Maxed Out (4 page)

Alice pipes up next. “I remember when I broke up with –“

“Can we just not talk about it right now?” I say. “I just
need some space.”

“Is there anything else to talk about?” Tiff asks.

Nobody volunteers anything. “I’m writing this cool article
for work,” I say slowly.

“The one about the Korean band?” Renee asks. “You said it
was just a fluff piece.”

“I was wrong,” I say.

“Which one?” Tiffany asks.

“All of them, now,” I say. “Phil wants me to focus on one
that the labels are pushing over here really hard, but the entire industry is
corrupt so I get to write an exposé.”

“Corrupt how?” Tiffany asks. I spend an embarrassing amount
of time looking for some sort of buried quip about Max before I realize she’s
actually leaving it alone.

“Well, for one, there’s no soul,” I say. “The industry is
dominated by about three labels, and they don’t sign existing artists usually.
They recruit kids when they’re 12 or 13, send them to a private boarding school
for musicians, then assemble the most attractive and promising ones into bands.
The contracts are ludicrously unfair and they can get away with it because
they’re signing some kid with no bargaining power that wants to become a star
because they don’t know any better.”

“Sounds like the domestic scene,” Renee says.

“At least here bands have some bargaining power and some
amount of artistic control,” I say. “Also the contracts are shorter – in Korea
there was a group that had to sue because their 15 year contract was unfair.
And the bands here make money off of live shows and merch, if nothing else. In
Korea that all belongs to the label.”

“Whatever,” Renee says. “Doesn’t mean it’s soulless.”

“Stricter contracts mean the labels control every aspect of
the band members lives. Literally. It’s written into their contracts that they
have to let the label know where they are at all times. When they’re training,
they can’t have phones. The music is drafted for hire – sometimes they’ll hire
roomfuls of composers and producers to all write songs and then pick the best
one – and the band gets no choice in it. When they need an extra shot of
publicity they’ll hire an American producer or even buy unreleased  songs from
artists in America. Everything the band members do is to promote the public
image and every second of their life is managed by the record label. There’s
this whole network of reality TV and televised performances to keep them in the
public eye – and they’re not creating more content for this; most bands do one
or two song sets, so they play the same soulless manufactured crap over and
over and then go on Korean Fear Factor or whatever and then play the same two
songs, over and over again, for months on end. One of the major bands – probably
the second most popular girl group – issued a statement a couple months ago
about how they’d had 2 days of break time over the past two years. Two days.
The rest was travelling around and performing – mind you, they lip-sync
everything and do very little actual singing, but they do fairly physically
intensive dances at every performance—“

“Do they play their own music?” Alice asks.

“No. One band does, I think. Maybe a few more –“

“If they don’t play their own music or sing then why are
they a band?”

“The term I read most was ‘idol group,’” I say.

“But they’re just dancers,” Alice says.

“I think the point she’s trying to make is that they’re just
puppets,” Renee says.

“More or less,” I say. “It’s all fake manufactured crap –
hell, the labels pay for most of the band members to have plastic surgery,
too.”

“So they’re underpaid fake idols created by the record label
and television industry,” Tiffany says. “Doesn’t sound too different than
anything Simon Cowell’s been involved in.”

“
Idol
forces the winners to sign a one year contract
after one performance a week for a few weeks,” Renee says. “After the show they
don’t have much control over the singers – just artistically, and just for that
year. This sounds a lot worse.”

“Still, they give artistically gifted kids a chance to
perform, even if they do underpay them,” Tiff says. “It’s not that bad.”

“And the sex stuff?” I say.

“What sex stuff?”

“The boarding schools these labels run are full of girls
chosen because they’re pretty and talented, but only a few of them get picked
to form bands and make music. How do you think the men in charge go about
selecting them?”

“You’re saying that they have to sleep with people from the
label to get in the industry.”

“I’m saying they don’t always have a choice,” I say.

Tiff frowns. “And you have proof?”

“I’ve got several anonymous sources from within the industry,”
I say. “They all verified it independently.”

“So famous people don’t play by the same rules sexually as
everyone else,” Alice says. “That happens here too. Maybe not as ubiquitously
or involuntarily, but it still happens – you remember that idol contestant that
slept with Paula?”

“No,” Renee says.

“Korean culture is like 1950’s America with regards to sex,”
I say. “No kissing in public. No sex before marriage. No marriage before you’re
30. This makes all the sex stuff bad, but it makes the content of the music
almost worse. The music industry takes all of their cues from the modern American
scene, so you get half naked girls singing ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce
soir)?’ or old Kesha songs or whatever and they’re not allowed to date anyone
because the image of a 20 year old girl with a boyfriend is too slutty for
their target audience.”

“So you’re saying that American music is like smallpox?”
Tiffany says.

“I’m saying the context matters,” I say. “It’d be like if Jehovah’s
Witnesses started a cartoon that imitated and drew heavily from
South Park
.
“

“I’d watch that,” Renee says.

“I don’t think you’d last an episode,” Alice says. “I
couldn’t get you to finish
Reefer Madness
with me.”

“I’m a bit too young to appreciate Reefer Madness,” Renee
says. “Jehovah’s Witnesses and
South Park
are more generationally relevant.”

“I still think it would be more sad than funny,” Alice says.

“People make culturally inappropriate music in the US too,”
Tiff says. “Marilyn Manson is an obvious example – hell, rock and roll has been
historically culturally inappropriate , and punk is entirely dedicated to being
against mainstream norms.”

“But that’s because the artists choose to do so, not because
they’re being forced to imitate a foreign idiom to sell more records,” I say. “This
is like – there’s really no good example, because most American music is written
by the artist—“

“Max Martin,” Renee says.

“Who?” I ask.

“He’s written 38 top 10 hits over the last sixteen years,”
Renee says.

“What does that –“ I start, but she cuts me off.

“Artists don’t universally have a large degree of control
when it comes to writing and producing their songs. There’s a range of how
involved they get -- it really runs the gamut. Some don’t care who writes their
songs or how they’re mixed. Some create all of their own material and attend
every mixing and mastering session to make sure the final result fits their
vision. It’s hard to make a comparison to something that varies that much.”

I frown. “But they have a choice,” I say.

“I guess,” Renee says. “At the end of the day, though, the
publisher has to be okay with whatever content is on the record, and that means
that if an artist is tied town to a label by contract, that label can exert a
lot of control on what actually gets put on that disk.”

“Do you have evidence that Korean artists don’t like the
music they record?” Tiff asks. It’s like a tag-team wrestling match in here –
as soon as Renee gets done, Tiff’s the next one in attacking my ideas. At least
they’re off of Max for now.

“I have a lot of circumstantial stuff that points to that,” I
say.

“So there’s no evidence,” Tiff says.

“It’s pretty heavily implied—“

“But never actually said –“

“It sounds like a mess,” Renee says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“—but not much worse than the mainstream American industry,”
she continues. “Just more… obvious. Also we have a lot of counterexamples,
people who succeed because of their own talent or luck and not because they
have a label pressuring them to churn out more hits every year. Point is that
there’s a lot of fucked up things about the American music industry and we can
do more to stop it.”

“I know, but I couldn’t print an article about that,” I say.
“We run music ads from major labels all the time.”

“Still seems a bit hypocritical,” Renee says.

I frown. “It’s the best I can do,” I say.

“How do you feel about Max?” Tiffany asks, suddenly.

I’m furious for a moment that she’s taking us back to this
subject before I realize it’s because I’m avoiding it, not because I’m at peace
with it. They all saw this instantly, of course, because they have the clarity
of separation. Still, I feel like they were far more bitchy than they had any
right to be.

I force myself to respond. “I miss him,” I say. “I miss him
a lot. I feel like my relationship with Max has been the best relationship I’ve
had by far. I really enjoyed having him in my life. Now he’s gone, and it’s not
because we’re fighting or we realized we’re incompatible or anything. We just…
separated. For no reason. Except there was a reason, that we’d almost certainly
fall apart if we hadn’t broken up, since we wouldn’t have any time together,
and I can’t ask him to turn down a promotion for me. He’s doing what he loves. I
love him. I won’t stand in the way of him being happy, even if it means I can’t
be with him.”

“Have you told him this?” Tiff says.

“No,” I say. “There’s no point. The reason our relationship
worked was because we communicated and planned and thought about things like
this. We get through conflict by being rational. The rational solution here is
that we’d both be happy with other people, in Max’s case someone that can
either travel with him or deal with him being absent, and in my case someone
who’s going to be there for me more often. Even if I can never find someone
that only makes me 75% as happy as Max makes me that guy’s going to be better
in the long run. Once Max starts travelling I’ll barely get a third of the time
I have with him now.”

“Sometimes I think you’re too reasonable for your own good,”
Alice says.

“I’ll drink to that,” I say.

I just wish I knew what it meant.

The next day, I arrive at work a few minutes late because
Will has the day off and he and Renee are presumably doing it in the shower,
delaying my morning routine for at least an hour. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but
normally I wouldn’t be competing for my position with an asshole new hire that
my boss already favors over me. Jeremy is lucky I didn’t hit the usual Friday traffic.
As it stands, my frustration levels are high enough that I’m liable for an FAA
citation for not having those fancy blinking lights at the top. When I step out
of the elevator to find Jeremy at my desk already, slouching in my chair like
he’s already replaced me it’s all I can do to not walk over and drive my
knuckles into his pretty, smug face until he looks like Jared Leto in Fight
Club.

He looks up as I approach, resembling an owl: hooded lids,
dark circles under his eyes like the sloppy spillovers of the coffee that he’s
resting right on my desk, no coaster. He looks disheveled, his hair mussed, his
face sporting old growth from the night before, like he hasn’t found time to
shave – or change his clothes, I realize, as he’s wearing the same thing as
yesterday. A moment of pity surfaces but I drown it without a thought –
whatever he’s putting himself through, it’s in the ultimate goal of pursuit of
my job, and I need to be equally ruthless to keep it.

“What are—“ I start, furious.

He spins to face me, creaking. “I owed you an article from
yesterday,” he says.

I recognize this sensation from two days ago, when Max
dumped me – my mind is numb, refusing to allow this information entry lest it
upset the status quo of my life too much. I power through it. He’s not going to
let me live in ignorance. I need to accept this and move on.

“Go on,” I say.

“You didn’t just think I was going to take that column you
wrote without paying you back, did you?” he asks.

I don’t say anything, holding my breath. This has to be some
sort of scheme to get at me. Has to.

“At the Globe we had a policy where if you used someone
else’s notes for anything, you paid them back in kind with whatever they were
working on. I assumed that was how you did things here.”

“So you—“

It’s weird being interrupted by a person who’s little more
than a half-dead victim of sleep deprivation so often, but he still manages in
a slow, methodical way, talking under me more than over. “I fleshed out your
notes on the article on Korean music. It’s really interesting stuff, actually –
you were on to a lot of great leads that I don’t think I would have found on my
own. It’s still not quite the state of the column you gave me, but if you give
me an hour or two to finish –“

I walk around my desk to stare at my computer screen,
finally. He’s taken my notes and
enhanced
them – I can see the untouched
originals in bold red, each now followed by dozens of tiny black lines.
Jeremy’s notes. Phone numbers, web addresses, article references, and contact
information. Each one accompanied by an extensive description, detailing what
it is and how it supports my article. A couple even have long purple paragraphs
in tow – interview transcripts, from the looks of it.

The quality is amazing. I’d found hints and rumors of sexual
scandals, but hadn’t been able to get anything concrete due to Korean law
dictating that defendants names be hidden from the press. Jeremy’s pinned down
a major CEO on trial for 40 odd counts of sexual abuse within the last month.
I’d hinted at salary problems and bad hours, he’s gotten exact figures for both
hours worked and pay rates and exchange rates to compare various groups to
executive assistants here in the states. I think I mentioned exhaustion once in
my notes, and he’s got accounts of using IV drops in between performances to
counteract an otherwise impossible schedule. And then there’s the dozen odd
pages of interviews.