Think about any piece of shit commercial numbers-crunching product you’ve ever distended your external content-stomach forth to consume, secreting a mixture of acidic bile and passive capitalist taste-receptors, and you’ll notice a distinct pattern. The thinking goes, amidst the people who hate creativity and worship money, anyway, that you idiots won’t buy anything unless your own specific demographic happens to be represented within a statistically significant percentage of the product’s run time. That holds for movies, a horror movie, say, where some ham-dicked rapper is tossed in over his depth to draw in the “urban” crowd, to TV shows, where a teen romance is skin-grafted on to the plot of some mythology-dense apocalyptic drama or other to pull in the younger crowd, to music, where collaborations and cross-over gambits are designed to bamboozle as many different types of people as possible at once to maximize profits. It might sound obvious, but this is, literally speaking, the reason why everything is awful. Political campaigns are beholden to this middling-milquetoasting too, as are chain restaurants with pages-long menus designed to have “a little something for everybody.” The problem is, when you aim to please everyone, you end up pleasing, well, a pretty good chunk of everyone; everyone is pretty dumb.
This sort of thing has been going on in music forever, pop rap and pop proper, in particular. Why do you think big name acts work together so frequently on contemporary releases? Because they’ve “been a big fan of Johnny Shitburger for a long time and have been dying to work with him”, or whatever soundbite pisses its way, gallstone-like, down the PR pipe into our gaping mouths? No, it’s the same reason that Mitt Romney makes sure he has his sausage fingers in as many different failing companies at once: diversifying the portfolio. When you spread out the burden of returns with as wide a net as possible, you risk alienating either poll of your intended audience, but you balance for those losses by planting as many flags in the consumption camps of varied personal consumer brands as possible. Read the rest at Bullett.
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