Deep Cuts

Music writing for the long play

Category

Era essays

  1. Backwards: The Crusade Against Rock Music and the Artists Who Defied It

    Between 1979 and 1990, a small coalition of evangelical preachers, congressional spouses, and concerned parents convinced substantial portions of the American public that rock music was a deliberate satanic recruitment operation. They held album-burning ceremonies. They published books decoding backward-masked demonic messages in mainstream radio hits. They got the U.S. Senate to hold hearings. They sued Judas Priest for two suicides. The bands, watching the panic unfold around them, eventually started recording actual backward messages in their songs — sometimes as satire, sometimes as defiance, sometimes as a kind of dark joke at the panic's expense. The inaugural Era essay.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 05 · · 15 min read

  2. The Math of Refresh: How CMC International Made a Record Label Work in the 1990s by Refusing to Behave Like One

    By 1993, the major labels had collectively decided that hair metal, AOR, and the broader 1980s commercial-rock catalog was structurally finished as a viable commercial proposition. The math no longer worked. A typical major-label rock album required gold certification — 500,000 units sold — just to recoup recording costs, promotional budgets, and the broader overhead the major-label commercial infrastructure required. The bands that had been generating multi-platinum sales five years earlier could no longer reach gold certification reliably. The majors began dropping them in sequence across 1992, 1993, and 1994. Tom Lipsky and Bill Cain, operating out of an office in Raleigh, North Carolina, looked at the same financial math the majors had looked at and reached a different conclusion. They built a record label whose entire structural premise was that the conventional commercial-rock business model had become incompatible with what working bands at the post-collapse commercial tier actually needed. The label was called CMC International. It existed from 1991 to 2000. It signed approximately forty veteran rock and metal acts the majors had dropped or abandoned, and it made money doing so.

    By Deep Cuts · Issue 04 · · 12 min read