by Kim Ross
Assholes, all of them.
Renee looks up from her phone suddenly – Will must be momentarily indisposed – and looks concerned for a moment. It’s the best acting I’ve seen all night. “Wait,” she said. “You don’t even want to talk about Max?”
“Why would I do that?” I ask.
“What happened with Max?” Alice says, suddenly interested.
“Nothing major,” I say.
Renee scoffs. “They broke up,” she says.
“What?”
“Breaking up is nothing major?” Tiff says. “How do you figure?”
I shrug. “We’re not like, fighting. We just agreed to break up.”
Alice frowns. “Why?”
“He got promoted,” I say.
Renee rolls her eyes. “Jeanine feels that if Max is travelling on weekends they won’t be able to maintain a relationship,” she says.
“That makes no sense,” Alice says. “Why—“
“Our relationship relies on communication and intimacy,” I say, sighing. “Without those, we’ll drift apart. I have to work late on weekdays a lot, so if he’s travelling weekends we’ll hardly see each other. I’ll suspect him of cheating, he’ll be unsatisfied, and then when—“
“You’re breaking up with him because you think he’ll break up with you later?” Tiff asks.
“Can I finish?” I say.
“I just want to understand what’s going on,” Tiff says.
“He was the one that brought it up, technically,” I say. “I think he broke up with me.”
“But you’re the one that had established that you didn’t want to be in a long distance relationship,” Tiffany says.
“I didn’t ask for your psychoanalysis bullshit,” I say. “I don’t even want to talk about this. We didn’t have a fight. We’re still friends. We just both decided we wanted to break off the relationship. Amicably.”
“If you’re on such good terms why are you sleeping on my couch?” Renee asks.
“I just felt like I wanted some space,” I say.
“Call him,” Tiffany says.
“What?”
“Call him,” she repeats. “Right now. If you’re such good friends, invite him to meet us. He’s a friend, he can join us.”
“This is our night, though,” I say. “No boyfriends.”
“You broke up,” Tiffany says. “He’s just a friend now. It’ll be okay.”
“Why do we call it girl’s night then?” I ask.
“We can make an exception this once,” Alice says.
“I don’t think that’s right,” I say. “It’s been just the four of us for –“
“Times change,” Tiffany says. “Call him.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Okay,” Tiff says. “I’ll do it. He’s my friend too. Unless you didn’t break up in that perfectly sanitary way you described and you’re not on good terms and you still have feelings for him, of course.”
I don’t say anything. This isn’t fair. Of course I’m still a wreck so soon after our breakup. Just because we worked it out logically doesn’t mean we dealt with the emotional attachment.
“Well?” she says.
“Don’t call him,” I say. I regret it instantly. Having Max here would be infinitely more pleasant than having to see that smug expression on her face. At least he would give a shit how it made me feel.
Alice pipes up next. “I remember when I broke up with –“
“Can we just not talk about it right now?” I say. “I just need some space.”
“Is there anything else to talk about?” Tiff asks.
Nobody volunteers anything. “I’m writing this cool article for work,” I say slowly.
“The one about the Korean band?” Renee asks. “You said it was just a fluff piece.”
“I was wrong,” I say.
“Which one?” Tiffany asks.
“All of them, now,” I say. “Phil wants me to focus on one that the labels are pushing over here really hard, but the entire industry is corrupt so I get to write an exposé.”
“Corrupt how?” Tiffany asks. I spend an embarrassing amount of time looking for some sort of buried quip about Max before I realize she’s actually leaving it alone.
“Well, for one, there’s no soul,” I say. “The industry is dominated by about three labels, and they don’t sign existing artists usually. They recruit kids when they’re 12 or 13, send them to a private boarding school for musicians, then assemble the most attractive and promising ones into bands. The contracts are ludicrously unfair and they can get away with it because they’re signing some kid with no bargaining power that wants to become a star because they don’t know any better.”
“Sounds like the domestic scene,” Renee says.
“At least here bands have some bargaining power and some amount of artistic control,” I say. “Also the contracts are shorter – in Korea there was a group that had to sue because their 15 year contract was unfair. And the bands here make money off of live shows and merch, if nothing else. In Korea that all belongs to the label.”
“Whatever,” Renee says. “Doesn’t mean it’s soulless.”
“Stricter contracts mean the labels control every aspect of the band members lives. Literally. It’s written into their contracts that they have to let the label know where they are at all times. When they’re training, they can’t have phones. The music is drafted for hire – sometimes they’ll hire roomfuls of composers and producers to all write songs and then pick the best one – and the band gets no choice in it. When they need an extra shot of publicity they’ll hire an American producer or even buy unreleased songs from artists in America. Everything the band members do is to promote the public image and every second of their life is managed by the record label. There’s this whole network of reality TV and televised performances to keep them in the public eye – and they’re not creating more content for this; most bands do one or two song sets, so they play the same soulless manufactured crap over and over and then go on Korean Fear Factor or whatever and then play the same two songs, over and over again, for months on end. One of the major bands – probably the second most popular girl group – issued a statement a couple months ago about how they’d had 2 days of break time over the past two years. Two days. The rest was travelling around and performing – mind you, they lip-sync everything and do very little actual singing, but they do fairly physically intensive dances at every performance—“
“Do they play their own music?” Alice asks.
“No. One band does, I think. Maybe a few more –“
“If they don’t play their own music or sing then why are they a band?”
“The term I read most was ‘idol group,’” I say.
“But they’re just dancers,” Alice says.
“I think the point she’s trying to make is that they’re just puppets,” Renee says.
“More or less,” I say. “It’s all fake manufactured crap – hell, the labels pay for most of the band members to have plastic surgery, too.”
“So they’re underpaid fake idols created by the record label and television industry,” Tiffany says. “Doesn’t sound too different than anything Simon Cowell’s been involved in.”
“Idol forces the winners to sign a one year contract after one performance a week for a few weeks,” Renee says. “After the show they don’t have much control over the singers – just artistically, and just for that year. This sounds a lot worse.”
“Still, they give artistically gifted kids a chance to perform, even if they do underpay them,” Tiff says. “It’s not that bad.”
“And the sex stuff?” I say.
“What sex stuff?”
“The boarding schools these labels run are full of girls chosen because they’re pretty and talented, but only a few of them get picked to form bands and make music. How do you think the men in charge go about selecting them?”
“You’re saying that they have to sleep with people fro
m the label to get in the industry.”
“I’m saying they don’t always have a choice,” I say.
Tiff frowns. “And you have proof?”
“I’ve got several anonymous sources from within the industry,” I say. “They all verified it independently.”
“So famous people don’t play by the same rules sexually as everyone else,” Alice says. “That happens here too. Maybe not as ubiquitously or involuntarily, but it still happens – you remember that idol contestant that slept with Paula?”
“No,” Renee says.
“Korean culture is like 1950’s America with regards to sex,” I say. “No kissing in public. No sex before marriage. No marriage before you’re 30. This makes all the sex stuff bad, but it makes the content of the music almost worse. The music industry takes all of their cues from the modern American scene, so you get half naked girls singing ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?’ or old Kesha songs or whatever and they’re not allowed to date anyone because the image of a 20 year old girl with a boyfriend is too slutty for their target audience.”
“So you’re saying that American music is like smallpox?” Tiffany says.
“I’m saying the context matters,” I say. “It’d be like if Jehovah’s Witnesses started a cartoon that imitated and drew heavily from South Park. “
“I’d watch that,” Renee says.
“I don’t think you’d last an episode,” Alice says. “I couldn’t get you to finish Reefer Madness with me.”
“I’m a bit too young to appreciate Reefer Madness,” Renee says. “Jehovah’s Witnesses and South Park are more generationally relevant.”
“I still think it would be more sad than funny,” Alice says.
“People make culturally inappropriate music in the US too,” Tiff says. “Marilyn Manson is an obvious example – hell, rock and roll has been historically culturally inappropriate , and punk is entirely dedicated to being against mainstream norms.”
“But that’s because the artists choose to do so, not because they’re being forced to imitate a foreign idiom to sell more records,” I say. “This is like – there’s really no good example, because most American music is written by the artist—“
“Max Martin,” Renee says.
“Who?” I ask.
“He’s written 38 top 10 hits over the last sixteen years,” Renee says.
“What does that –“ I start, but she cuts me off.
“Artists don’t universally have a large degree of control when it comes to writing and producing their songs. There’s a range of how involved they get -- it really runs the gamut. Some don’t care who writes their songs or how they’re mixed. Some create all of their own material and attend every mixing and mastering session to make sure the final result fits their vision. It’s hard to make a comparison to something that varies that much.”
I frown. “But they have a choice,” I say.
“I guess,” Renee says. “At the end of the day, though, the publisher has to be okay with whatever content is on the record, and that means that if an artist is tied town to a label by contract, that label can exert a lot of control on what actually gets put on that disk.”
“Do you have evidence that Korean artists don’t like the music they record?” Tiff asks. It’s like a tag-team wrestling match in here – as soon as Renee gets done, Tiff’s the next one in attacking my ideas. At least they’re off of Max for now.
“I have a lot of circumstantial stuff that points to that,” I say.
“So there’s no evidence,” Tiff says.
“It’s pretty heavily implied—“
“But never actually said –“
“It sounds like a mess,” Renee says.
“Thank you,” I say.
“—but not much worse than the mainstream American industry,” she continues. “Just more… obvious. Also we have a lot of counterexamples, people who succeed because of their own talent or luck and not because they have a label pressuring them to churn out more hits every year. Point is that there’s a lot of fucked up things about the American music industry and we can do more to stop it.”
“I know, but I couldn’t print an article about that,” I say. “We run music ads from major labels all the time.”
“Still seems a bit hypocritical,” Renee says.
I frown. “It’s the best I can do,” I say.
“How do you feel about Max?” Tiffany asks, suddenly.
I’m furious for a moment that she’s taking us back to this subject before I realize it’s because I’m avoiding it, not because I’m at peace with it. They all saw this instantly, of course, because they have the clarity of separation. Still, I feel like they were far more bitchy than they had any right to be.
I force myself to respond. “I miss him,” I say. “I miss him a lot. I feel like my relationship with Max has been the best relationship I’ve had by far. I really enjoyed having him in my life. Now he’s gone, and it’s not because we’re fighting or we realized we’re incompatible or anything. We just… separated. For no reason. Except there was a reason, that we’d almost certainly fall apart if we hadn’t broken up, since we wouldn’t have any time together, and I can’t ask him to turn down a promotion for me. He’s doing what he loves. I love him. I won’t stand in the way of him being happy, even if it means I can’t be with him.”
“Have you told him this?” Tiff says.
“No,” I say. “There’s no point. The reason our relationship worked was because we communicated and planned and thought about things like this. We get through conflict by being rational. The rational solution here is that we’d both be happy with other people, in Max’s case someone that can either travel with him or deal with him being absent, and in my case someone who’s going to be there for me more often. Even if I can never find someone that only makes me 75% as happy as Max makes me that guy’s going to be better in the long run. Once Max starts travelling I’ll barely get a third of the time I have with him now.”
“Sometimes I think you’re too reasonable for your own good,” Alice says.
“I’ll drink to that,” I say.
I just wish I knew what it meant.
7
The next day, I arrive at work a few minutes late because Will has the day off and he and Renee are presumably doing it in the shower, delaying my morning routine for at least an hour. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but normally I wouldn’t be competing for my position with an asshole new hire that my boss already favors over me. Jeremy is lucky I didn’t hit the usual Friday traffic. As it stands, my frustration levels are high enough that I’m liable for an FAA citation for not having those fancy blinking lights at the top. When I step out of the elevator to find Jeremy at my desk already, slouching in my chair like he’s already replaced me it’s all I can do to not walk over and drive my knuckles into his pretty, smug face until he looks like Jared Leto in Fight Club.
He looks up as I approach, resembling an owl: hooded lids, dark circles under his eyes like the sloppy spillovers of the coffee that he’s resting right on my desk, no coaster. He looks disheveled, his hair mussed, his face sporting old growth from the night before, like he hasn’t found time to shave – or change his clothes, I realize, as he’s wearing the same thing as yesterday. A moment of pity surfaces but I drown it without a thought – whatever he’s putting himself through, it’s in the ultimate goal of pursuit of my job, and I need to be equally ruthless to keep it.
“What are—“ I start, furious.
He spins to face me, creaking. “I owed you an article from yesterday,” he says.
I recognize this sensation from two days ago, when Max dumped me – my mind is numb, refusing to allow this information entry lest it upset the status quo of my life too much. I power through it. He’s not going to let me live in ignorance. I need to accept this and move on.
“Go on,” I say.
“You didn’t just think I was going to take that column you wrote without paying you back, did you?�
� he asks.
I don’t say anything, holding my breath. This has to be some sort of scheme to get at me. Has to.
“At the Globe we had a policy where if you used someone else’s notes for anything, you paid them back in kind with whatever they were working on. I assumed that was how you did things here.”
“So you—“
It’s weird being interrupted by a person who’s little more than a half-dead victim of sleep deprivation so often, but he still manages in a slow, methodical way, talking under me more than over. “I fleshed out your notes on the article on Korean music. It’s really interesting stuff, actually – you were on to a lot of great leads that I don’t think I would have found on my own. It’s still not quite the state of the column you gave me, but if you give me an hour or two to finish –“
I walk around my desk to stare at my computer screen, finally. He’s taken my notes and enhanced them – I can see the untouched originals in bold red, each now followed by dozens of tiny black lines. Jeremy’s notes. Phone numbers, web addresses, article references, and contact information. Each one accompanied by an extensive description, detailing what it is and how it supports my article. A couple even have long purple paragraphs in tow – interview transcripts, from the looks of it.
The quality is amazing. I’d found hints and rumors of sexual scandals, but hadn’t been able to get anything concrete due to Korean law dictating that defendants names be hidden from the press. Jeremy’s pinned down a major CEO on trial for 40 odd counts of sexual abuse within the last month. I’d hinted at salary problems and bad hours, he’s gotten exact figures for both hours worked and pay rates and exchange rates to compare various groups to executive assistants here in the states. I think I mentioned exhaustion once in my notes, and he’s got accounts of using IV drops in between performances to counteract an otherwise impossible schedule. And then there’s the dozen odd pages of interviews.
“You’ve been interviewing people in the middle of the night?” I ask.
