Staticblog Rejects and Denounces Eliot Spitzer
Spit take
Keeping your nose and other appendages clean is a good, standard rule by which to live — especially if your day job involves crusading for truth, justice and record companies not paying radio stations to play Jennifer Lopez songs.
After New York Governor Eliot Spitzer got busted this week for spending stacks of cash on luxury hookers, I checked my archive and saw that I wrote about Spitzer six times between July 2005 and May 2006. It was all about the then-New York attorney general’s investigation of the record industry’s relationship with radio and television, which revealed a massive gravy train of cash and other incentives to play music that, in many cases, was unfit for human ears. Over the course of that year, Spitzer levied about $31 million in penalties against the major labels.
I have no shame in having trumpeted what Spitzer accomplished as New York’s AG — payola is and always has been a hugely destructive force in radio. If you hear a song on the radio once an hour that cannot be judged as tolerable by any reasonable standard, someone with string-pulling power probably got a 52-inch plasma television and a compensated weekend in Las Vegas for their trouble. Fredric Dannen’s classic 1990 book “Hit Men” tells the long and sordid story of how payola shaped the pop landscape for decades, and it’s a phenomenon that never really dies — it’s the “Terminator” of music industry scandals.
By the time the now-disgraced Spitzer charged after the music industry, the process of greasing the media had evolved into a multi-level scheme involving major bribes of radio company employees and the hiring of “request companies.” This involved banks of compensated fake “fans” barraging the 800 numbers at MTV, all to get a worthless single such as Lindsay Lohan’s “First” on MTV’s “Total Request Live” the same week that Lohan’s “Herbie: Fully Loaded” hit theaters, thereby synergizing the non-singing bad actress across the media spectrum.
But now that Spitzer is revealed as a man who could not walk the walk, and his career in public service ended with his Wednesday resignation, there will always be an asterisk next to this chapter in music business history. The music industry is not above indulging in massive, Caligula-choking levels of sleaze, but when Spitzer imploded in an almost cartoonishly clichéd manner, the reaction in record label offices probably made the uproarious cheers at the New York Stock Exchange sound like meek sniffles.
The integrity of the music industry hardly rests with one person, but before he was revealed as a weak-willed fraud, Spitzer was the first person in years to take on payola as a crusade. We can only hope that the next person to lift the curtains on pay-to-play malfeasance in the music industry can keep from partying like a rock star.
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