I am Trying to Break Your Heart and the Future of Content

Last Monday night I saw the band Wilco in concert at the Wiltern.  Despite having a domestic beer dumped all over me by the psychotic guy dancing next to me, I had a great time.  No American band is as consistently evolving and challenging as Wilco (they can put that on their next CD jacket if they like…that is if they still make CDs…more on that in a second).  After the concert, my wife and my sister-in-law and I discussed various aspects of the show:  How Nels Cline is a superhuman.  How Jeff Tweedy looked happier than we’d ever seen him.  How Spencer Tweedy has a cooler blog than me.  My wife expressed interest in seeing the Sam Jones documentary I am Trying to Break Your Heart for a second time.  Which brings us around to why I’m writing about a seven-year-old documentary about a rock band.

For those who haven’t seen I am Trying to Break Your Heart (and you really should watch it, it’s a beautiful piece of filmmaking), I’ll summarize the plot of the film for you.  In 2000, Wilco recorded an ambitious album called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  The members of the band, as well as their manager and most other people who had heard the album, felt that it was a masterpiece, the album that would solidify their critical reputation as a great American rock band.  When they handed the album over to Reprise Records (a division of Warner Music), they didn’t hear anything for a couple of weeks.  It turns out that not only did Reprise not agree with the band’s analysis of the album, but they felt that it was, in the words of one executive, “a career ending album.”  They dropped the band.  The band then shopped the record to dozens of companies before eventually selling to Nonesuch Records (ironically, also a division of Warner Music).  Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released to major critical acclaim and, we can only imagine, financial success, as well.

Filmed in grainy, gorgeous black and white, the film is stunning to look at, and offers one of the most fascinating looks inside the creative process that I’ve ever seen.  YHF is loaded with odd sounds and moments of noise, and watching the band create the album is truly illuminating.  It’s easy to read the film as a parable about the dangerous junction of art and commerce.  Indeed, the film positions itself as such.  But  to my mind, it’s something more than that.  Watching it seven years later, it’s rife with foreboding for the content industry (music, books, etc.) and fairly prescient about many aspects of how media will be created, disseminated, critiqued and consumed in the future.

Let’s start with the issue of the artists’ advance.  Early in the film, before the band turned the album over to the label, band member Jay Bennett (who tragically passed away about a month ago) remarks “I know it’s cool to bitch about your record label, but they’re giving us $85,000 to make a record in our loft and they haven’t heard any of it.”  Here’s a case of the label acting as risk capital, seeding the band money to create an album that the label then hopes to sell for a profit.  Once they heard the album, an album that doesn’t contain a clear hit single (the idea that they were still hoping to make Wilco in The Wallflowers seems laughably bizarre in retrospect), they began to worry they wouldn’t recoup the advance.  While this doesn’t perfectly mirror the process by which a publishing house acquires a book (they’ve usually read it first), it does point towards the inefficiencies of a system built around payment up front.  One can only imagine that if Wilco had funded the album themselves and then taken it to Reprise, the reaction might have been different.

In a world where nobody makes money until everybody makes money (call this the Consignment Model, if you like), the role of risk capital shifts towards the artist.  Band manager Tony Margherita says as much when he says, “The band could go out and gig and raise the money to make the album themselves.”  Which brings us to another point:  if a content company (in this case a record label, but you could easily sub in a publisher) isn’t going to provide risk capital, what are they going to do for an artist?  In that same quote, Margherita says, “What are they doing for us?  What are they really doing for us?  If they’re not going to market the album…”  Indeed, I’ve often wondered why publishers so often tell me “We’re really behind this book.”  I should hope so.  If you’re not, why would I want to read it?  Why even publish it?  Most publishing companies can’t adequately promote all of the books they publish because, it would seem, they are publishing too many books (and it would appear the same is happening in the record business).  When confronted with a work that doesn’t fit into one of the three or four predetermined formats, the company doesn’t know how to handle it.  If you’re already overworked and exhausted, why go the extra distance to figure out a work like YHF?  Why not just put more effort into the latest Coldplay album, which you know will sell?

As interesting as the record company’s reaction to YHF is the band’s reaction to being dropped.  While they shopped the album around to record labels, leaked copies began to surface.  Rather than freak out, the band took the then radical step of streaming the album for free on its website.  While I have no hard numbers to back this up, I believe this probably curtailed piracy of the album and helped boost sales.  In some way it must have worked because the band has streamed each of its subsequent albums on its Wilcorworld website.  One wonders that if this scenario were to play itself out today rather than seven years ago, would Wilco even bother signing with a label?

Indeed, one of the ways the film seems prescient is the way it recognizes the paramount importance of the content over format.  Journalist David Fricke of Rolling Stone holds up a CD and says (I’m paraphrasing) “It’s whatever is encoded in little bits and numbers on the underside of this that matters, not the piece of plastic it comes in.”  (One place where the film seems oddly dated to me is the reliance on Rolling Stone as the primary critical touchstone.  While Rolling Stone continues to publish (I assume), in my world, they’ve been replaced by online magazines like Pitchfork.  In fact, that had already begun back in 2002.  I distinctly remember reading Pitchfork’s 10.0 review (a perfect score) of the album on the site.)

I am Trying to Break Your Heart has a happy ending:  Wilco landed on its feet and continues to make great music and tour the world.  Nonesuch records, presumably, continues to profit from its relationship to the band as well.  Wilco also continues to look forward about how it uses technology to connect with fans.  If you visit their site, you can download the Wilco iPhone app.  But the film stands as a testament to how flawed many media conglomerates are at selling content, and how other, smarter companies (or even the artists themselves) might be able to replace them.  It doesn’t seem to me to matter very much whether those comanies are selling CDs or books.

[And since we're talking about the band and all, their new album, Wilco: The Album, comes out tomorrow.  You can hear it and pre-order it at the Nonesuch Records website.]