“The greatest weakness of countercultural thinking has always been its inability to produce a coherent vision of a free society, much less a practical political program for changing the one we live in.”
Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter
“Y’All Want a Single” was the third single from Korn’s sixth album, Take a Look in the Mirror. Released in March of 2004, it was chosen as a single via a fan poll on the band’s official website.
“We were recording this album before we went to Ozzfest,” guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer explained in an interview with Metal Hammer magazine. “We had ten songs written and recorded, but we weren’t feeling it would be the whole album. We wanted to add three or four more songs, so we came back to record them. Then our record company was like ‘Hey, we’d really love to have a single’ and our management, The Firm said ‘We would really like to have a smash hit single, man, can you dig it?’ We were really appalled by that scene. They wanted ‘Got the Life’ or ‘Freak on a Leash’, and that shit wasn’t flying with us at all! For the first time in our lives we were dissecting our music, and trying to analyse the structure of those songs, trying to figure out what made them huge hits. But Korn never works like that, and while we were all wondering, Jonathan came up with a line: ‘Y’all want a single? Say: FUCK THAT’ and we wrote ‘Y’All Want a Single’ as a big ‘fuck you’ to them. Damn, Jonathan is really good at motivating us this way.”
I would love to have been a fly on the wall during that band meeting. To imagine what Davis and the guys were thinking: Alright, the suits will get their single. But we’re going to make those fuckers pay… I know I’d have a lot of fun with that. Davis essentially admitted this to MTV, as the band saw out 2003 by headlining that year’s KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas. “We were sitting there just looking at each other and we were like, ‘OK we’ve got to write this single,’ and we started laughing,” he recalled. “And we came up with this anti-single, which turned out great.”
“It’s all about how it seems like kids are fed what is cool,” he continued. “They don’t really have a brain to search and see what’s going on with music. I’m just saying if kids are really into music then they go and do that, but if they are just everyday Joe, then music is fed to them. And we are just really excited about it ’cause it seems to be a fan favorite. Everybody keeps requesting to play it and everyone keeps talking about that song.”
Part of me feels like Davis isn’t giving the kids enough credit, but I agree with the basic premise of “Y’All Want a Single.” There definitely is a LOT of astroturfed fast food music out there.
“Did My Time” may have cracked the Top 40, and “Right Now” was the anthemic set opener, but it was “Y’All Want a Single” that ultimately defined Take a Look in the Mirror‘s legacy. An accompanying music video, directed by Andrews Jenkins, depicts the band trashing a record store, with performance footage in between. CDs, DVDs, shelving… everything that could be thrown around was thrown. Even better, a group of fans and store employees join in as well (the store was closing down). As they make a big mess, music industry statistics flash across the screen. A few examples:
“One corporation owns the five major video channels in the U.S. Is that OK?”
“90% of releases on major labels do not make a profit.”
“Hit songs on Top 40 are often repeated over 100 times a week. Is that all you want to hear?”
And, my personal favourite of the bunch:
“The record company wanted us to change this video. We didn’t.”
The music video cost a total of USD $150,000, which may seem like a lot now, but at the time, it was pocket change for a major record label like Epic (Korn were signed with them at the time). In the 2000s, dumping ridiculous sums of money into an album or music video was standard fare. Back then, you had clueless execs at Virgin Records signing Mariah Carey for USD $80 million, just to pay her an additional USD $28 million just to leave a year later, when the label was undergoing a massive reshuffle. I could probably think of better uses for that kind of money, but then again, I’m not an industry exec.
“It’s probably the most inspirational, the most spectacular understanding of what’s going on in this country right now,” shock jock Howard Stern said of the track. “I believe that young people… are freaking out right now because of what is going on with the religious right. They are angry. They are angry about the corporations running the music business. They are angry with the radio business… What Jonathan Davis is able to do is tap into the mood of young people.” Stern was something of a poster child for anti-censorship activism at the time, having been censored for his criticism of US President George W. Bush, and his criticism of Bush’s ties to Clear Channel.
I won’t lie: At the age of seventeen, the video for “Y’All Want a Single” got me pumped. The fact that my favourite band could score a hit with their middle fingers up was my idea of a statement. It had attitude. I hated the state of radio and the music industry as much as the next overeducated child of the boomers, and mentally took in the statistics with the fervour of a 9/11 truther on Walter White-quality meth. Anti-radio, anti-television, anti-corporation, all of it clicked. That a disc of polycarbonate cost between AUD $20 and $30 made no sense to me. And then I’d go out and buy them anyway.
Music streaming is common now, but in the 2000s, the most common way to access your favourite artists and albums was through physical media such as the compact disc (CD). The evolution of the MP3 might not seem like a super interesting topic, I’ll grant you that. It’s not like you hear about the Word document or JPEG file as changing the world. And yet, the MP3 ended up being the favourite file format of just about every kid with access to a computer. It allowed audio files to be compressed to around a tenth of its normal size, so us kids could not only swap tracks online, we could cram more of them on our hard drives. And, if you were one of my shady friends in high school, you could burn the tracks onto CDs and sell them for around five dollars each. Ever the entrepreneurial sort they were.
The theory behind the MP3 was originally developed German electrical engineer and mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg, of the Fraunhofer Institut. Brandenburg and his fellows had the real neato idea of seeing just how far music files could be compressed before the average human ear could notice. Their initial experimentation resulted in Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” being the first MP3. After much trial and error, Fraunhofer submitted the new file format to the International Standards Organisation (ISO). It was originally open source, the Linux of the music world, essentially. Many players and coders were distributed across the ‘net, but it wasn’t until 1997 that the first mainstream MP3 player hit the market: the AMP MP3 Playback Engine. A little tinkering by some students turned it into WinAMP, the desktop player us millennials came to know and love. Then Napster came along in June of 1999, and the MP3 file format blew up, and even the most casual of users could see its value.
Shawn Fanning was a nineteen-year-old student when he founded Napster, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing platform. The premise was simple: The user typed in the name of a track, and the app would search the thousands of connected PCs and a list of available files would be shown. It was one-hundred percent free. It was also very much illegal. While Fanning didn’t tell people to share copyright material, that’s precisely what happened. The vast majority of music files shared over the network were pirated MP3s of existing tracks, while a fraction would be small bands trying to get their demos out there in earnest.
This was all seen as perfectly harmless. If a user downloaded a couple of tracks off Napster and liked them enough, they’d support the official release and buy the real thing, right? Try before you buy? At least that was the theory. It worked for Korn in late 1999 when they were promoting the release of Issues. The band — against the advice of “the attorneys and the corporate establishment” — posted a free MP3 of the single “Falling Away from Me” on their official website. The campaign had no impact on sales whatsoever. Issues debuted at number one on the Billboard chart with 575,000 units shipped in its first week.
Conflicting statistics depict CD sales either rising or falling as a result of P2P file sharing, and to this day I’m not entirely sure which to believe. Whatever. Soon enough, the music industry took notice of this thing called the internet. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) took it upon themselves to quash Fanning’s puny rebellion and send a stern warning to any would-be online pirates.
The Chinese have a saying: “sha yi jing bai.” It means you kill one man to warn a hundred others, a strategy as old as warfare itself. The RIAA probably hoped their one-sided war with a college dropout and his P2P app would have the same effect. The capitalist robber barons would file lawsuits left and right, with their financial muscle and overall institutional power on their side. By 2002, Napster was effectively dead, thanks in large part to lawsuits from useful idiots Metallica and Dr. Dre. However, this mattered little to most users. Countless file-sharing networks were now running, most notably Kazaa and Audio Galaxy. Shakespeare wasn’t kidding when he said, “A little fire is quickly trodden out; which, being suffer’d, rivers cannot quench.” The situation was growing beyond the industry’s control. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, you cut off one head, two will grow in its place.
It took a good few years, but the music industry would adapt, with Apple paving the way for legitimate music downloads in the form of iTunes. Launched in 2003, iTunes offered legal downloads at an affordable cost when compared to CDs. The iPod, released two years earlier, would make portable MP3 players attractive to the hipster crowd. With no CDs to press, nothing to physically distribute, and no margins for retail stores, the user could save a LOT of money. So could the industry. Napster would also resurface as a legitimate paid file-sharing platform, and today, users gladly pay monthly subscriptions for streaming services like Spotify and Tidal.
The rest is history, as the cliche goes, but it’s all very recent history.
The fact that something as mundane as a single file format could disrupt an entire industry and change the way we consume music is still amazing to think about. It would light a fire under the ambitions of many a tech bro in the 2000s, and practically every business book published during this era would have a good chapter or two devoted to the decline of CDs and the rise of iTunes. In An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds looks at society in the context of individuals versus institutions. Published in the mid-2000s, it shares the boundless optimism of many business books of that era that technological change would pave the way for total disruption of established industries that stood as the gatekeepers of culture, of acceptability. Throughout, Reynolds argued that the playing field was being levelled, with decentralisation on the rise.
This definitely appealed to me at the time, since I loved nothing more than the idea of power being decentralised (still do). That being said, I never really saw myself as a little Alexander the Great of my own world. And, given the way things are now, maybe Reynolds and other authors were being overly optimistic. There is no sin in that. As for me, if my seventeen-year-old self was right into Korn’s message with “Y’All Want a Single,” then presently, I would probably align more with this little snippet from Edwyn Collins’ “A Girl Like You.”
“Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs.”
Because it’s true, and if I’m being honest, it becomes harder to engage with the “Y’All Want a Single” video and its proverbial raised fist as I grow older and more cynical. Like a Paulo Coelho novel, you strip the vocabulary away and start to realise there’s not much there. And looking at the state of the music industry today, I have to ask: What has changed? The same songs are repeated on all the major music and video platforms every week. Record labels, tech corporations, and credit card companies dictate what is permissible, the majority of artists get little to no compensation for their work, and FM radio still festers in our car stereos like a sickness. All forms of art and culture are going to hell in a handbasket. Does anyone care? Some people did, when we were firing up our file-sharing engines back in the day. But as far as revolutions go, we were all Mollie in Animal Farm: “Will there be sugar after the rebellion?” We had our revolution, but that was really only about how we consumed music.
My favourite take on this is a comparison made by Ryan Holiday many years ago, between the digital revolution and the Battle of the Fetters. In a 2007 blog post, “A revolution without substance is not a revolution at all…“, he describes the Spartans’ mentality leading up to their battle with the Tegeans, and the consequences of their hubris. Quoting Herodotus, he says:
“The Spartans were ‘so confident of reducing the men of Tegea to slavery’ that they literally brought chains with them. But they lost, and ironically the prisoners were ‘forced to wear on their own legs the chains they had brought.”
He believed this was where we were in 2007. He was essentially correct, and I don’t think much has changed. “The blood is in the water, and the blogs are sharks circling,” he says. “We talk about the ‘new media’ and how it’s going to change the world. We talk about wresting control from the titans and putting in the hands of the common man.”
Holiday goes on, and if you think he’s being unfair to the people, consider:
“We walked in like the Spartans, with the chains over our shoulders, only to walk out with iTunes DRM clasped around our ankles. We told them that we were tired of records with just a few good songs only to turn around and make ‘Hollaback Girl’ the first platinum download in history. We were angry that the industry was controlled by so few, and yet we allowed Apple to ride the trend wave all the way to a monopoly.”
And finally, Holiday leaves us with:
“We’ve made a lot of progress on the tech side, and almost none on the content side. We think we’re about to enslave Hollywood just as we did the music industry, but that won’t happen unless we first make the conscious decision to raise our consciousness. Quality has to be the number one concern, not traffic, not Diggs, not comments.”
He identifies a problem with much of the tech industry: technological progress, with almost no consideration for social progress. The same could be said now, with Hollywood and AI. What Holiday considers to be quality isn’t defined, but one could assume from his writing over the years that it has to do with creating and maintaining work that lasts. Still not even remotely specific, but it’s a start.
Fast forward to 2024, and we are still the Spartans, with Facebook, Google, and their brand of surveillance capitalism around our ankles. Sure, in the 2000s, something had to give. The music industry was beyond corrupt and had to go. It wasn’t sustainable. But what did we replace it with? Really, we need to ask ourselves. Dispatching the gatekeepers of old isn’t going to make “quality content” just magically appear. A lot of things need to be in place for music or video to reach a wider audience, and in the 2020s, too many people — young and old alike — are content to be “fed what is cool,” as Jonathan Davis said of audiences in 2003. Not all, probably not even most, but still too many.
But this kind of thinking presents another problem: Do we just assume that audiences don’t know what they want then? That would be incredibly elitist. There are plenty of things I enjoy that are considered low-brow. I can put on a Linkin Park album that topped the charts twenty years ago and it still sounds valid to me. I can enjoy it for different reasons than an Elliot Carter string quartet.
Or, you can put it in purely economic terms and chalk it up to supply and demand. You know the diamond-water paradox? The same is often true of art.
Time for a bit of “red pill” talk:
Maybe I’m losing perspective, but we’ve ruined the internet by turning it into a consumer product. At least in terms of art and content creation.
It’s a weird, highly fragile situation that we’re in with Google and Patreon, because the artists of the digital age essentially gave these giant tech companies carte blanche to do whatever they want. We — creators and consumers alike — gave them permission to build their monopoly, and we never asked for anything in return. And it’s not like the golden age of Web 2.0 where it was independent creators putting all this cool homegrown content out there. We’ve had accounts on streaming and social media platforms banned, shadow-banned and demonetised, deservedly or not. Not just musicians, by the way, but all artists.
Then you have the payment processors. If more independent creators were kicked off Patreon, someone would probably come along and build a smaller version. Not everyone would transition over, and it wouldn’t be built that quickly, because the second you start creating alternative platforms, all the far-right nutjobs and racists come in and ruin everything. Without exception. You can’t say no to these guys, because they’re half the reason alternative platforms exist, but it would be really nice if they’d exercise even a little bit of self control and just dial it back for a minute. Maybe limit their spamming of slurs and epithets to once per hour instead of every five minutes. They always have to put everything on a banner. Just don’t. Slow-ball it for once, you dicks.
If I was an e-celeb and I got kicked off YouTube or TikTok, I’d probably just go set up shop somewhere else. It wouldn’t be the same, but wasn’t that the whole point of the internet? Our people’s revolution? The purpose of the internet is connecting people, and the CEOs running these companies — Google, Patreon, Twitter, et al — are so divorced from reality, that they probably don’t fathom how much power they have. That’s why they’ve handed the reigns over to these trust and safety teams and consulting firms that have no allegiance to anything.
The solution would have to be some kind of distributed cash system. It sounds stupid (because it is), but it’s going to have to be some kind micro-payment system. Instead of paying your ISP bill, you pay a consumption bill. And it has to be seamless, but basically, money is taken from your account and distributed to whatever it is you’re watching or listening to. It has to be so technologically sophisticated that it has to seem as magical to us as the internet would seem to someone who grew up in the 1970s. It’s envisionable, which means it’s possible, and I have no doubt that someone will eventually do it. Something wonderful and seamless, because the current system is a convoluted mess.
I find it harder to watch a movie online now than I did when I was a teenager and I owned a copy of it in 2004. I knew exactly where my copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was. I’d just take the disk out of its case, pop it in my PlayStation 2, and press play. Now? I don’t know if the movie I want to watch is on my Google Play, Apple TV, or if I still have a physical copy of it lying around somewhere. And all of this is the fruit of our common man’s revolution. But instead of “Vive La France!” or “Proletariats of all countries, unite!“, it’s “How hard can we make this simple, mundane thing for all people at all times?” Well, I say burn it. Fuck both the system and our dainty people’s revolution. I don’t know which convicted far-left or far-right populist buffoon we have to elect to make it happen, and frankly I don’t care. Just burn it. Western civilisation has always been a system of mob rule anyway, so it makes no difference.
I forget what point I was trying to make here, but I think the future of artist platforming and monetisation will be centred on some kind of distributed, federated system, with everything encrypted all the time. Distributed files, distributed payments, distributed broadcasting.
It’ll be neat.
Thank you for reading.
Lawrence Deveney 