The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (22 page)

GloomDolls.com, created by burlesque troupe manager Erin Oliver, published Caravella’s long missives explaining her reasons for leaving the site, supplemented with supposed transcripts of instant-message chats between her and an explosive Suhl. “SG is not a feminist-empowered site,” one of Caravella’s statements read in part, “except that they have two frontwomen posing as spokeswomen. It’s run by a man who is the only owner of the site, who’s not progressive in his views on women. I’m being kind. I feel he’s a raving misogynist and very ugly in how typical he is, though amplified and obviously a bit psychopathic. I and others who have known him feel the same.”

Not all the information offered on the sites turned out to be truthful. Both Darksite and GloomDolls gave attention to a rumor that Suhl had kept models captive in his house, which he denies. “Depending on how you hear the story,” says Suhl, “I’m either someone that beats up, rapes and locks girls in the basement, or I’m just someone who had a lot of hateful, untrue things said about them.”

The websites were also used to publish business documents that models had to sign upon joining SuicideGirls, including, reportedly, the standard SG personal-release form. The one-page contract offers models a fee of $300 per shoot in exchange for granting SuicideGirls “the exclusive, perpetual, and irrevocable right and license to copy, use and reuse, publish, distribute, edit, excerpt, exhibit, copyright and otherwise exploit model’s image, picture likeness, persona, performance and voice in conjunction with the model’s name, identification and related biographical information.” Despite the severe language it uses, the contract may be essentially unenforceable. “The release is so poorly written that it is hard to say with any certainty what it means,” says Barry Adler, a professor of contract law at New York University. “My take is that it was designed to give SG Services an absolute right to use and exploit, in any way, the images and recordings created by the models for the website. In any case, it would be ludicrous for the company to believe it could, with this release, forever stop the models from working on or profiting from other projects of any description.”

Until recently, SuicideGirls limited the outside use of its models’ images to promotional materials, banner ads, skateboard decks, the Playboy website and a photography book published in 2004. But in the summer of 2005, the site licensed the burlesque tour film to Showtime, which would air the documentary throughout the fall. The site also made SG videos available to iPod users (and yielded 500,000 free downloads in the first 24 hours they were available). Some models say they have no problem with this bargain. “We know our pictures will be used everywhere,” says Reagan, a current SuicideGirl. “It’s not their job to tell us where.”

For others, the visibility was an unwelcome surprise. “I always thought fans of SuicideGirls would see the DVD and that’s it—not that everyone and their mom was gonna see me on Showtime,” says Kleinert. “I feel I got really screwed out of the deal. SuicideGirls keeps getting bigger, and I got nothing out of it, and it pisses me off.”

In the two weeks after Caravella left SuicideGirls, Kleinert and original employee Katie Gilbert followed. Both Kleinert and Gilbert began modeling for God’s Girls, another prospective SG competitor that promised similar-looking women but staked no claim to punk ideals. “I thought it would be fun to show alternative models in the same way we see the Pamela Anderson-types,” says God’s Girls founder Lara “Annaliese” Nielsen, 21, who refers to her site’s financial backer, hardcore-porn magnate Gavin Lloyd, as “Uncle Gavin.” “It would be quality photography with good makeup.”

But their previous employers were determined to prevent them from appearing on competing sites. “The day I flew to L.A. for my God’s Girl photo shoot,” says Kleinert, “a packet of paper is sitting on [Nielsen’s] doorstep saying if we did the shoot, SuicideGirls would sue.” In fact, SuicideGirls had already filed suit against Nielsen and God’s Girls, alleging violations of federal and state “unfair competition” laws, poaching models, and interfering with its business relationships. Gilbert, the onetime face of SG, had also been named in the suit for violating modeling and confidentiality agreements; the suit even claimed that God’s Girls “features the same trade dress, including the use of pink as a primary color and the use of the stylized font utilized by SG.” In a separate action, SuicideGirls sued GloomDolls’ Oliver, demanding that she apologize and turn over her website to SG. “The demands are ridiculous, and I would never adhere to them,” Oliver says.

On September 27, 2005, the case of U.S. v. Chad Grant went to trial in a California court. Though Grant admitted to illegally setting up free SuicideGirls accounts and tampering with one aspiring model’s online application, prosecutors were unable to prove that the site had suffered the damages it claimed. The case hinged on an $18,000 bill for repairs resulting from the hack issued by SuicideGirls’ Web host, 3jane, a company that employs Suhl and is owned by his longtime friend Peter Luttrell. The trial ended in a hung jury, and a retrial is pending.

During the proceedings, SuicideGirls became fearful that images on its website depicting girls doused with fake blood and dressed in bondage gear would catch the attention of the FBI, so SG removed the images preemptively. “We got scared,” says Suhl. “We all agreed that our business is not about bondage or blood. That’s not the ethos of SuicideGirls or what we want to fight for. We took [those photos] down. It’s not very punk rock and we know.”

But some of its most vocal critics claim that the punk-rock spirit left SuicideGirls a long time ago and that punk porn is still porn, no matter how you qualify it. “They draw in girls who don’t realize they’re becoming a part of the sex industry,” says Caravella. “It’s sugar-coated. It’s pink. It does not look like gross, nasty porn. It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault except mine for getting naked on the Internet.”

Faced with the litany of troubles that SuicideGirls has endured over the past year, Suhl concedes that he may have instigated some of them, but he ultimately feels he’s as much a victim as any of his models. “Honestly, I get bulldozed all the time,” he says. “Those girls know how to work me; they know how to get what they want. But maybe I am intimidating. I feel like I give in, that I’m a sucker. Do you know what I mean by a sucker? You know, they give you the eyes, and they know how to talk you into things that sometimes aren’t the most sensible.”

In her pink office, Mooney says that the events of the previous year have made her more guarded and more reluctant to form friendships with people. But she prefers to concentrate on how the site’s continuing expansion is helping to fulfill what she sees as SuicideGirls’ fundamental mission. “It’s shocking to me that people are so focused on the negative and the gossip, when we are doing so many great things with the company,” she says, pointing to future ventures that will see the SuicideGirls brand extended to comic books and clothing lines, and new businesses in Japan and Brazil. “It’s very exciting that I can help another girl’s art get into the hands of millions of people.”

Without speaking the names of the women whose images still surround her every day, Mooney says their grievances are another natural outgrowth of SuicideGirl’s rapid success. “There are going to be disgruntled employees,” she says. “Some people need a scapegoat and want to blame someone else for their decisions.” As much as she may wish circumstances were different, Mooney knows there are some things about SuicideGirls that even she can’t change. “You can’t be naive forever. It’s a business now.”

HOW SELLING OUT SAVED INDIE ROCK

BuzzFeed, November 2013

It’s 2 p.m., the Friday before Christmas 2012, on the 21st floor of the Leo Burnett building in downtown Chicago. Young executives, creatives, admins and interns are all packed into a large meeting room, giddy and restless; today is special. Canadian sister duo Tegan and Sara step onto a foot-high stage and play three songs—including the first two singles from their seventh album,
Heartthrob
, which they will release the following month. The fluorescent lights stay on, the city’s skyline splayed out behind them. Afterward, nearly all of the 200-odd employees in attendance will stand in line, phone at the ready, to pose for pictures with the band, just like fans after any concert.

Tegan and Sara, who eventually cracked the Top 20 with
Heartthrob
’s “Closer,” need to win over this audience just as they would at any concert. A track in the right commercial could bring about the kind of attention that magazine covers and radio play alone can no longer garner. Commercial placement, also known as a “sync,” has evidenced itself as the last unimpeded pathway to our ears—what was once considered to be the lowest form of selling out is now regarded as a crucial cornerstone of success. And as ads have become a lifeline for bands in recent years, the stigma of doing them has all but eroded. But with desperate bands flooding the market, the money at stake has dropped precipitously. Even the life raft has a hole in it.

“A tiny sliver of bands are doing well,” says the duo’s Sara Quin. “The rest of us are just middle class, looking for a way to break through that glass ceiling. The second ‘Closer’ got Top 40 radio play, we were involved in meetings with radio and marketing people who said, ‘The next step is getting a commercial.’ I can see why some bands might find that grotesque, but it’s part of the business now.”

Fifteen years ago, the music industry was still a high-functioning behemoth pulling in $38 billion a year at its peak, able to ignore the digital revolution that was about to denude it entirely. Starting in 1999, sales of recorded music fell an average of 8 percent a year; 2012 was the first time since then that sales went up—0.3 percent. Last year, it reported $16.5 billion in global revenue. America accounted for $4.43 billion of that—approximately the same amount spent by AT&T, Chevy, McDonald’s and Geico on ad buys in the U.S. alone.

Back in the early ’90s, when the music industry was thriving, commercials weren’t a way indie bands got ahead—the punitive value outweighed the relatively small financial gains bands made for licensing a song to a commercial campaign. Band manager Howard Greynolds, who looks after the careers of Iron and Wine and Swell Season, was an employee at indie label Thrill Jockey when two of its flagship bands, Tortoise and Freakwater, each licensed a song for a 1995 CK One campaign.

“I remember people calling us saying, ‘I can’t fucking believe they did that, I can’t support this band anymore!’” says Greynolds. “We were overly transparent then, we told people, ‘Listen, this $5,000 bought them a van—
fuck off
.’” A few years later, another Thrill Jockey band, Trans Am, were outspoken about turning down a rumored $100,000 deal to license a song for a Hummer commercial. A generation ago, refusing these kinds of offers was a way for bands to telegraph where they stood, the sort of thing that showed their allegiance to the underground and their community.

It’s been nearly 30 years since Lou Reed hawked Honda scooters with “Walk on the Wild Side” and 26 since Nike used (and was summarily sued for using) the Beatles’ “Revolution” to sell sneakers, but the diminishing of outrage has sped up over the last decade. Volkswagen used Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” and a half-dozen Wilco songs, Apple placements are gold medals rather than albatrosses for relative newcomers like Feist and rock royalty like U2 alike, and no less an anti-commercialism scold than Pearl Jam got in bed with Target in 2009. Such moves are barely even press-cycle talking points by now.

Greynolds says what expedited this change wasn’t just the huge drop in record sales, but as layoffs swept through the record industry, contacts from labels and distributors went to marketing, advertising and brands. “All of the sudden those were the people at music houses,” says Greynolds. “People from your world. They might be feeding you a line of shit, but there was trust. They were different.”

These new players within the advertising industry proved to be capable navigators of the ad world as well as the music underground. They could help forge lucrative connections between brands and cash-strapped bands—and their fan bases. Decades of posturing and sanctimony were rendered moot once artists realized that corporate gigs were the only paying gigs in town, a (very) necessary evil.

Sitting in his not-quite corner office, two floors below where Tegan and Sara played their lunchtime set, is the one of the most important gatekeepers of these coveted career-making opportunities: 38-year-old Gabe McDonough, Leo Burnett’s vice president of music. Within the music industry, some believe McDonough and execs like him now play the role once occupied by major-label A&R guys—the talent seekers and overseers whose attention can mean the difference between music being your living or being your basement hobby. He handles everything from music supervision for commercials to pitching artists’ tours for corporate sponsorships. His reputation was made early in his career for “breaking” Santigold with a Bud Light Lime spot and placing Brazilian pop oddities Os Mutantes in a McDonald’s commercial—a spot that
AdWeek
named one of the five best uses of music in a commercial ever.

That was five years ago. McDonough’s pre-agency cred originated as bassist in Chicago indie-rock band Boas (most of the band went on to form Disappears), and he’s seen as a savvy translator between the creative and corporate sides. His most recent coup was getting Lorde’s “Royals”—her first sync—for a Samsung campaign.

McDonough is effusive and modest, reluctant to claim credit for even the things he is often credited for. Tacked on the wall above his desk is a small slip of paper with a Warren Buffett quote: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Dressed in an anorak and expensive jeans, he looks as if he’s in a successful Britpop band. On his desk are a stack of cassette tapes from a producer at a Los Angeles music house and a spray-painted vintage Walkman—a promotional item from another.