Sunday, Oct. 05, 2003
Ask the employees at Clay Aiken's record label, RCA, if they would
listen to Aiken's debut album, Measure of a Man, by choice, and the
response is almost uniform: a lengthy pause followed by laughter. RCA
was the home of Elvis Presley, and its current roster includes
critical favorites like the Strokes and the Foo Fighters. It's a
rock label. Aiken, who came in second on the most recent installment
of American Idol, is not only not a rocker, but, as he says in his
aggressively self-deprecating way, "I'm not an artist. I'm just a guy
who was on a reality show—and I didn't even win!" Humility aside,
Aiken, 24, doesn't mind being doubted because he believes in his
bones that his detractors are wrong. "There are many people at the
record label who are afraid of me," he says. "They don't understand
the reasons that someone as uncool as me is here. In a way—and this
is a horrible word to say, and once I say it you're going to print
it—it's a revolution."
The revolution of which Aiken speaks is a TV show. In two seasons on
the air,
American Idol has snatched the notoriously vague process of
selecting musical talent away from music executives and put it in the
hands of ordinary Americans. In a convenient syllogism, Aiken
believes that since everyday people chose him as their hero, those at
RCA who don't like him or his music are biased against everyday
people. He may be right. It's also possible that his denigrators love
music—and the process of making music—far more than Aiken can
imagine and that they resent having their passion marginalized by
anyone with a telephone and a taste for Bee Gees medleys. "I don't
know why people relate to me," says Aiken, "but my guess is that
they're tired of beautiful, cookie-cutter pop stars. They don't
believe them, and they don't trust them."
With
Measure of a Man's Oct. 14 release around the corner, it is now
an incidental fact that Aiken did not actually win
American Idol.
Thirty-four million people watched last May as Ruben Studdard edged
out Aiken by less than 1% of the votes. Studdard was the more
polished singer, but Aiken was the better narrative. Week to week,
with the help of a hair iron and contact lenses, he was transformed
from a complete geek who sang show tunes into a better-looking geek
who sang pop ballads. After the
Idol finale, interest in Aiken
surged, and his startlingly sincere first single,
This Is the Night,
trounced Studdard's to become the best-selling single since Elton
John's reworked Candle in the Wind. Modern rock radio, which is
dominated by hip-hop, nu-metal and irony, was overwhelmed by a wave
of requests and was forced to play Aiken's song.
Rolling Stone put
him on its cover and had to increase the print run to meet demand.
Richard Sanders, executive vice president and general manager of RCA
Records, caught on early to what he calls the "emotional connection"
Aiken forged with the
Idol audience, and he decided that regardless
of who won on the show, RCA was going to sign Aiken. (In a deal
struck with the show's creator, Simon Fuller, RCA has the right of
first refusal for all
American Idol finalists. So far, the label has
signed inaugural winner Kelly Clarkson, her runner-up Justin Guarini
and Aiken; Studdard was signed by sister label J Records.) Sanders
made his name as a music executive by signing Moby. He won't say
whether he's a fan of Aiken's music—"But I'm a disciple of the
phenomenon," he offers, flashing a wry smile. "There is no Ed
Sullivan Show anymore, no opportunity for two or three generations to
listen to music together and have a good time. I'm into being the guy
that provides that."
Many members of the RCA staff are fond of Aiken, if not his music,
and are willing to go along with Sanders. But a healthy minority have
curiously deep reservoirs of disdain for the
Idol industry. One RCA
executive, who insisted on anonymity, cited
Idol as proof that
"Americans have no taste" and described Aiken as "Barry Manilow, but
with less talent." Sanders says he understands that some of his
employees are "skeptical about the selection process and skeptical
about selling a pop artist with no credibility." But, he adds, "I've
told everyone they need to look at it this way: Americans buy more
vanilla ice cream than any other flavor. Yes, they like their Rocky
Road and Cherry Garcia, but ultimately America wants to consume
vanilla. So we're going to sell the best vanilla. Given the problems
we're facing as an industry, we cannot afford to be judgmental."
Clive Davis is not a man easily stripped of his judgment. Davis, as
he often reminds people, discovered Janis Joplin, Patti Smith and
Whitney Houston. Despite his status as chairman and ceo of the RCA
music group, he still considers himself an A.-and-R.
(artist-and-repertoire) man, which means he loves matching singers to
songs. It is Davis' job to gather material from professional
songwriters for the
Idol albums, oversee their production and put his
stamp of good taste on every finished product. Shortly after the
Idol
finale, Davis invited Aiken to his home to discuss Aiken's debut. "I
told him," says Davis, "that he is a marvelous talent and that This
Is the Night is a very strong song, but it is a souvenir of a
television show, and we have to get beyond that. It is my feeling
that when you get into being a career recording artist, the stakes
are different. People want to see if you can stretch and evolve. They
want to know if you have some edge."
Before appearing on
American Idol, Aiken was a special-education
teacher in Raleigh, N.C. He is a devout Baptist who does not smoke or
drink, though he claims to have a temper that emerges when he sees
"people with disabilities treated like they're 4 years old." In his
piety, Aiken can make Billy Graham seem like a rogue. He listened to
Davis' advice about edge and then respectfully asked that he not be
required to sing any songs about sex. "Clive tried to tell me that
saying certain words in a song—or as he says, 'putting some balls
into it'—isn't bad, it's just strong emotion," says Aiken. "Well,
there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and
I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This
is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I
did."
Davis counters that Aiken is no longer selling to a TV audience. "You
can't worry about who bought the last single," says Davis from his
seat in an office studded with platinum-record plaques. "You can't be
paralyzed by what the public expects of you. We're now competing
against Justin and Christina and Avril and Pink, and if you allow the
television audience to program your music, you will not be on radio
and you won't make mtv. And then where are you? We have to stay ahead
of the curve."
Aiken had been forewarned by Clarkson and Guarini that if he was
happy with 50% of his completed album, he'd be "doing real good." The
problem, they told him, was that there were too many people wrestling
for control of their music. "Simon Fuller did not create
American
Idol to be in the television business," says Tom Ennis of Fuller's
production company, 19 Entertainment. "He created
American Idol as a
new way to find talent to manage and nurture." 19 is the
Idols'
official record label — RCA is the American distributor — and Fuller,
who managed Annie Lennox before inventing the Spice Girls, is Davis'
contractual equal in choosing music for the
Idol albums.
Here's where the
American Idol business gets dicey. Davis would like
RCA to curate the careers of artists; Fuller wants his
Idols to have
long recording careers too, as long as they don't forsake the
Idol
audience. (Fuller was incensed that Davis spent eight months refining
Clarkson's debut for radio rather than getting it to market as soon
as possible.) "You have to serve many masters when you have that many
people with a vested interest in you," says Ennis. "You can't skew
yourself one way and not speak to the people who spent all that time
watching you and voting for you."
Ennis and 19 have market research on their side. As Davis suggests,
avid music fans expect their stars to evolve. But the
Idol audience,
which has an unprecedented ownership stake in Aiken's career, is not
made up of avid music fans. A disproportionate number of copies of
This Is the Night were sold at Wal-Mart and Target stores, and a
large number of those discs were picked up in the check-out lane,
where Sanders positioned
Idol merchandise to catch the eye of people
who wouldn't think of stopping in the music section. "Our consumer is
the middle 80% of the population," says Gerry Lopez, president of
Handleman Entertainment Resources, which stocks and manages music
offerings at such stores as Wal-Mart. "These are moms and dads making
$26,000 to $36,000 a year ... We're not catering to Napster or Kazaa
folks, just people who like a nice song sung by a nice kid." Because it pays the full retail price and doesn't download music, the
Idol audience is a record company's dream; because it doesn't have
indulgent, wide-ranging tastes, it can be an artist's nightmare.
Studdard got so frustrated trying to tailor his upcoming album,
Soulful, to the
Idol audience that in early July he called his
various managers and label representatives and, according to several
sources, threatened to quit. "This is my car," Studdard said,
according to an executive who was on the call. "If you guys want to
navigate, that's great. If you guys want to drive, then you better
get a new car." Studdard is now working with Missy Elliott and R.
Kelly on what an RCA executive termed "a credible, clean hip-hop
album."
If Studdard appears to be a Clive Davis kind of guy, then Aiken
definitely sides with Fuller. "Simon Fuller is the one person I trust
in all this," says Aiken, and the proof is on
Measure of a Man, which
is the rare pop album completely free of innuendo, let alone sex.
Instead of adding edge lyrically, Davis and another A.-and-R.
executive, Steve Ferrera, were forced to play with Aiken's sound,
using crunchy power chords in place of benign synth pads and
encouraging Aiken to put some power into his ballads. Says Aiken:
"I'm very satisfied with my album. I grew as a singer, and Clive
deserves a lot of the credit for that."
Still, pop isn't just music. It's a package, and Aiken has had
numerous frustrations with the way RCA has tried to tweak his image.
Everyone—label, management and Aiken—was thrilled with Aiken's
Rolling Stone cover shoot, so photographer Matthew Rolston was hired
to direct a video for
This Is the Night. In it the story line was ...
Clay Aiken does a magazine photo shoot. "They had me in this tight
little vintage T shirt and jeans and a leather jacket," says Aiken.
"And (Rolston) had me sing the song in one scene with this angst
attitude—popping my neck and mean looks on my face ... It's trying
to make me somebody I'm not. I'm not mean, and this is something the
label just doesn't get. 'How the heck do we market this boy? We're
used to marketing Christina Aguilera and Dirrty. We can't market
clean!'"
Aiken laughs off most of RCA's foibles—like the time he was forced
to change his unstylish shoes before appearing at an industry
convention, or the airbrushing of his eyes on the
Measure of a Man
album cover—because he believes that the label is clueless about how
to market to an audience he knows instinctively. "I'm a battle
picker," he says. "I try not to get upset about all this marketing
stuff because I'm saving it for the time that they tell me that I
need to do a song about 'Let's hook up and have sex.' But I'm like,
'Do not—ugh!—don't pretend that the public are a bunch of idiots!
Don't pretend that you know what they want and they don't know what
they want.' That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life!"
Of course, anticipating the tastes of the public—knowing that the
world might be ready for a black woman to sing about respect, for
example—is exactly what great creative executives do. They don't
make art, but they facilitate it, fight for it and nurture it, often
in the face of public opposition or apathy. Record companies have
always made plenty of music aimed at the heart of the market, but the
frustration of the anti-
Idol RCA executives—and many others
throughout the industry—comes down to timing. At the exact moment
that
American Idol has created a surge of people who buy their music
with their mints as an impulse item, file sharing has siphoned off
nearly all the adventurous record buyers. That leaves a whole lot of
people buying Sanders' vanilla and very few interested in his Rocky
Road.
It is telling that in just five months with RCA, Aiken has won most
of his battles. The
This Is the Night video was scrapped at
considerable expense. His album is family-friendly pop. Aiken got to
name his record
Measure of a Man, even though Davis lobbied for any
other title. The marketing department now says its strategy is to
"let Clay be Clay." "Revolution is a strong word," says Aiken. "But
RCA would not have picked me or Ruben. Simon Cowell would not have
picked us. America has shown them that they don't know what they're
talking about."
