Like many music industry types, I read the Lefsetz Letter. And again, like many, I often think old Bob is just a cranky, washed-up, old-school record label type guy. Case in point: he recently shredded a performance by Mika. His complaint was that under all the lights and staging, the entire show was played off a hard drive:
Bob writes: We’re fucked. I was standing in the back of the Palladium, all jazzed up, when I realized something. Almost this ENTIRE SHOW was on hard drive! … It was an interesting amalgamation of people. Gays, straights, thin, fat, not extremely young, but only a handful of baby boomers. It was Friday night, and they were out to have a good time. Which Mika provided.
Mika’s show began with a presentation. The band members, dressed as normal folk, sat on a couch facing a big screen. Where a denizen of Mission Control spoke of losing an astronaut. The curtain rose, the “players” took their designated places and lumbering in from the back came a tall thin man in a spacesuit. MIKA! … The audience had their cell phones raised, people were bopping up and down, a good time was being had by all …But something was curious. Mika was singing when he was not. Didn’t matter if he held the mic up to his face. He was singing anyway! The backup vocals, they were pure and pristine! The keyboards played even though no one had his hands on any keys.
You could say that Bob’s an old fart who just doesn’t get “the new sound.” No one sings live anymore, right? After he goes on (and on…) to say both the good and bad (ok, mostly bad) about Mika’s performance, he does something brilliant: he lets Mika’s camp respond.
Mika’s manager, agent, and producer all chime in — some more politely than others — and Bob published the whole profanity-ridden tirade. None of what these people write paints Mr. Lefsetz in a particularly flattering light. In fact, it shows him to be a total anachronism.
My personal favorite, “We work way too hard on Mika’s music for me to not weigh in on your drunken bullshit. Go take the energy you put into your blog and do something positive with it, like say, make some good music?” This from Greg Wells, Mika’s producer. Also quite fun, “The only reason “we’re fucked” (love how you cast aspersions for society in full) is that we have close minded people like yourself who can’t see outside of the small minded prism they live in.” Mitch Rose, Mika’s agent.
Were he totally irrelevant, completely backwards, and impossibly out of touch — why would people be reading and responding with such vitriol?
Maybe, just maybe … Bob’s a lot smarter than we give him credit for. I think he is.
