Exploding The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group Book

Oh. My. God. I can't believe I actually finished reading this mind numbingly dull book. Several times I almost threw in the towel, even though I really, really hate not finishing a book I start and rarely give up on reading one. What kept me going was the growing irritation and loathing I felt for all the people in this book. It's like how people hate-watch a tv show like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. You sit there amazed at how people so despicable could be given a tv show and you watch them as they live their unpleasant lives, all the while their behaviors adding fuel to the white hot flame of your disgust.

The book starts off as merely dull; a wearisome recitation of random non-famous people who worked in the music industry. I kept hoping the author would go into more details about the nuts and the bolts of the business - about how artists were wooed to the label, what was in contracts between labels & artists, how the specifics of the contracts came into being, details about the recording process, details about album covers, what went into the manufacturing of the albums, details about the album promotions, etc. Instead it was a record of jobs, of hirings and firings, with little detail about what these people actually did. "Joe Blow was hired in 1962. Then he was promoted to another random job and John Doe took Joe Blow's job. Blah blah blah." I. DON'T. CARE. It was impossible to keep track of all the people the author mentions in this book. There are fewer characters in War & Peace. All I could think of, to rationalize this compulsion to name every single executive who ever worked for Warners, was that the author was afraid to piss anyone off, by forgetting to mention him in the book. He was retired when he wrote this book, so I don't know why he would care if he burnt a few bridges but seriously, I cannot think of another reason for this ridiculous inclusion of so much minutiae.

I'd say my full blown active hatred of these executives - So many middle aged white men! So many! - probably started at the beginning of the merger between Warners and Time. My jaw dropped open when I read about the stupidly large amounts of money these guys were pocketing. 60 million cash was what the Warner CEO got in the merger - not counting the stock options and other benefits he also got. And don't get me started on all the golden parachutes these guys put in their contracts. CRAZY. For the majority of people on the planet, when you lose a job either by being fired or getting laid off, you are lucky to get at least a few weeks pay. These dudes? Tens of millions of dollars were given to them. My favorite was one guy, his contract stated that after losing his job he got his full salary paid for the rest of his life (not an uncommon term for these select few) but AFTER HE DIED his family would still get his full salary & all his benefits for two years. Yes, he was still drawing a salary even after death. Props to his evil lawyer for inserting that clause into the contract.

Throughout the book, the author wrote of the sexism, racism and homophobia that was rampant at Warners. Oh, not to say he was aware of all these jerky behaviors! It's not like he was cataloging how awful these guys were. Instead he was sharing "funny" stories. Ugh. About secretaries that "put out" and are "up for anything". Secretaries in their sexy miniskirts. Lots of *nudge nudge wink wink* about the poor women these executives were around. He writes of Freddie Mercury of Queen "prancing about" and fighting with bandmates over an eyebrow tweezer. Oh you know what those queers are like - hardy har har. He writes about the scary rappers of Interscope Records. He says nothing about the actual music - other than to say it's not really music (not like The Eagles, whoo-hoo now that was music etc) but does mention any criminal records they had. And he mentions that he had never, after living in LA over 30 years, gone into the neighborhoods the rappers talk about. Yikes, scary black people live there!

I could probably go on for an hour straight, cataloging all the shitty, selfish, sociopathic behaviors I read about but I don't want to. I had been wondering, after reading so many musicians' memoirs, if the "suits" the musicians bitch about are really all that bad. It turns out that they are worse, much worse, than the musicians ever knew.