Ranpitsu

Since 1966, when I started in this business, I’ve worked in almost every aspect of entertainment. I’ve been a manager, I’ve run a record label, I’ve produced TV shows and movies—pretty much everything. And, still, the most powerful thing I know of in entertainment is the live experience. The performer onstage receiving the adulation of the fans—there’s nothing like it, and that’s never going away.

Originality is, in its own way, a sign of authenticity: only Bowie could be Ziggy Stardust, because the character, however elaborately garbed and alien-seeming, came from within. Lady Gaga is more like a collection of quotes than a singular performer. Every move she makes, every crazy ensemble she wears, can be easily traced. She’s a human mash-up, a sample bank, recycled and reused.

To Gaga’s detractors — and, I suspect, to dance floor veterans 30 and older, who say she makes them feel old — the borrowed quality of her act undermines her obvious smarts, decent voice and endearingly overwrought sense of purpose. But what pop innovator hasn’t also been a borrower? In the permanent state of Gaga, “new” is a false category, just like “real.” Every thought’s been had by someone who came before and is searchable through Google. Every image has been minted and uploaded to YouTube.

The demise of the record cover has been under way since the arrival of the music video, followed by the shrunken canvas of the CD. Today, the album cover is just one of a dozen requirements for the successful marketing of music. The most important activity for the modern record company is getting artists onto magazine covers or into hit TV shows: the album cover is just one of many surfaces to be filled, no less or no more important than any other. Cover art will survive, encouraged by small independent labels and bands who crave a visual expression of their music. But as far as the major labels are concerned, if they could avoid spending money on record sleeves they would do it tomorrow.

The Coldplay cover, with its intriguing puzzle and uncommercial design, is an almost nostalgic statement of graphic simplicity. It can be viewed as a neat commentary on the death of the old record industry, but in the future it is more likely to be seen as a last hurrah for sleeve design and the notion of record covers as shared generational artifacts.

Whether pop music’s critical elite this year anoint Kings of Leon, Fleet Foxes, TV on the Radio or even Glasvegas, the message is clear: The populist rock movement is dead and gone. The pop music panorama in the 21st century is a bleak landscape of commercial songwriters and professional producers who long ago traded away creativity and imagination in favor of craft and cunning. Artists working in anything less than the lowest common denominators have been marginalized into micro-categories and cut out of any access to mainstream audiences.