Observers shouldn’t be surprised. Pressed to name a single major act in the past decade that had exercised a so-called “key man clause” and opted out of a contract because a trusted label chief had hit the road, several managers, industry lawyers and record company executives polled could think of just one: the Foo Fighters.

When Capitol Records president Gary Gersh (the former Geffen A&R whiz known for his soft touch among artists) was fired in 1998, Dave Grohl’s post-Nirvana project exercised its key man clause and went free agent, eventually signing with RCA Records. Sources say the band landed a big cash advance and a sweetened royalty rate.

One act in 10 years. Perhaps it’s time to finally bury the myth. So much for the image of a grateful artist attaching himself to a guru’s hip and blindly following to fresh pastures. “It’s an urban legend,” says Jim Guerinot, manager of No Doubt and Offspring, and president of Time Bomb Records. “It’s part of this romanticized version of the business,” says one major label exec.

Adds another platinum act manager: “It’s this big press hype of loyalty and friendship and deep relationships. Fuck that. Ultimately, it’s about ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

On the surface, the key man concept makes a lot of sense. Artists who make their labels enough money deserve an insurance policy on their contracts that says if their favorite boss leaves, the artist is free to go, too. (The music business didn’t invent the feel-good provision; its dealings are just more public.) It’s considered the ultimate in contract prestige. “You’re talking the Garth Brookses of the world,” says manager Ron Stone, who runs Gold Mountain Management, home to Tracy Chapman and Ziggy Marley. “They’re very hard to get. The major record companies will not do it as a matter of business because the executive turnover rate is too great; the life expectancy of a record company president is shorter than a professional baseball player, like two or three years.”

Today, manager Alan Kovac, president of Left Bank Management, which represents the Bee Gees, Lucy Pearl and others, wonders if there are any remaining executives whom artists would want to align themselves with. “Who really matters at the label? If I were Shania Twain, I’d want a key man clause with [producer and songwriter] Mutt Lange. He’s a key man.” (For the record, Twain has a better deal: Lange is her husband.)

In the past, certain label execs weren’t above flaunting key man clauses as a way to boost their own worth, even if the clauses never existed. The most famous case revolved around Walter Yetnikoff, who ran the then-CBS Records (today Sony Music) as his own kingdom. Battling with CBS’s new buttoned-down owner Laurence Tisch (the “evil dwarf” as Yetnikoff dubbed him) in the ’80s, the record exec made sure Tisch knew that if he was squeezed out, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand would march with him. Tisch reportedly had a CBS lawyer look into the contracts; even though the attorney reported back that key man clauses weren’t allowed at CBS, Tisch played it safe. (When Sony let Yetnikoff go in ’90, not a single artist balked.)

Still, there have been some effective examples. Back when record companies were run by their founders, long-term personal relationships were cultivated with artists. Ahmet Ertegun did it at Atlantic; Jerry Moss, at A&M; Mo Ostin, at Reprise and later Warner Bros.; Chris Blackwell was essentially Island; and key man clauses cemented their family approach.

Meanwhile, it is smaller labels that make the best use of such clauses today. “We have key man clauses in a lot of contracts,” allows Danny Goldberg, founder of indie Artemis Records, and former president of Mercury and Warner Bros. “Artemis is a brand new company and artists want to know they’re signing with me, and want assurances that I’ll be here.”

For the most part though, the music industry has matured into such a big business that most key labels are now part of publicly owned companies that answer to Wall Street. There, quirky clauses that can jeopardize key company assets and undercut market value are not exactly embraced.

Says artist attorney Ken Hertz, “It is an extreme conflict of interest to allow an artist to tie their obligations to the executive. That said, recording contracts are easily renegotiated, and while these artists may not be able to leave, they use the turmoil as an opportunity to complain.”

And that’s what key man clauses, real or imagined, have morphed into: negotiating tools against venerable labels that have just lost a high-profile boss. “It’s the best way to get a fat new contract,” explains one manager. “The clause isn’t used in the way it was intended. It’s more a ploy to increase royalty points or get a home studio built.”

“Whitney Houston has some sort of key man clause,” notes Stone. “But whether she exercises it or not, it’s a gun to the head of Arista, because she gets to dictate to them.” According to industry sources, that’s exactly what she’s done, winning a handsome new contract.

Meanwhile, Santana, whose blockbuster comeback album, “Supernatural,” has been consistently credited to Davis’ vision at Arista, didn’t have a key man clause in his contract. Why? When Davis signed him just a couple of years ago, the guitar wizard was not highly sought after. Yet with all the public turmoil surrounding Davis’ exit from Arista (in a messy spat, parent company BMG eased Davis out to make room for younger executive blood), Santana was in the driver’s seat. BMG couldn’t afford the public spectacle of Santana battling to get off Arista in order to accompany Davis (i.e. if Santana thinks Davis is such a genius, why did BMG give him the hook?), so the company wound up throwing a ton of money Santana’s way.

There are other reasons artists don’t leave home to follow their favorite executives. The biggest lure is generally catalog — those old albums that keep selling and selling and selling. “Catalog can constitute 25 to 50 percent of an artists annual income,” notes Stone. But if an act jumps ship, he no longer has a say in how those previous records are marketed or reissued. Labels play off that too, offering to boost the royalty rate on those old records, and even bank on consistent future sales to hand out big advances.

Like the man said, “It’s all about the Benjamins.”

Tonight’s episode of “Duets” then, in which the rules are largely, if not entirely explained, effectively works as a do-over. Each week, the performances are graded — anonymously — by the superstars, and it is their feedback that determines the amateurs’ chart standings. (There is a moment in tonight’s episode when the first performer of the night is told her place on the chart. Anti-climactically, it’s the top one, because she is the only person yet to have sung. “Duets” is still working out its showmanship kinks.) Starting next week, the two contestants at the bottom of the chart will have to face-off in an a cappella duel (no trapeze sadly), and the loser will be kicked off the show. In six weeks’ time, “Duets” will go live and the audience will begin to vote on the outcome of each episode. (As to how the victor of the duel will be determined or what the ultimate winner will win, see the “not entirely explained” clause above.)

When written out, these rules may sound boring enough to seem like the sort of yawn-inducing information a TV show could reasonably hope to spare its audience. But they matter. On all the other major singing competitions, after the winnowing down of the audition rounds — those dark weeks when it becomes clear that America lacks for neither competent singers capable of melisma or the disturbed and delusional — it’s the audience that decides who stays and who goes. On “Duets,” for the next six weeks four relatively articulate performing professionals will be the deciders. “Duets” is temporarily putting off the rowdy, democratic voting process, and its tendency to favor sleepy-eyed white boys, to practice the more aristocratic style of expert judgment found on Bravo’s competition shows. “Duets” may be ABC’s answer to “Idol” and “X Factor,” but in rare moments, it’s also the singing version of “Project Runway.”

Though the four judges are too nice (they start and finish each comment with something like, “I love you,” or “you’re great”) they are also informed. They give feedback — the singing is pitchy, too perfect, too scared, the mic is too close, the dancing is bad. “Duets” does not embrace the sort of serious crit sessions seen on “Runway,” “Top Chef” or “Work of Art,” and it would be much better if it did. The judges seem up to it — not only does Kelly Clarkson effortlessly remain more likeable than anyone who has ever appeared on reality TV, I suspect that there is a Nina Garcia lurking inside of John Legend, whose high standards and perfectionism are belied only by the goofy, childish, wide-eyed expression he gets whenever he is watching a performance he enjoys. Real criticism would also rescue the show from its current in-between state, in which it drags on like any bloated musical performance show, but without the energy or stakes of one since, thus far, “Duets” is pre-taped.

The judges’ participation adds a nice new wrinkle to the format. Though it may mean that we will never get to know the amateur contestants well (this show could be called “Singing with the Stars,” despite the reversal of expertise), it should fuel some future sharp exchanges. Kelly Clarkson may not want to lay in to a reality TV contestant, but she can feel no such compunction about digging in to the over-confident Robin Thicke.

That the judges are performers delivers the same message –albeit at a much softer, less-compelling volume — as those Bravo shows: Talent is great, but greatness is hard, hard work. Robin Thicke may seem most concerned with making himself appear sexy, and Jennifer Nettles may not be able to contain her inner cheeseball, but they, like Legend and Clarkson, are professionals in the most complimentary sense of the word: reliable, knowledgeable, focused, dedicated. What they demand of their duet partners is surely nothing compared to what they demand of themselves. Clarkson, especially, is the embodiment of this. Exactly a decade ago she won the first season of “American Idol,” and she is now back on reality TV mentoring the two least polished, most insecure contestants on “Duets.” She chose them, she says, because they both reminded her of herself. She may be right, but they have lots and lots of work to do before before I see it.

In this sense, the new music video for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s track “No Church in the Wild” is the best actual riot porn I’ve ever seen. The video, directed by Romain Gavras, is five minutes of a graphic, fiery and entirely staged riot. It opens with a young man lighting a Molotov cocktail and lobbing it at a line of riot cops as masked comrades behind him raise their arms in support. Filmed in Prague, but presented as a non-specific yet decidedly European urban battleground, riot cops on horses violently beat the masked crowd, who fight back with fire and fists while Greco-Roman statues look on. Were it not for the surprising appearance of a chained elephant amidst the fray in the video’s final frames, the footage looks (almost) like something straight out of Athen’s Syntagma Square. Jay-Z and Kanye don’t feature in the video at all, which makes artistic sense: I’d be more surprised to see Hove in a riot than a two-tonne elephant.

So what to make of riot porn brought to you by those hip-hop moguls and emblems of excess Jay-Z and Kanye? As I noted last year when purveyors of eau-de-date-rape Axe came out with a scent called “Anarchy”, the depiction of anarchism and riotousness in commercial ventures are at least “a nod to the popularity of dissent.” Gavras, who directed the “No Church in the Wild” video, has long riffed on the idea of social upheaval and fierce state repression in his work. His short film for rapper M.I.A’s “Born Free” told the story of U.S. military forces brutally rounding up and executing ginger-haired civilians. The message was lost on no one, and the video was banned from YouTube. Gavras offers a stylized, gritty and startling depiction of social rupture; that his brutal vision of a street riot is deemed popular and consumable enough to accompany some the most mainstream of music is worth consideration. It’s not just anarchists getting off on riot porn anymore.

This isn’t entirely new: There was the Levi’s jeans commercial last year that featured a young man in Levi’s squaring up to riot cops under the tagline, “Now is our time.” The ad was pulled from British television in light of the summer riots in London. The video for Kanye and Jay-Z’s anthem with Rihanna, “Run This Town,” also featured gangs in black bandanas — but it was a far cry in terms of realism and police-on-protester brutality from the riot scenes in “No Church in the Wild.”

My friends at the New Inquiry magazine, Malcolm Harris and Max Fox, have argued that riot imagery and revolutionary calls in products can serve as genuine threats to capitalism, even though they may be expensive ad campaigns or music videos. In a published dialogue between the two (which is well worth reading in its entirety) Fox and Harris agree that subway ads and select lyrics from pop songs are ample materials for would-be rioters. So, while some might see the depiction and glorification of rioters in a hip-hop video as exemplifying capitalist recuperation (even Molotov cocktails can help sell records now!), Harris and Fox suggest that these images can be reappropriated by anti-capitalists — after all, the accessibility of a music video featuring a riot suggests, at the very least, that this sort of dissent resonates. Indeed, Harris quipped on Twitter today, linking to the Jay-Z and Kanye video, “Oh hey, capital, are you sure that’s such a good idea?” and continued to joke about whether the hip-hop artists endorsed black bloc anarchism. We don’t need to make new anti-capitalist propaganda; Kanye and Jay-Z can have Romain Gavras do it while they accidentally offer up revolutionary slogans in their otherwise problematic lyrics. The bridge for “No Church in the Wild”, sung by Frank Ocean, is an insurrectionist two-liner: “I live by you, desire; I stand by you, walk through the fire.”

Of course, none of this is to say Kanye or Jay-Z should be praised as agents for revolutionary change. Jay-Z, aside from celebrating a life of unadulterated excess, is a key voice behind developer Bruce Ratner’s controversial Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which has been widely criticized for pushing people out of their homes and failing to provide affordable housing and jobs. Meanwhile, Kanye is a famous jerk; he walked by Zuccotti Park once to check out Occupy Wall Street last year, but, again, he is mainly a jerk.

And, it’s worth noting, that the way in which the rioters are glorified in the music video is problematic. I question Gavras’s decision to only feature male rioters. It’s a common criticism of black bloc tactics that they alienate women and perpetuate a masculinist expression of anarchist street actions. Problems of patriarchy in radical scenes certainly abound — indeed it’s an issue too huge to really address here. Suffice to say, however, women across the world who have fought riot police in the streets might take issue with Gavras’s ubiquitously male scene.

But what strikes me the most, and what might make a lot of anarchists and other proponents of street confrontation feel pretty smug, is that Kanye and Jay-Z have the resources to produce pretty much any kind of spectacular music video imaginable. And they opted for riot porn.

Watch the “No Church in the Wild” video below:

What I remember is when my parents bought that brand-new album “Abbey Road” and played this LP on their brand-new faux-antique console hi-fi, right about when they were separating. That had some impact. I can remember feeling like “Golden Slumbers,” McCartney’s brief, melancholy lullaby from that Beatles album, was a lullaby for me in a time when I could have used one.

Well, now I am a dad myself, and I don’t want to make my daughter have to listen to stuff she doesn’t want to listen to (though, in fact, I have tried to sneak Sun Ra onto the stereo in her presence). I don’t want her to feel that music is an intergenerational chore. I would do almost anything to make sure that music, for her, is something to love.

And yet: Nothing makes me happier than when my daughter does take to a particular piece of music on her own. Recently, e.g., she became obsessed with a very excellent tune by the Pogues. It was “If I Should Fall From Grace With God,” which my daughter refers to as the loud-and-fast song. As in: Papa, play the loud-and-fast song. No delight is more delightful than dancing to the loud-and-fast song with a 3-year-old specialist in the pogo.

And yet, sometimes, it must be observed, the sadder songs are the more genuine songs, or: there are times when the sadder songs come into focus, or: perhaps affirmation in a song is a thing of which one should always be suspect. And so there was a day recently that I was spending the day with my daughter, just me and her, and after all the usual pastimes had been exhausted I said, at last, falling into the trap of so many dads, We still have a few hours here, how about we listen to some music?

I put on “Let It Be.” By the Beatles. In fact, I put on the song “Let It Be.” And I’m talking about the version from “Let It Be,” the Phil Spector production, not the George Martin-produced single that you can find easily, not the “Let It Be … Naked” version, which I actually love, too, because I like hearing how guitarist George Harrison thought about what he did on the various recordings. I played my daughter the “Let It Be” I knew best, and which had bludgeoned me much as “Golden Slumbers” had, back in the day, when things at home were coming unglued.

I played the song for her while I was making her a sandwich. It’s really unusual for a 3-year-old to stop moving, unless she’s asleep, and my daughter was not asleep. But she was pretty still. She was transported by the song. Look, you have heard this song 10,000 times, I have heard this song 10,000 times, we are somewhat impervious to the charms of this song, even though it’s a very beautiful song, but when you play it for someone else, in this case someone else who has never heard the song at all, you get back something lost, the original emotional freight of the thing. And with “Let It Be,” which is apparently about a dream Paul had about his dead mother, and, self-evidently, also about the Beatles breaking up, it is hard not to feel that the title, the refrain, is sung with real insight, a real understanding about what it feels like to need the sentiment expressed therein. There really is a lot of misunderstanding and disagreement and dispute in the world, all of it essentially pointless, our time here is so brief, and it would be better if we could all just …

Now, when you’re 3, a sentiment of this kind has maximum impact when repeated, but it’s repeated a lot here, in the song, over and over, and my daughter picked it up quick, the theme, but not so quick that she didn’t want to hear the song again, and so I played the song again, and finished making the sandwich, and then she wanted to hear it again, and I played it again, and then again, and on the third or fourth repetition, that plaintive, moving quality had begun to empty out again, and I was just hearing the song I had heard 10,000 times, and then my daughter asked for it a few more times. We played it six times. That first day. And we have played it more times since. Papa, play that “Let It Be” song.

What’s it like to have resounding success in the dad-playing-music-for-the-kid sweepstakes? I am not sure I want my daughter feeling like she has to like something just because I played it for her. I would like to provide an opportunity, make the music available, then step out of the process, so that she’s absolutely liberated, so that she has self-determination in the matter of her musical interests. That way she can die for Uncle Rock or Dan Zanes if that is what she wants. But I can’t deny, and especially not here, the sense of pride that I feel when she likes something that I too liked, once upon a time in the suburbs. I hope she can do the same when she’s a parent. Maybe one day she’ll share with me things she likes with the same enthusiasm. And maybe one day I can sell her on Sun Ra.