AMANDA LATONA—R.I.P.

In the summer of 2002, I posted the following screed at the Archives Forum:

In the Sunday, August 4, 2002, New York Times Magazine, the feature article concerns the process of manufacturing next month's music superstar who is to be forced on the listening public. This particular product is Amanda Latona, an appallingly ignorant girl who chirps, "... so I'm like, yea!" and calls people, even women, "Dude!" But she has a leather bra and tattoos, the essentials of modern musicianship, and so will be marketed as the Next Big Thing. The article focuses on the decisions involved in her art—mostly a choice of wardrobe and hairstyle—but then provides the following information about how "music" is now marketed. The team of designers who are manufacturing Amanda Latona's stardom employ ten independent promoters whose job it is to convince radio stations that she is a great singer and worthy of frequent airplay. Independent record promoters are paid an initial fee of between $100000 and $400000 by record companies. The promoter goes to work and then sends the record company a weekly bill for every song added to a playlist. It costs between 250000 and one-million dollars to get a song played on commercial radio. (Managers of radio stations maintain that they are not paid for playing a particular song but for "notifying" the promoter that a song has been added to the playlist.) All this makes me somewhat sympathetic to the radio moguls, and I regret having used them so roughly. After all, if you owned a radio station and had a choice of getting nothing for playing Scarlatti or broadcasting Amanda Latona and receiving a million dollars, what would you do? Nothing, of course, is exactly the amount spent on promoting classical music. Thus, once again we see that the taste of the listening public has nothing to do with what is played on the radio. The public will hear whatever the music industry decides that the public wants to hear. The song "Can't Take It Back" from Amanda Latona's forthcoming album is being released on this very day, so be sure to listen for it. And anyway, it's not as if you have a choice.

It recently struck me as odd that since the above was posted, I have heard nothing about Amanda Latona. Although I once saw her name listed among the song credits at the end of some movie, a standard American media blitz would insure that everywhere I turned I would see an image of Amanda Latona, and every time I opened a periodical or turned on a television I would be greeted with the story of her romantic life or her battle with weight-gain/substance abuse/anorexia, etc. What happened? Why haven't I been bombarded by the promotion of Amanda?

It could be, I reasoned, that living in an ivory tower as I do, I've simply missed Amanda Latona's rise to stardom. After all, Radiohead became the most popular group in the world—far bigger than the Beatles at the height of their popularity—before I was even aware that there was a group called Radiohead. To resolve my worry, I quickly went on line and did a search for Amanda Latona.

My favorite search engine, Vivisimo, in a search for "classical music" yielded 162 results (including the superb Classical Archives), and while many results are useless (the catalogues of faraway libraries, dead links, CD sales), the remainder is enough to keep anyone occupied for at least an evening. But a search for Amanda Latona yielded 178 results. There's amandalatonamusic.com, amanda-latona.com, ms-amanda.org, amanda-latona.org, a site in Denmark, a site using the Cyrillic alphabet, many sites in Italian, an Amanda Latona blog, an Amanda Latona Forum, a listing of Amanda Latona items available at eBay, A discussion of Amanda's romance with A. J. (I confess that I have absolutely no idea of who A.J. is—A. J. Foyt? Logical positivist A. J. Ayer? The rogue character in the novels of Wm. S. Burroughs?), and many sites made resplendent with Amanda's publicity photos. At the website of Rolling Stone magazine, the page devoted to Amanda Latona lists only one concert that she's performed—at some shopping center—but Amanda has more of the Internet devoted to her than do either Bach, Brahms, Mozart or Beethoven. That's the power of money in action.

But then I noticed that the wildly-enthusiastic testimonials (many, no doubt, posted by shills in the employ of Amanda's handlers) to Amanda Latona's talent (such as it is) suddenly ceased in the spring of 2003. Further investigation revealed that poor Amanda had been dropped by J Records, and that the album she was recording will never be released. A million dollars, at the very least, had been spent promoting her, all for naught.

That may seem a ghastly waste, but the sums at stake in the music game are so enormous that a million dollars is actually of no consequence, and Amanda Latona was last year's model. There's an endless supply of teen [pudenda] to be processed, packaged and marketed, and already The New Yorker. in the July 7,2003 issue, had a profile on Cherie (née, Cindy Almouani) who is a seventeen-year-old beauty being marketed by Warner Brothers. (Amanda Latona's shelf life had expired as she has already turned twenty-one and is thus too old to be a music celebrity.)

The profile mentions that the sum being gambled on "Cherie" is about five million dollars. That may seem like an enormous sum (never mind that the latest issue of the magazine reports that Brooklyn's P.S. 184 can't afford paper or pencils for its students) but consider the profits reaped from previous teen sensations—Avril Lavigne's debut album, "Let's Go," sold four million copies; Alanis Morissette's debut, "Jagged Little Pill," sold seven million.

If anyone reading this expects me to wax indignant and suggest that music would be improved by taking a fraction of the amount spent on promoting these girls and using it instead to promote Mitsuko Uchida (not to mention music education), forget it! I would never propone anything so absurd. Such idealism is impossible because the men who control and manage the music industry live in a state of perpetual adolescence, and I would suspect most of them to be on some sort of watch list and that their Internet activity is monitored. Because their entire lives have been spent worshipping in the temple of Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll, they are ignorant of anything else. Any suggestion that sophisticated music which appeals to mature adults could also be marketed would be regarded by these men in the the same manner that the Wahabim would regard a chapter of Hadassa that moved into their village.

The men who control the music industry, and whose money controls the broadcast industry, are motivated by only two things. One is that they like to play dress-up Barbie with flesh-and-blood dolls. Amanda Latona was marketed as Leather Barbie—replete with tattoos—and Cherie will be marketed as an amalgam of Britney Spears and Whitney Houston—provocative but unspotted and singing self-help songs that parents find unobjectionable.

The rest of the music executive's mind is typically dominated by greed. Yes, they could make a modest profit by marketing Murray Perahia, but they have no interest in a modest profit or even a handsome profit. They are only interested in what is called the "monster hit"—a recording which is purchased by every ten-year-old girl in the world; not merely North America, but Eastern Europe, China, and if those pesky towel-heads can be conquered, the Islamic regions as well. That's why the US government has been persuaded to begin broadcasting pop music into the Middle East using Radio Sawa (which costs US taxpayers $30 million a year) and the pop-culture magazine Hi (which costs taxpayers $4 million a year less whatever advertising revenues it may earn). The music industry bears no hostility toward Islam, it simply considers it a vast untapped market.

You may consider yourself to be above the lowest-common-denominator product music industry purveys, but the greed of these men is such that you are affected by it daily. If you are an American taxpayer, you are paying for Radio Sawa. If you own a radio, the choices offered on it are limited because the "promoters" have run classical music off of the commercial airwaves. Pick up a periodical and chances are that, even in the most sophisticated journal, the editor has been persuaded to include a profile of whatever teen superstar the industry is hawking that month. There's no escape.

The failure to market Amanda Latona successfully will motivate the powers of the industry to prevent such losses in the future, because greed hates losing money—even a paltry million dollars—more than it likes making it. As you read these words, there is likely a meeting in progress in the V.I.P. Room of a club in Los Angeles or New Jersey, where new marketing strategies are being planned. What ideas are being discussed? If music education in the public schools once spawned an interest in classical music, perhaps a course in pop music should be introduced and students tested on who Britney Spears dated. Music history courses at the college level might be changed to begin with Joan Jett. Not many people know, or care to know, who Nestlé or Campbell were, so isn't that a neglected marketing opportunity? Will we see Kid Rock Soup and Nelly Chocolate? Fiona Applesauce? The image of Elvis Presley appears on US postage stamps, so surely a few well-placed campaign contributions could persuade the powers in Washington that the pictures of pop stars should appear on currency as well. Are Vivendi Universal and Sony negotiating to purchase the Vatican and turn it into a concert venue?

If any of that sounds far-fetched to you, simply consider how long it has been since you went through an entire day without being assaulted by teen music or its promotion. If you have actually managed to escape the maws of the American pop-culture monster, please write and tell me where you are, and let me know if you have spare room in your igloo.