Once Again, Clive Davis Learns the Wrong Lesson From the Kelly Clarkson Affair
Because apparently the Beatles took music in the wrong direction, Clive Davis says that singers should not write their own songs.
Davis, chairman and chief executive officer of the BMG Label Group, said he has seen many entertainers lose their careers by not concentrating on finding hit songs — no matter who they are written by…”I don’t care how many No. 1’s you have written in the past, have you written a new No. 1?” When [Whitney] Houston came to him after her second or third album and asked if she should start writing songs, he said: “Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra didn’t write, and they are among Time magazine’s greatest artists of the century.”
Let’s break down the numerous ways Davis is wrong, shall we?
First, if you need any more proof that Clive has as little concern for music as he does for his morning cup of coffee, it does not even cross his mind that a singer might be more interested in pursuing a particular artistic vision than in getting a hit, or that ideally you should be able to do the two things simultaneously. Now, look, I understand that Clive’s a businessman. He’s the chairman, after all, and when he’s hearing from the stockholders, they’re not going to ask about compression quality. But if he’s going to represent himself as someone who matters for music, as the boy with the golden ear, then he has to acknowledge that his job is to get between the artist and the moneymen to let the artist do what they want to do. The article invokes the Kelly Clarkson affair, and apparently Davis still thinks that an agressively underpromoted album that he publicly bad-mouthed sold a mere 700k units because the artist co-wrote some of the songs.
More importantly, though, it highlights just how behind the times Clive is. Besides the fact that singers co-writing with hit producers account for some of the biggest hits of the day, singers have been writing their own songs for some time now. For almost anyone getting into pop music, having the option to write your own songs goes without saying. So if you were a hot new artist, why would you want to sign with a label whose boss comes out and says your artistic ambitions are stupid and unprofitable?
I love pop songs written by professional songwriters. But surely there’s room for both in this rapidly shrinking music business, right, Clive? I know you sit at that big old desk and every afternoon around three the shakes really start, and you can see the future laid before you, and it looks kinda like the post-apacolyptic scenes in the Terminator movies. But that’s no reason to badmouth art, is it, Clive?
