Salon.com > Amol Sarva

White star, black galaxy

Wed, 20 Nov 2002 19:00:00 +0000

Astrologers took note last week as a rare alignment graced their star charts. The auspicious sign: one Eminem, two No. 1 slots. This year's prince of hip-hop scored a pleasing symmetry, with the film "8 Mile" and its soundtrack album reigning atop the box-office charts and the Billboard charts in the same week.

In the marvel of a humanized Eminem, once just another angry thug, is yet another symmetry. The white rapper's transformation is hip-hop's, and in his race is the message that black music has gone mainstream. Eminems character in "8 Mile" climbs out of his Detroit ghetto on the merit of his stylish flow alone, an achievement all the sweeter for a young white kid in a black mans world. And so is born the record industrys white knight, he who will carry the budding hip-hop genre farther and deeper into the heart of a mostly white target market. Yet as his roman à clef meditates on hip-hop's color barrier, Eminem's observers miss the fact that this exception proves the rule and that his genre is anything but budding. Hip-hop is all grown up. And now, as much as ever, it is by and about black America.

Evolution, Enron-style

Wed, 13 Feb 2002 20:30:00 +0000

There is a '90s way of doing business that new economy companies "get," and old economy companies create committees to study. It has much to do with flat hierarchies, innovation, casual clothes and foosball tables. It's the theme that ran through every issue of the Industry Standard, every Silicon Valley mission statement and every recent book by "pop" strategy gurus like metaphor-spinner Geoffrey A. Moore or Wired editor Kevin Kelly. And it is exactly this cluster of ideas that is at the heart of "Survival Is Not Enough: Zooming, Evolution, and the Future of Your Company," a new book by Seth Godin, Fast Company editor and self-proclaimed "agent of change."

The twist of Godin's approach is his choice of master narrative: an evolutionary approach to business. On one level, this is just another vapid gimmick connecting a sexy metaphor to the same old recycled management fads: Unleash your company's "mDNA" to make it "zoom"! A clearance-counter library of variations exists on this theme, from "business judo" to "chessmaster strategy." But on another level, Godin's topic gestures at a genuinely interesting idea.

Survival of the losers

Wed, 06 Jun 2001 19:09:00 +0000

The revolution is over. Or so it might appear to anyone reviewing the wreckage wreaked in the past month in the digital music industry. As chronicled in Salon, the purchases of MP3.com by Vivendi Universal and Myplay.com by Bertelsmann were only the latest in a series of sad stories about Scour, Launch Media, Liquid Audio, Emusic, CDnow, Listen.com, Aimster, Gnutella and even Napster. The revolution has choked on litigation, drifted toward bankruptcy and sold out to the establishment at rock-bottom prices.

It wasn't so long ago that things looked very different. Stewart Alsop, general partner at venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and Silicon Valley pundit, went so far as to say, "The music business as we know it is hosed." Fortune and BusinessWeek put Napster's teenage founder on their covers. The record industry was accused, again and again, of failing to "get it." Of the new technology's impact, said Hal Varian, professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, "the business model for music distribution is unlikely to survive."