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NEVV<br />
MUSIC<br />
SEMI-NAR:<br />
The Revolution Won't Be Televised<br />
by Victoria Starr<br />
The tenth annual New Music Seminar (NMS) has left me<br />
in a deep funk. Not that I didn't know what I was getting<br />
into, mind you. Anyone who's been even slightly following<br />
this event over the years knows that what started as a "beat<br />
the system" conference<br />
to counter the<br />
lots of starving artists how to "make it" in the industry.<br />
Only now they throw a white woman and a black man<br />
onto every panel, lest some wise-ass college kid tries calling<br />
them all bigots. But what's scary is when there are no<br />
wise-ass college kids<br />
brave enough (or<br />
Misogyny is hip. George Clinton<br />
stood and roared, ··We<br />
gonna get us some PUSSY!"<br />
stuffy old-boy network<br />
of the music industry<br />
has, over the past<br />
decade, become its<br />
own antithesis. After<br />
all, where else could<br />
you attend a workshop<br />
entitled "Does .<br />
Radio Suck" to find that the panel is composed of four record<br />
company executives and four music directors from some of<br />
the most commercial stations in the country. (Of course radio<br />
sucks. And this is precisely who makes it suck!)<br />
Sure, the NMS has become its own best enemy: lots<br />
of balding, overweight (or coked-up) white men telling<br />
MIND AEROBICS<br />
The Drugs and Rock panel.<br />
50 OUT?WEEK August 7, 1989<br />
bright enough) to call<br />
the bigots out. As one<br />
well-heeled panelist<br />
happily commented,<br />
"The workshops used<br />
to be the forum for an<br />
audience of scruffy<br />
punks to insult the<br />
panelists. Now the crowd is too busy taking notes." In<br />
short, it's not the NMS that has been bought off. It's the<br />
whole of rock and roll.<br />
I, of course, was there to agitate: Instead I was agitated, as<br />
I was painfully reminded what eight years of Reagan had done<br />
to America's youth, some of which was present Witness day<br />
one: As a member of the Pop Critics panel,<br />
Nelson George of the Village Voice made a<br />
comment that while rap music had forced<br />
the world of pop criticism to give more<br />
attention to Black music, the "ghetto style"<br />
had eclipsed the more mainstream (and perhaps<br />
middle-class) styles of artists like Anita<br />
Baker and Luther Vandross. When it came<br />
time for questions, someone in the audience<br />
begged to differ with George. As far as the<br />
dissenter was concerned, artists like the<br />
Supremes and Aretha Franklin had received<br />
plenty of attention, while mainstream white<br />
artists like LizaMinelliand Dolly Parton had<br />
been given the shaft. Dolly Panaril Liza<br />
Minnellt? You figure it out.<br />
The Drugs and Rock workshop was<br />
more an exercise in mind aerobics than<br />
even the heaviest acid trip. As the panelists<br />
filed one testimonial after another<br />
about how drugs had nearly ruined their<br />
lives, only writer and manager Jim<br />
Fouratt was willing to say, "Don't do
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