Beyond the Beat

Musicians Building Community in Nashville

Daniel B. Cornfield

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400873890
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

At a time when the bulwarks of the music industry are collapsing, what does it mean to be a successful musician and artist? How might contemporary musicians sustain their artistic communities? Based on interviews with over seventy-five popular-music professionals in Nashville, Beyond the Beat looks at artist activists—those visionaries who create inclusive artist communities in today's individualistic and entrepreneurial art world. Using Nashville as a model, Daniel Cornfield develops a theory of artist activism—the ways that artist peers strengthen and build diverse artist communities.Cornfield discusses how genre-diversifying artist activists have arisen throughout the late twentieth-century musician migration to Nashville, a city that boasts the highest concentration of music jobs in the United States. Music City is now home to diverse recording artists—including Jack White, El Movimiento, the Black Keys, and Paramore. Cornfield identifies three types of artist activists: the artist-producer who produces and distributes his or her own and others' work while mentoring early-career artists, the social entrepreneur who maintains social spaces for artist networking, and arts trade union reformers who are revamping collective bargaining and union functions. Throughout, Cornfield examines enterprising musicians both known and less recognized. He links individual and collective actions taken by artist activists to their orientations toward success, audience, and risk and to their original inspirations for embarking on music careers. Beyond the Beat offers a new model of artistic success based on innovating creative institutions to benefit the society at large.

CHAPTER 1

Creating Community in an Individualistic Age

Artist activists are re-creating a musician community in Nashville. These visionary peers of a musician community are transforming their community as they enter a risky era of entrepreneurial music production and artist self-promotion. As their careers increasingly unfold outside of the unionized corporate confines of major-label artist rosters, new generations of enterprising artists themselves bear the risks of production and distribution, an instance of Ulrich Beck’s “individualization of risk.”¹ In this post-bureaucratic moment, artist activism in re-creating peer community is an act of occupational self-determination for new generations of enterprising artists. Their activism is directed at minimizing risk by creating social spaces—such as production companies, studios, and performance venues—and a new arts trade unionism that promote their own and their peers’ artistry and livelihoods.

Nashville artist activists have been initiating a wide range of individual and collective actions in re-creating a peer community over the last few decades. For example,

• In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone magazine contributing editor Josh Eells, recording artist Jack White explained how he conceived of the new building for his label Third Man Records, whose Nashville presence had been established two years earlier:² “When I found this place … I was just looking for a place to store my gear. But then I started designing the whole building from scratch.” Eells reported in the New York Times that the building “[n]ow … holds a record store, [Jack White’s] label offices, a concert venue, a recording booth, a lounge for parties and even a darkroom. ‘The whole shebang,’ White said. It’s a one-stop creativity shop.”³ At Third Man Records, the guitarist-singer-songwriter produces his own and others’ music, and has many of the label’s vinyl records pressed just a few blocks away at Nashville’s legendary United Record Pressing, the nation’s largest vinyl record plant located in the emerging Wedgewood-Houston arts district.⁴

• In 1987, recording engineer Mervin Louque partnered with businessman Rick Martin to establish Douglas Corner, “a music venue aimed at showcasing new singers and songwriters in Nashville. It soon grew to become a well-known ‘Home Away From Home’ for Nashville’s top songwriters and future music stars,” including the likes of Alan Jackson, Trisha Yearwood, Marc Collie, The Kentucky Headhunters, Billy Dean, John Berry, Blake Shelton, and Garth Brooks.⁵

• In 2008, insurgent candidate Dave Pomeroy defeated eighteen-year incumbent and iconic Music Row co-founder Harold Bradley in an unusual and hotly contested election for the presidency of Nashville Local 257 of the American Federation of Musicians. Labeling it a “power shift,” Nashville Scene writer Brantley Hargrove wrote that “To onlookers on the coasts, Local 257 had become a battleground far larger than Nashville’s city limits, in a sort of proxy grudge match for control. At stake was leadership of the fourth largest local in the world’s largest trade organization for professional musicians. That’s in a town where music, according to a Belmont University study, is a $6.4 billion industry.”⁶ Union leadership change also signaled a new approach for revitalizing Local 257, whose sagging membership, like that of many unions in all economic sectors, had declined over the previous decade.⁷

Artist activists have arisen throughout the post-1980 musician migration to Nashville. By the mid-2000s, Nashville had become the U.S. city with the third highest concentration of musicians and, by 2011, it was proclaimed the nation’s “Best Music Scene” by Rolling Stone magazine.⁸ Artist activists have arisen as the steady stream of musicians created an increasingly genre-diverse pool of “indie” enterprising artists of diverse social backgrounds in Nashville. Over the last half-century, Nashville’s established musician community had crystallized around a group of “A-team” recording musicians, songwriters, producers, arts trade unions, and recording artists on the rosters of a few corporate major labels that distributed commercial country music through mass broadcasting. The established community, according to music historian Robert Oermann, “was insulated from the pop-music world as well as from mainstream Nashville. As the booking agencies, publishers, and record labels clustered on Music Row in the 1960s, the personalities who populated them became friends as well as competitors.”⁹ Contemporary artist activists are reconstituting the musician community as the genre-diversifying musician migration moves Nashville into a post-bureaucratic, entrepreneurial era of music production and artist self-promotion in risky niche consumer markets.

Beyond the Beat is about the artist activists themselves. How do individualistic, entrepreneurial artistic peers sustain their occupational community during a competitive phase of what sociologists Richard Peterson and David Berger called the “concentration-competition cycle”¹⁰ of popular-music production? This book, and the new sociological theory of artist activism derived from the Nashville case, address this question of re-socializing risk by recreating occupational community for an individualistic, diversifying, and entrepreneurial art-making era. I define artist activism as an act of occupational self-determination that is directed at minimizing risk by creating social spaces and a new arts trade unionism for promoting artist activists’ and their peers’ artistry and livelihoods.

The changing Nashville music scene has spawned three types of artist activists. I refer to these ideal-typical, artist activist roles as “enterprising artists,” “artistic social entrepreneurs,” and “artist advocates.” The sociological theory of artist activism addresses how artist activists fashion their roles as artist activists. Together, the three artist activist roles constitute a repertoire of individual and collective action for re-creating a peer artist community. The theory attributes variations among artist activists in their assumption and enactment of individualistic and collective roles to the artist activist’s subjective orientations toward success, audience, risk, and career inspiration.

Jack White, Douglas Corner, and the power struggle within Local 257 illustrate the emergent ensemble of artist activist roles—“enterprising artists,” “artistic social entrepreneurs,” and “artist advocates,” respectively. I define artist activists as those visionary artistic peers and closely aligned impresarios who create inclusive, place-based artist communities in an increasingly entrepreneurial art-making era. John Van Maanen and Stephen Barley define an occupational community as a “group of people who consider themselves to be engaged in the same sort of work; who identify (more or less positively) with their work; who share a set of values, norms, and perspectives that apply to, but extend beyond, work related matters; and whose social relationships meld the realms of work and leisure.”¹¹ In an otherwise vertically organized rational-bureaucratic economy, occupational communities, for Van Maanen and Barley, are the horizontal communal organization by which workers achieve self-control, collective autonomy, and social solidarity and form their identities.¹²

In Nashville, artist activists are building an inclusive, place-based expressive occupational community among indie musicians in a widening range of popular-music genres. This emerging community consists of a spatial ecology and “loosely coupled”¹³ set of local micro-organizational initiatives undertaken by diverse artist activists who are advancing the well-being of their peer community. The community is “expressive” in its focus on the artistic occupation of musician; “place-based” in being co-extensive and thematically linked to the Nashville music scene; and “inclusive” in the diversifying set of artist social identities—race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion—and corresponding widening array of musical genres that are expressed by its members.

Artist activists arise to sustain individual artists and the whole occupation. Their local organizational initiatives constitute a repertoire of individual and collective actions that address the artist-communal functions of artist professional development; networking and job referrals; and the economic interests of the whole occupation.¹⁴ The typology of artist activist roles that I derived from my interviews with seventy-five Nashville music professionals consists of enterprising artists who produce and distribute their own and others’ work and mentor early-career artists; artistic social entrepreneurs whose social enterprises, such as schools, live performance venues, and artist development companies, have the explicit social mission of maintaining social spaces and networks for promoting professional development opportunities and job referrals; and artist advocates who, as arts trade union reformers, are creating new guild-like unions by revamping collective bargaining, contract language, and union organizational functions in order to resonate with a new generation of enterprising artists whose individualism exceeds that of earlier generations of their peers.

The purpose of this book is to develop a sociological theory of artist activism. The theory concerns how artist activists’ subjective orientations toward success, audience, risk, and career inspiration shape the array of roles they create, assume, and enact to reconstitute artist community in a post-bureaucratic, entrepreneurial art-making era. In the words of the late sociologist Richard A. Peterson, the advent of an entrepreneurial art-making era was a stage of “competition and creativity” in the “concentration-competition cycle” of cultural production. In this cycle, an artistically competitive, innovative, and genre-diverse era succeeds an era of mounting economic concentration in a bureaucratic culture-producing industry whose increasingly homogeneous content had run its course in the market.¹⁵ Readers who are interested more in the detailed, career-biographical profiles of the artist activists than in the sociological and policy mission of this book may wish to proceed to chapters 3 through 6.

In the terms of ancestral sociologist Emile Durkheim, reconstituting a community of enterprising artists in Nashville is driven by a shift in the occupational division of labor of music professionals. The shift is from vertically organized, occupational specialization toward a horizontal occupational generalism, a shift that has accompanied the advent of independent art-making throughout the arts and entertainment sector in the United States during the last several decades.¹⁶ Over the last quarter-century, the unionized, corporate Nashville music scene based in mass broadcast distribution and an emphasis on country music has been transforming into an entrepreneurial, genre-diverse, de-unionized music scene. In the corporate era, music production is organized around large major labels and publishing companies, large studios, elite producers, and artist advocacy organizations. The complex, occupational division of labor of music specialists includes songwriters, pluggers, A & R reps, producers, engineers, an “A-team” of unionized session musicians, top-charting artists, and music agents, administrators, and executives, all geographically situated in the Music Row neighborhood. In the post-bureaucratic indie era, in contrast, the simple occupational division of labor of music generalists comprises entrepreneurial artists—self-promoting and self-contained bands who perform a wide range of their own artistic, art-production, and art-support functions, often conducted in their homes or small studios throughout multiple neighborhoods of greater Nashville, and directly engage their niche markets of fans and consumers in live venues and over the Internet.

In Durkheimian terms, reconstituting a post-bureaucratic community of artists entails the development of a new “social solidarity” or sense of togetherness based in a simplifying occupational division of labor. In a community built around a complex division of labor of occupational specialists, “organic social solidarity” was achieved from the interdependence among specialists. In contrast, “mechanical social solidarity” was achieved in a community based on an occupational sameness that prevailed in a simple occupational division of labor.¹⁷

In Nashville, artist activists are creating a “mechanically solidary” community of entrepreneurial artists alongside and partly from the ranks of an older, organically solidary corporate-era artist community. Nashville entrepreneurial musicians constitute themselves as a community by producing and performing for one another, showing up to each others’ showcases, and extending mutual aid during trying moments in their lives. According to Ken Paulson, an astute participant-observer of the Nashville musician community, Nashville entrepreneurial artists “cross-promote. And they cross-promote in an unselfconscious way…. [T]he community is largely very supportive of each other’s art.”¹⁸

From a Durkheimian perspective, however, reconstituting community and achieving a new social solidarity are not a foregone conclusion. Social change is punctuated and interrupted by moments of “anomie,” Durkheim’s term for the destabilizing normlessness that arises with a shift in the inspirational and organizational norms of an occupational community. Anomic historical moments are often accompanied by the marginalization of minority groups and intergenerational group conflict in a changing community,¹⁹ as in the epochal, contested election in Local 257. These anomic moments nonetheless can constitute a “wellspring of innovation,” as Richard Peterson put it in his masterful treatment of the institutionalization of Nashville country music through the 1990s. In a “dialectic of generations,” Peterson contended, “[i]nnovative young artists, that is, those who fabricate a contemporary way of expressing authenticity, commonly feel that they are doing so in opposition to the music they have grown up with.”²⁰

As community builders, artist activists are also challenged by anomic historical moments beyond those inherent in their occupational community. In our contemporary neoliberal era of “risk individualization”²¹ and “identity politics,”²² occupational communities are embedded in a societal web of increasingly precarious employment relations and polarized status-group relations.²³ Beyond meeting the Durkheimian challenge of achieving a new social solidarity among occupational generalists, artist activists must also solidify an occupational community composed of “free agents”²⁴ who hail from diverse social backgrounds.

As community builders, artist activists express an occupational self-determination for managing and minimizing risk in a precarious era of risk individualization. Employment precarity is symptomatic of a regime of casual employment relations. Risk individualization is manifested in declining labor movements, shrinking public commitments to social welfare and social insurance, and the shift from cradle-to-grave organizational careers in large bureaucracies toward casual, post-bureaucratic careers as, in Vicki Smith’s words, “free agents.”²⁵ Arne Kalleberg shows that the trend toward risk individualizatio...