Ida Maria photo by kristiecat via Flickr

The first time I ever heard Norwegian singer/songwriter Ida Maria Sivertsen – better known as just Ida Maria – was on the late night TV garbage dump of a show known as Last Call with Carson Daly.  I was a little bit drunk and only half-paying attention when she came on the screen; she was performing the song “Keep Me Warm,” a ballad where she professes her love for and emotional dependence on cigarettes and coffee.  My ears perked up a little bit, thinking it was a lot more unusual than your typical 1am television fare, but in the end I didn’t then give it much thought.

A few weeks later my wife told me she’d heard a song called “Oh My God” by Ida Maria that she liked a lot.  I thought, “Oh, that’s the weird Norwegian girl I saw on Carson Daly” and again failed to think about it beyond that passing recognition.

Not long after that, we were in the car and heard the song “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” on 101X, the local horrible alterna-rock radio station here in Austin, Tx.  My eyes widened and my jaw dropped at what seemed a cheap gimmicky stab at creating an ephemeral “hit” single.  Then I heard “Oh My God” again, as background music on the cringe-worthy teen drama Gossip Girl.  If context is crucial for understanding and interpreting art, then Ida Maria’s context (a hopeless late night talk show, an awful radio station, and a  bad teen drama) seemed to place her in the middle of some kind of musical Hiroshima.  It’s no surprise then that I had completely written Ida Maria off as being nothing more than another tick on the very long list of hopeless bands that perpetually populate the revolving door of the major label music industry.

But then something surprising happened.  As my wife continued to insist that Mme. Maria was redeemable, and the number of times that I had involuntarily run into the thing on TV and radio steadily increased, I realized that “Oh My God” was not just a good song, but, steeped though it is in corporate music industry production values and promotional schemes, it’s a shockingly fantastic burst of raw energy and emotion that qualifies as something approaching genius. And though it took some amount of mental separation, when I managed to remove myself from the unappealing contexts in which I kept hearing the song, what was left approaches moving and memorable: confessional songwriting with an emotional bareness that is incredibly hard to achieve without sounding phony or facile.

The single naturally led me to Fortress Round My Heart, an album jam packed with excellent songs from start to finish that cover the full range of human emotion without ever indulging in self-loathing or sentimentality.  Here, Maria’s incredibly strong singing voice is almost painfully honest as it soars, cracks, groans, and laughs over the perfectly succinct ten song, 31 minute spread.  It is, quite simply, an excellent album that’s found its way into heavy personal rotation and has yet to bore me.

Despite my discovery that Sivertsen was, in fact, not a vacuous wannabe pop star, there is still an inherent problem with the way her music is presented and perceived. Trapped as she is by her major label contract, her situation is indicative of a problem that has forever plagued the corporate music industry: It has been documented that nine out of ten major label albums fail to turn a profit, making the record industry the most successful business in history to have a 90% failure rate.  Major labels are historically concerned with commerce rather than artistic value, employing A&R men who are completely out of touch with what makes a quality artist.  The continuing integration of independent labels (run by music lovers rather than businessmen) into the public consciousness has sent the major label business model into a tailspin as they no longer have a stranglehold on what music the public receives.  Normally, the commercial failure of so many artists is not worth a mention but every so often the industry stumbles upon something that’s actually good; such is the case with Ida Maria. And it’s here that that the real tragedy of the major label model is revealed.

Somehow Sivertsen landed a major label contract very early in her “career” and has since lost a huge amount of control over how she presents herself and the types of events she plays.  Her intense live shows are often the subject of praise, but beyond that it seems that every level of her creative output is steeped in some awful record label employee’s bad idea.  It’s a holistic corporate failure. For starters, Fortress’ cover screams “bad major label release” (comparable to “Silver Lake” by Vic Chesnutt, another incredibly talented songwriter plagued by the bad taste of corporate music business), and the audio production on the thing is so clean and slick that it takes away from the music’s appealing rough edges. Add to that the facts that (deep breath here), in two years, her still-only album has been repackaged and re-released three separate times (along with several singles and FOUR different elaborate music videos), her Web site showcases banner advertisements for other musicians, she’s been sent on tour after awful tour (the worst offender being a Perez Hilton-sanctioned tour earlier this fall), she has played tons of big outdoor festivals where it always seems she’s performing in the middle of the afternoon, she has appeared on Carson Daly’s show at least three times in less than a year, and what is clearly the stand out track on her album (“Oh My God”) was recently completely ruined by a confounding mindfuck of a guest vocal spot by Iggy Pop (with an accompanying FIFTH music video), who clearly has never once been in the same room as Ida Maria.

It boils down to this: Someone is throwing a lot of money at Ida Maria but the decision-making behind it is so poor that it’s depriving her of her natural  audience – the folks who are turned off by such brash, tasteless commercialism.

So please, whoever it is that’s in charge of Ida Maria’s destiny, let her out of her contract.  Just let her go.  She is an interesting, unusually captivating musician who doesn’t deserve to suffer through an Iggy Pop collaboration, those Mariah Carey ads on her Web site, or any kind of association at all with the cultural nightmare that is Perez Hilton.

In an apology note written to explain her eventual  leaving of the Perez Hilton tour she says, “I am just completely exhausted … The new music is in forefront of my mind.”  So come on, Island/Def Jam, give Ida Maria the control she needs of her songs and allow us to hear the new music, free from all ill associations borne from committee thinking and the terminal breaths of a dying system.

If we are to believe the Wikipedia crowd, the word gimmick has roots that are … somewhat less than noble. “According to the OED,” writes, uh, someone, “the word … first [appeared] in 1926, defined in the Wise-Crack Dictionary by Main and Grant as ‘a device used for making a fair game crooked.’” And if we trust team Wiki, then it seems that the term has made very little progress: “In marketing,” it continues, “product gimmicks are sometimes considered mere novelties, and not really that relevant to the product’s functioning, sometimes even earning negative connotations.”

Indeed.

So, as gimmicks go, the one recently announced by Motormouth Media on behalf of the band HEALTH is relatively harmless. For those not willing to click, it goes something like this: Band makes colored tickets. Band distributes CDs with the colored tickets hidden in a select few jewel cases. Lucky buyers of said CDs get neat-o prizes. It’s all so very wholesome. ‘Course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something sinister lurking behind the giveaway — at least if you’re a band or a label or anyone else in the CD-buying food chain. For these lucky chumps, the HEALTH “CD Sweepstakes” signals a dark turn indeed, one which has been coming in the object of slumping CD sales for quite some time but needed something of an announcement before it got here. And this sort of incentivized buying would be it. This, finally, is the formal end of the age of CDs.

Way back in 2006, blogger Jabari Zakiya had what he calls an “epiphany.” “It became clear,” he writes, while he was contemplating the usefulness of flash drives. “[T]he end of CDs is near … And when I say CD I don’t just mean regular old 700 MB compact disks, I also mean DVDs, and the new Blue-ray and HD DVDs optical disks too. In fact, I see a world in the near future (5 years?) where, like the floppy, optical disks will take their place in the trash bin of yesterdays technology.”

His reasoning is relatively sound: “[F]or all the benefits optical disk storage brought,” he writes “there was an Achilles heel inherent in their use — they require a mechanical optical drive to play them with. And being mechanical beasts, by nature, they are subject to all the inherent negative aspects of such things (size, weight, fragility, etc).” Basically, the things were bound to be made unwieldy by future technologies, and they would, eventually, as he terms it, go the way of the floppy disc.

Zakiya’s post is something of a well-duh — at least in terms of technical advancement; innovation happens, popular modes of … well, everything, are replaced by more effective means. But for the music industry, where CDs represented the major means of product distribution, the technical trump didn’t just signal some kind of evolution. Nope, the end of CDs was, instead, brought on by a total re-wiring of the media acquisition process — an effort which was a giant work around of the exchange of money for music.  Not only would the CD become obsolete, but the whole industry that relied on it for delivery of their product was also threatened with extinction.

Cue the law suits.

Thanks to another innovation, the music industry averted crisis and has started to right the ship — without CDs. And that brings us back to the HEALTH gimmick: Faced with the prospect of having to sling a product that no one really wants, someone came up with the brilliant idea of making the things into sweepstakes entry tickets. Whether or not anyone really wants to win an “LP test pressing autographed in [members of the band's own] blood” is something of a crapshoot. But at least it’s not selling CDs.