Fat Cats and Hippies

Frank Zappa gave the interview this clip is from to MTV's "The Cutting Edge" in 1987. In this section he outlines a problem he saw with the music industry of the 80s - a problem he saw developing years earlier.

I hope you'll listen to the interview - it's just 4 minutes long. But for the moment here's the issue in a nutshell, and in Zappa's own words:

"Remember the 60s? You know, that era that a lot of people have these glorious memories of? [...] One thing that did happen during the 60s was some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded and did get released. Now look at who the executives were at those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product that came and said 'I don't know. Who knows what it is. Record it, stick it out - if it sells, alright.' We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives who are making the decisions about what people should see and hear."

Now, personally, I think Zappa over-plays the cluelessness of the executives here:

The key to his observation here is this - he saw that way back in the 60s there were executives in the music industry who just didn't know what "kids these days" were listening to, or what it was that attracted them to it. 

But these executives weren't blind to music in general - they were business people of course, but many of the big labels in the 60s were being run by people who had "been around" as it were, and were familiar with what came before. Maybe they weren't in a position to judge the current trends, maybe they didn't even like the current trends, but they knew that they didn't really need to. They could tell if the musicians involved had skill, even if they didn't personally care for what they were playing - and if the music was technically good they were willing to take chances and let the people buying the records decide.

Sometimes the result was a flop. Sometimes it was the out-of-left-field success that everyone would be copying. 

But they took the chance, sometimes anyway, and let experiments by people who knew what they were doing stand or stumble on their own merits.

Here's the important part of Zappa's story though:

"You know how these young guys got in there? The old guy with the cigar one day says 'ah, well I took a chance, it went out, and we sold a few million units. Alright! Well I don't know, I don't know what it is, but we got to do more of it. I need some advice. Let's get a hippie in here. So they hire a hippie. They bring in the guy with the long hair. Now they're not going to trust him to do anything except carry coffee and bring mail in and out. He starts there. 'Well we can trust him - he brought the coffee 3 or 4 times on time. Let's give him a real job. OK, he becomes an A&R man. From there, moving up and up and up, next thing you know he's got his feet on the desk and he's saying 'Well, we can't take a chance on this, because it's just simply, it's not what the kids really want, and I know'"

This is what Zappa was getting at, and what I can see in other creative industries over the years: 

There's this second type of "curator" (because that's what the business people running the creative marketing industries are) - the true believers who are certain in their hearts that they know. Sometimes not just what you will like, but maybe also what's good for you.

Zappa watched this happen to the music industry. I think that if we look back we can see it happening in genre fiction as well. As a data point, take a look at what happened to Wendayne Ackerman's English translations of the hit series Perry Rhodan - Ace carried them for 9 years before finally responding to the print critics who called the series "a juvenile embarrassment" (to paraphrase) and Tom Doherty, who was in charge at the time, ended up cancelling the series. But here's the thing: 

It's true that the first 10 years of Perry Rhodan were relatively unsophisticated space opera, a formula "writing stable" produced series of the sort that is marked by limited character development, heavy reliance on established tropes, and fast-moving action. The objection that the series was "juvenile" was probably not too far off the mark, though others have noted that the plots were relatively complex even where the focus on characters and creative world-building were lacking. But there are two important points that the critics missed:

1. In the last few years of Perry Rhodan in English, the German version was growing steadily more sophisticated under the skilled hand of William Voltz, leading to a more coherent - and creative - Rhodan universe that drew on esoteric ideas and philosophy to create its sense of wonder and the fantastic. But even if this had not happened:

2. People liked it.

This second point is the key: Forrest Ackerman himself commented in his introduction to the first English issue, Operation Stardust, that "In Germany, all serious SF buffs claim to hate Perry Rhodan, but somebody (in unprecedented numbers) is certainly reading him." - the situation seems to have been much the same in Ace's markets, since the Perry Rhodan series appears to have been profitable at the time it was cancelled.

The critics took it on themselves to be arbiters of quality - to tell readers what they should like. They went beyond "I like/don't like this, and this is why" and started using more socially loaded terms of opprobium like "juvenile" and "embarrassment." We can argue all day about whether this is what critics are for (certainly to some degree that's exactly the point of criticism I guess) but this tendency seems to have bled over into editorial decisions.

I can't say to what degree the critics' branding of Perry Rhodan as "juvenile embarrassment" influenced Tom Doherty's decision to discontinue the series. I wasn't there, and I don't know what the calculus looked like. It may well be that he had to choose something to cut, had nothing unprofitable to choose from, and just chose Rhodan because it seemed least likely to cause an uproar.

But the value judgement must have played some part in it - and therein lies the lesson:

In spite of the sales numbers Ace cancelled Rhodan, which has since lived to become the world's longest running SF series, since translated in bits and pieces into 11 different languages and still going strong in its native German.

They listened to the true believers, to the people who said "it's just simply, it's not what the kids really want [or should want], and I know."

And in some quarters they're still listening.