LA Weekly & How To Save Alternative Media: Stop Selling Out!

If the recent acquisition of the award-winning LA Weekly by right-wing douchebags with no appreciation of, or concern for, the arts teaches us anything it is that free-thinking, boundary-pushing alternative publications should refrain from being made part of such ridiculous mergers and acquisitions in the first place.

In other words, don't fucking sell yourselves out to the highest bidder, for fuck's sake. Is that so goddamn hard to understand?

Of course, if I could go back in time, I would say much the same thing to the once-upon-a-time idealistic and visionary founders of a dozen or so indie labels that built something truly iconic from nothing, simultaneously defying the system and defining a generation, only to sell out to the same fucking major labels that couldn't have given a shit about any of their acts a few years prior.

"Thanks for doing all the hard work for us. Here's your check."

Take Daniel Miller, for example: The man who started Mute Records and gave the world Depeche Mode, Fad Gadget, Yazoo, Moby, and a metric shit-ton of other great acts over the course of a brilliant three decade run.

Unlike most other indie labels that go broke after their first few releases tank, everything Miller's Mute imprint touched seem to turn to gold. The name itself came to be such an automatic indicator of quality that, for most of the '80s, all one had to do was see that Mute logo on a record by a new band to know the ride would be worth taking.

Of course, throughout the '90s, as the UK got caught up in Blur vs. Oasis-mania, Mute's magic touch got a tad soft and the money wasn't coming in like it had the previous decade.

Miller himself freely admits that things got a little touch & go there for awhile, forcing him to seriously consider selling the label to a major, but then Mute released Moby's Play album and the cash registers starting ringing all over again.

Instead of telling the major labels with whom he'd been loosely discussing a sale "Thanks, but no thanks, we're good now", he sold Mute to, of all labels, fucking EMI.

What the fuck, man?

Of course, my favorite horror story is that of L.A.-based A&M Records, a label that many folks don't even consider an indie label because of their massive success and cultural influence across many musical genres.

Started by legendary jazz musician Herb Alpert and partner Jerry Moss in 1962, the label went on to have great success with a wide array of artists, including the Carpenters, Captain & Tennille, the Brothers Johnson, Cat Stevens, Joe Cocker, Styx, Nazareth, the Tubes, and Squeeze.

They also put out a little record called Frampton Comes Alive that managed to move a few units.

It is not an overstatement to say that they single-handedly broke new wave in America by signing Joe Jackson and The Police while also licensing albums by Orchestral Maneuvres In The Dark, Simple Minds, and Human League (whose single "Don't You Want Me" would go to #1 in the U.S.) from UK label Virgin Records.

Most notably, the label provided marketing and distribution for I.R.S. Records, home to Wall of Voodoo, the Go-Go's, and R.E.M., thereby making them the largest indie label in the country and one with more success and power than most major labels of the day.

Yet Alpert & Moss, for reasons known only to them, chose to sell the label to Polygram in 1989 despite no money troubles or desire to leave the business. In fact, one key component of their negotiations was that they continue to manage the label's day-to-day operations.

With all due respect, who in their right mind does that? If any indie label had the capability to remain a free agent and, in doing so, continue to do whatever the fuck they wanted when they wanted, it was A&M.

Naturally, their new owners found numerous ways to meddle in A&M's affairs, leading Alpert & Moss to file suit against Polygram for breach of contract. Instead of taking that opportunity to wrestle back ownership of their cherished label from their content-consuming corporate overlords, Herb & Jerry settled for $200 million and pretty much washed their hands of the iconic label they'd started thirty years prior.

Polygram soon merged A&M into their Universal Music Group, which is a nice way of saying they shuttered the label, saving the familiar logo for special occasions such as any new Sting album that might find its way onto UMG's release schedule.

What those heartbroken by LA Weekly falling into the hands of a shadowy, newly-formed company with no respect for the counter-culture and artist communities upon which the publication was built should do is direct their ire at the ownership group that sold out in the first place.

Of course, to do that, you'd have to go back to 1996 and give original owner/publisher Jay Levin a kick in the shins for selling to competitor New Times, a company with deep counter-cultural publishing roots of its own, but a relative newcomer to the LA scene at the time.

Levin's sale of the LA Weekly began a slow, but deliberate degradation of the rebellious, profits-be-damned mindset that had been intrinsic to the paper's success back before the internet decimated the print publishing landscape. More and more, decisions were being made by corporate suits more concerned with pleasing shareholders than readers, or, for that matter, employees.

How could anyone have not seen the day coming when LA Weekly would, much like A&M Records, be reduced to little more than a logo?

If anything, one should be amazed that it actually took this long.

Whatever becomes of the publication from this point on, a question worth pondering is "how can future massacres be avoided?" Truth be told, whether it be an indie record label or an alternative newspaper, a run of 30+ years is pretty remarkable and, mortality being what it is, changes at the top are kind of unavoidable.

At the time Levin relinquished ownership of LA Weekly back in the '90s, could he have possibly foreseen what the future held for such publications and that even alternative publications like the Village Voice would become irresistible to media conglomerates eager to swallow up as much content and market share as possible?

And if he had been able to foresee such mergers and acquisitions, not to mention the reckless devaluation of the counter-cultural mindset that had endeared his creation to million of Angelenos, would he have cared enough to...you know...not sell?

To those currently involved in boycotting the publication's new ownership and protesting the clumsy co-opting of a cherished brand by a mysterious corporate entity whose intentions seem darkly cynical, we at The Shit can't help but ask if such energy is better spent building a new entity to occupy the space in our hearts and minds that LA Weekly used to fill.

In doing so, maybe those who choose to do so can learn from the mistakes that ultimately led to LA Weekly's sad and completely avoidable demise.