another day, another dollar: part 3 (of ∞)
For another dose of record-label schadenfreude, check out this rant (check here if it’s been taken down – Victory’s lawyers have been chasing it all over the internet) by former Victory Records vice president Ramsey Dean. It’s an entertaining but unwieldy mishmash of legally actionable character assassination, insider’s memoir, hilariously hyperbolic tone, pompous word choices, and completely irrelevant Apocalypse Now quotations. I would quote some of the best bits, but I don’t want to get stupid (and lawyers) all over my blog.
If you have the patience to wade through Dean’s sludgy prose, his grandiloquent claims that Victory’s travails are in some way comparable to Joseph Conrad’s dark nights of the soul are pretty funny. Tony Brummel is no Colonel Kurtz. I think there are probably hundreds of dudes (and of course they’re all dudes) in the business who are functionally indistinguishable from Brummel; huge egos, bigotry and self-delusion are practically the defining traits of label heads. It may even be that the industry would grind to a halt without people like Brummel: Hawthorne Heights have very little to show for their time with Victory, but their CDs ended up in the hands of way more kids than the band’s quality merited.
Being nice doesn’t always help: Touch & Go Records, famous for being a humane label, with their “handshake contracts” and band-friendly accounting (as well as releasing most of Steve Albini’s records), ended up getting sued by the Butthole Surfers (who ought to have known better – they won the lawsuit but lost the war, in that a lot of people, like me, ended up convinced that they were egomaniacal dicks with a vastly overinflated sense of their worth in the wake of the lawsuit).
I have no opinion on the truth of Dean’s claims, except to say that bands should probably stop signing contracts with Victory (Thursday actually came back after leaving for Island) and fans of hardcore and emo should stop buying their records (which is tricky, because sometimes they do release some truly transcendental albums, like Refused’s Shape of Punk to Come – probably the best punk record of the last 10 years – not to mention records by Darkest Hour, Earth Crisis, Between the Buried and Me, and Integrity). On the whole, I’d just take the whole thing as a case study of how epically messed up the industry really is, from a not entirely reliable insider’s perspective, with more than a few grim laughs thrown in.