The Rake Magazine

Author: Dan Mitchell

  • Modern or Classic?

    With the State Fair’s feeble lineup sounding the traditional power chord that marks the close of the summer concert season,Twin Citizens can crawl back under the rock of pre-recorded music for the cold winter months. Even in Minnesota, the Internet has not killed the used record store, nor the people who insist on taking their custom there.

    “I’m well into my thirties,” said Brigid Phister, who lives just a few blocks from the Uptown Cheapo Records outlet, where she pops in about twice a week. “But I keep up.” She was dressed in a dark blue T-shirt, black jeans, black Doc Martens. She revealed a couple of modest tattoos and one visible piercing (nose). She did not look outrageous. But she was outraged. Well, a little. “This is just ridiculous,” she said in disgust, shaking her head and holding up a copy of the Talking Heads’ album Remain in Light. It’s ridiculous because Cheapo’s staff stocked the album—a pivotal work in the history of modern rock and a crucial text of the alternative canon—in its new “classic rock” section. It might have gone in the new “modern rock” section, but there it was, rubbing elbows with redoubtable seventies groups like Foghat and Triumph.

    Cheapo staffers recently remodeled their store, and when they did, they had to figure out a way to make their massive rock section more accessible. “The problem is, when you use just the alphabet, it’s a long walk,” said store owner Al Brown. “I don’t want people to be intimidated by the hugeness of the store.” His idea was to create several little stores within one giant one. In all, there are nine sections under the new scheme.

    But now, Cheapo has a problem. It’s a problem faced by grocers and librarians, Web developers, and radio programmers. That problem is: What goes where? And once it goes where it goes, what do you call it? Unlike groceries, though, music carries with it all kinds of extra emotional baggage. People identify with their music in a way they don’t identify with their mayonnaise. It’s part of what defines them. When you tamper with their music, you are spoiling for a fight.

    There are those who would rather stay out of record stores altogether than be caught browsing through a “classic rock” section. There are just so many connotations they don’t want to be associated with: Do-rags. Mullets. Drum solos. Muscle cars. Bic lighters waving in the stadium darkness. George Thorogood. Even people who like “classic rock” tend to shrink from the label. Blame radio programmers, who gave us that label, but destroyed the music’s reputation by playing the same songs—both good and abominable—relentlessly for the past thirty years. So now, “Radar Love” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” are roughly the equivalent of “Happy Birthday” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Taken together, these criminal acts by corporate radio have led to Brigid Phister’s reluctance to shop in the classic rock section at Cheapo, even though that’s where she must now go if she wants Talking Heads.

    To be fair, it’s not always easy to decide what is “classic rock” and what is “modern rock.” Where should Dave Matthews go? Pearl Jam?

    Brown walked through the aisles with me recently, just as the exhausted staff was finishing up the restocking. The original idea, he said, was to split rock history in two using Nirvana as the breaking point. Every act whose debut album was issued before 1991 (the year Nevermind came out) would go into classic rock, everything that came after would go into modern. This presented problems right away, of course. For one thing, where does grunge itself go? Based largely on classic rock with some punk elements, you might think it should go into classic rock. On the other hand, grunge represented a tipping point in music history, marginalizing eighties hair metal and opening the way for nineties alternative and neo-punk. So bands like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots went into modern rock.

    But there were other, thornier problems. The whole idea behind the Talking Heads, Television, the Clash, and other such bands was to critique “classic rock,” to rail against its excesses, even to destroy it. Nonetheless, those bands were pre-grunge, so into classic rock they went.But then things began to change. CDs started getting moved. REM, another seminal modern-rock band who started in the early eighties, went from classic to modern. So did Celtic punks the Pogues, who probably deserve their own bin labeled “super-alcoholic Irish folk.”

    One reason for the moves was confusion and disagreement among the staff. Many insisted on sticking to aesthetic principle. Others just wanted to get the job done as quickly as possible, and the grunge-based split seemed easiest. But there was another, more prosaic reason: “The classic rock section ended up being a little short,” said Brown, looking slightly sheepish. So, to balance things out, the grunge split was abandoned, and ad hoc decisions were made. Dead Can Dance and Del Amitri went into modern rock, but Talking Heads stayed in classic.

    But if the original reason for this whole thing was to save customers’ shoe leather, it seems that arbitrarily sorting the merchandise would be counterproductive. If you don’t know who is stocked where, you spend a lot of time going back and forth between the sections. I did just that in looking for a Patti Smith CD—walking the entire lengths of both sections before I found it (it was in modern rock, despite having been recorded when Kurt Cobain was still in diapers).

    “It can be a challenge to the customer,” admitted a store manager named Neill Olson. “We keep moving stuff back and forth.” He and the staff have been the objects of “good-natured ribbing” regarding the new layout, but they haven’t heard much in the way of caustic criticism from customers. Most of that has come from the staff itself. “At first we thought the whole thing was crazy,” he said. And while he’s grown “more comfortable” with it, some of his employees are less so.

    “It’s been really frustrating,” said Sarah Johnson, an exasperated clerk. “It’s all based on opinion,” she said, indicating that this was a bad thing. “The Talking Heads,” she said, citing the band that seems to keep exemplifying the conundrum, “define modern rock to me.” She feels for the more confused customers. “I’m confused by it, and I work here.”

    Olson has an answer for the hypothetical complaining customer. “Hey, buddy,” he said, eyeing me closely, and maybe sneering just a little. “There are other things to worry about besides what goes into classic rock and what goes into modern rock, you know?”—Dan Mitchell

  • Out the Inbox

    Each of the offices in the ten-story Ceresota Building on Fifth Street is, like a lot of offices these days, an island unto itself. Each floor of the converted flour mill holds three tenants at most. Some, like the Cooper Law Firm, take up an entire story. So despite the common first-floor cafeteria, interoffice communication seems limited mostly to polite nods in the elevator. There hasn’t been much gossip about the fifth floor, which is the world headquarters of a business that goes by dozens of names but whose office window reads “GeekTech, Inc.”

    Most people in the building assume the company is involved in some kind of software development; others know the partial truth that it’s one of the few dot-coms to have survived the bust. A few of them know the full truth: that GeekTech is an Internet porn outfit. Those who know don’t seem particularly bothered by it, even when they hear that GeekTech may be one of the largest purveyors of online pornography in the country.

    GeekTech’s office looks like any other, with Fortune and Time magazines on the lobby table. Employees seem friendly enough, but keep to themselves. The place is not crawling with scantily clad, silicone-injected porn stars; GeekTech’s business is all virtual.

    But when I mention that the company has been accused of being a chronic source of spam, the neighbors become agitated. Sue, an office assistant next door at Standard Parking, had no idea what GeekTech did. “They’re nice,” she said. When I told her they publish pornography, she shrugged. Whatever. But when I mentioned the possibility that GeekTech’s business may be responsible for a considerable amount of spam, she grimaced and made clawing motions, as if scratching the eyes out of whoever is responsible for infecting her email inbox with a plague of sleazy scams.

    Her ire may be well placed. Because of the way GeekTech and many other online pornographers do business, they frequently become conduits for spam, whether they plan it that way or not. Such companies invite anybody with the time and interest to act as an independent marketer for them—sending traffic to paid porn sites in exchange for a piece of the action. Many so-called “affiliates” do this legitimately, by linking from their own Web pages, for example. But many also do it by sending thousands, often millions of emails.

    Unsolicited commercial email has reached a critical mass. The problem has become so bad that Congress recently passed a law restricting it (though it is largely symbolic and mostly toothless), and people like Bill Gates are investing heavily in technology meant to stem the deluge. Companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and America Online have filed lawsuits against dozens of alleged spammers. Internet service providers say they are so overwhelmed with spam that they have to siphon money and personnel away from customer service and toward making sure their customers don’t get so much spam that they abandon the Internet altogether.

    All spam is annoying, but some is truly offensive. Few people want to launch their email program at work, only to have a large sexually explicit image fill their screen. And most parents would prefer that their kids not be exposed to advertisements for “farmer’s daughter gone wild!”

    One of GeekTech’s more successful properties is a core site called Porn City. Mike Strouse, otherwise known as GeekTech’s brash young owner, calls himself its mayor.

    Porn City opened for business in 1996. It claimed to be the “first free adult host.” It was right around that time that online pornography became a lucrative business and the free-host business model became common. Not coincidentally, it was also around then that porn spam started to become a serious problem. Since then, similar business schemes have proliferated, along with the spam that inevitably is a part of the formula.

    GeekTech’s business works like this: Anybody with an Internet connection, the right software, and a rudimentary knowledge of Web publishing can become a “host” on any one of several sites run by GeekTech. Or, if they’re especially ambitious, they can set up their own independent site. Smaller host operations can get free Web space from GeekTech in exchange for a promise to direct any traffic they attract to the company’s pay sites. Bigger operations usually run their own sites on the servers of their own Internet service provider, and they may act as affiliates for any number of pay-for-porn outfits. These larger hosts tend to be sites that offer hundreds of pages of free pornography, heavily mined with ads and links to the pay sites.

    The upside for GeekTech is obvious: the more independent operators that link to GeekTech’s sites, the more paying customers GeekTech signs up. The Web is rife with such “affiliates,” who in essence act as marketers for companies like GeekTech, which provide the actual material. GeekTech gives its affiliates some pictures to lure users. Affiliates direct the users to one of GeekTech’s big pay pornography sites, such as sushichicks.com (Asian women), babeswithboners.com (pre-operative transsexuals), or legsandhose.com (stockings). For every Web surfer who clicks through to a GeekTech pay site and enters his credit card number, the host of the affiliate site gets a check—commonly about $35, though different programs pay different amounts. The link on the affiliate’s Web page to the pay sites contains a code, which is how affiliates are identified and paid.

    That’s where the problem comes in. Most spam that advertises Web sites includes a link that contains this code, usually at the end of a long URL. That link leads users to the pay-porn site, and the code tells the owner of the site which affiliate sent the user there. If the user signs up for the site, the affiliate gets a cut of the first month’s payment from the new customer. What could be easier?