular kind of movie-making that’s becoming an endangered species: the specialty release, the thoughtful, character-driven drama that the majors long ago turned their backs on.”

Yet according to deWaard, Ellison’s overbudgeting of her projects deters investors and increases costs for other independent films:

Even if Ellison did have the best of intentions upon starting this company, the long-term result has been the weakening of the overall infrastructure of independent film as it becomes ever more closely linked to the whims of the wealthy and the vagaries of finance.

That may be true, though deWaard provides his own counterpoint by listing the classic films Ellison has funded, including Phantom Thread and American Hustle. It’s hard to argue against the mechanisms that allowed such work to come into being. Movies are expensive, after all, and directors no doubt consider Ellison’s millions to be a godsend. Alternative crowdsourcing methods such as Kickstarter have proved unreliable in comparison.

But perhaps there’s a lesson in the recent editorial choices of the Washington Post. With newspaper sales plummeting, some observers saw the rich-man ownership model, with a billionaire footing the bill at the end of the month, as one of the few ways that a large-scale institution like the Post could still operate. But deep suspicions that Jeff Bezos had a hand in the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate this year show the danger of any model that’s at the mercy of the one person’s whims. Similarly, a healthier independent film industry may be one that is built to be self-sustaining.

One of the most trenchant case studies examined in Derivative Media is the TV show 30 Rock, which deWaard depicts as a yarn ball of corporate interests, product placement, brand integration, and marketing for its network NBC that presents itself as satire. I’ve never watched 30 Rock, but deWaard’s analysis did make me recall a scene in the American version of The Office.

During a trip to New York, lead character Michael Scott mistakenly believes he has spotted 30 Rock creator/star Tina Fey, while failing to recognize the real Conan O’Brien. As both The Office and Late Night with Conan O’Brien were NBC productions, I assumed someone had simply knocked on O’Brien’s dressing room door and asked if he would make a quick cameo. But had he been carefully placed as a way to promote another NBC show? Should I have been more cynical?

Future Schlock

As I read Derivativee Media, I thought more and more about Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s tub of pop-culture-referencing gloop released in 2018, which is only mentioned in the book briefly. The movie is set in 2045, at a time when people escape into a virtual reality of predominantly twentieth-century pop iconography. It occurred to me while watching that the movie assumes that no new pop culture will be created between now and when the movie is set.

It felt like a narrative choice born of convenience. But maybe Ready Player One is actually an accurate picture of the future we’re racing toward. There’s barely a blockbuster movie released these days that is not based on a preexisting movie, character, book, or other form of intellectual property. Innovation is suppressed in the quest for a sure thing, a quick buck. Of course, these industries have always sought to make profit, but in the haze of sequels, reboots, and remakes, some good and some bad, that word “derivative” seems more apt than ever.

To his credit, deWaard never instructs readers to turn off, cease listening, or stop watching, nor does he turn on the vast majority of the talent. Media might be increasingly derivative, but it can still be enjoyable, even nourishing. Every year, artists, operating inside the system or as independents, overcome the quagmire of corporate interests and economic pressures to produce great work. So perhaps the message of the book goes largely unspoken: even in the capitalistic crush, the human impulse to create endures.