Daily Ramblings:
When The Ship Comes In ...06/18/2005 11:20:12 pm
So Amazon.com is having a 10th anniversary bash on July 16th.
They are treating their employees to a gala featuring
Bob Dylan (the best selling living male artist on
Amazon) and Norah Jones (the best selling living
female artist) as well as Bill Maher (the best
selling albino-ish comedian on Amazon?).
I'm frankly stunned, if pleasantly so, that Dylan
has sold more than any other living male on
Amazon.com. That Norah Jones is the best selling
female artist just seems drearily predictable: She's
made all of two albums, photographs well,
and crosses all the barriers by being musically so
nondescript. (That's not intended meanly - it's not
her fault she's sold so many discs.) I just can't
understand how Dylan has gotten ahead of all the male
equivalents. I'm too out-of-the-loop on the current
music scene to even name them, but they must be out
there.
It appears that Dylan's master plan, which he
hatched in the late 80s, of constant touring,
visiting the same places over and over again,
garbling his songs beyond recognition, gaining a
reputation for being a complete wacko, recording a
couple of acoustic albums that would never get played
on the radio, not releasing anything for 4 years,
recording an album that everyone thinks is about
dying, and then recording an album where everything
seems to be stolen from somewhere - has paid off in
spades! He's the biggest thing since Michael Jackson
and Billy Joel all rolled into one. The guy makes
Jack Welch look like somebody who just got knocked
off "The Apprentice." He sure
knows how to sell records. Excuse me,
"discs."
And I guess it shouldn't be any surprise, given
his amazing ability to influence otherwise sane
individuals into creating endless numbers of websites
dedicated to the study of his work. It was only a
matter of time before that whole thing would reap
dividends.
I'm so amazed by the mighty Dylan's sales
statistics, that other parts of the Seattle Times story on this
thing, which might ordinarily annoy me, just kind of
make me yawn:
It's not
uncommon for high-profile artists, even
one as closely associated with the
counter-culture as Dylan, to appear at
corporate events, according to Gary Bongiovanni
of the concert trade magazine Pollstar.
"The
stigma that used to be associated with these
corporate gigs seems to be just about gone
now," he said.
"The
artist's motivation for doing this is usually
money. They pay extremely well. ... (Dylan's)
doing casinos and all kinds of things now. Bob
hasn't been as selective in his choices as he
would have been even 10 years ago, or as any
artist would have been 10 years ago."
Oh, alright. Back here I
lambasted a Seattle Times critic for spouting various
inanities about Dylan, and chances are the same one
had a hand in this story (it's just credited to
"Seattle Times staff"). Fine, if they want
to continue to label Dylan as being part of the
"counter-culture," then let them have their
illusions. Dylan's role as ultimately subversive
to the counter-culture would hardly be as successful
if everyone realized what was going on.
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