Adam Musings

Not offended. Personally, I think that Adam blows Elvis out of the water, vocally. But, I didn't want to knock such an icon. But, since you mentioned it.....

THANK YOU, ksha, I love to blog and write and this Adam fandom has provoked so many new thoughts for me. I agree about Adam as visual artist. The little interview today with Johnny Cota was a timely reminder that he is a performer with the whole experience in mind. I suspect he already has costumes in mind for the next tour -- can't wait.

Elvis was my first love and the touchstone I come back to again and again. In so many ways, in spite of his worldwide superstardom, there is the sense that Elvis wasted his life and his potential. He recorded hundreds of songs but so few were worthy of his talent that the legacy is not nearly that of someone like, say, Frank Sinatra, who maintained and developed his artistic integrity.

Tom of Finland ... I used to see his posters around in the college town I grew up in. Of course I had no idea what they meant. Later I saw books and collections of his work in the old Barnes & Noble, back when they used to be cool. Forgot about him for years until I saw the first Lee Cherry photoshoot and thought, Oh cripes, he's reaching back for old Tom of Finland stuff and nobody's going to get it.

Remember the Village People? It was so hilarious how they directly parodied all this stuff. I remember kids in school who insisted that the Village People weren't gay! Fortunately I had a hip dad who clued me in so I could enjoy YMCA the way it was meant to be enjoyed, as a big laugh on the straight world!

Wonder how much of Adam's appeal to women is the opportunity to share a big laugh on the straight guys who run the world?

What does an Artist Manager Do?
Originally published at ALFC
Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 9:37 AM



The news that Adam had dumped 19 Entertainment for Direct Management Group made headlines, but what does it mean for Adam and for us fans? I decided to find out what an artist manager really does and do a little speculating.

An artist manager is responsible for developing an artist as a recognizable brand, marketing him, and helping him exploit his career opportunities to the fullest. A manager oversees an artist’s administrative and financial affairs, including publishing deals, royalties, public relations, publicity, and promotion. Their job is to promote and advocate for the artist and to help him develop a long-range plan for his career and then achieve it. A good manager is not out to make a quick killing but to be there for all the ups and downs. For all this the manager receives a cut of the artist’s earnings (usually 20%).

Until a few days ago, Adam’s manager was “19E,” an entity created to market talent from American Idol. A standard management contract runs for two years and apparently that is what Adam had with 19E. It is worth noting that a recording contract is separate from a management contract. As an American Idol runner-up, Adam received a recording contract from 19 Recordings/RCA, as well as the management contract from 19E. I believe he is obligated to the recording contract for five more years. The American Idol contracting is (just my opinion here) remarkably exploitative and detrimental to the best interests of the young artists involved, and I am glad Adam will now have a manager whose main interest is in promoting him, not the Idol franchise.



DMG’s first job will be to understand Adam’s market, then expand it. Defining a market sounds complicated, but at the most fundamental level it just means understanding the people who are willing to buy Adam’s music, merch, or concert tickets (in other words, us), and then expanding that market to include people who would buy those things, if only they knew Adam existed. In practice, an artist manager needs to bring to the table expertise in trends in music, pop culture, and technology to make an artist successful. We saw little of this with 19E. As far as I could see, they did not invest the time to handle even the simplest business affairs for Adam. Most visibly, they managed to turn an unalloyed feel-good story, the charity:water campaign, into a bona fide fan relations debacle.

How will DMG go about understanding Adam’s market? Through tough analytical work on questions like these:

- Which of Adam’s downloads sell the most? How about his CDs and DVDs? Merch? Tickets? Subscriptions to this site? Which sell the least?
- What new products should be added?
- What campaigns might be effective (newsletters, street teams, videos, chats, blogs, etc.)? Which generate the most feedback? Which result in actual sales?
- What incentives are the most effective (i.e. pre-orders, free downloads, extras)
- Which songs, videos, images, t-shirt designs, etc. resonate the most with fans
- Who are the “super fans” and how can they be leveraged to create more sales
- What fan engagement activities would work the best
- Where are fans clustered (best routes for a tour)
- How much is Adam earning vs. spending
- And much more

From Adam’s viewpoint, a good manager will take a great deal of load off of his shoulders (though he will undoubtedly be involved very closely in what they do). DMG can deal on Adam's behalf with the record company, the music publishing company, the publicist, the accountants, the lawyers, the tour booking agent, and corporate sponsors to create a team that will boost Adam’s success. If he makes lots of money, everyone wins, especially Adam. Critical to the success of the enterprise is that the manager understand and back Adam’s artistic integrity and long-term interests. Again this is something Adam did not have with 19E; it should be a huge step up for him at DMG.

From the music standpoint, DMG will be in charge of working every day to get Adam and his voice out in front of people, from personal appearances to endorsements to corporate sponsorships to getting Adam’s music placed in movie, TV, and commercial projects. Adam has been working on image changes along with the new album and DMG will help Adam make the most of them.

From the fan standpoint, we should start to see some changes soon. For one thing, it will be DMG overseeing this fan club and Adam’s merch store. DMG will be in charge of dreaming up direct and meaningful fan engagement activities and making sure they come off. And I for one can’t wait!

A Million Eyes, You Are The Brightest Blue

Try and see my heart. – Adam Lambert, “Better Than I Know Myself”



In the last few days I have seen quite a few fans shedding a tear for the end of Adam’s “glitter’ period. Adam himself has said in recent interviews that he is over glitter, rhinestones, feathers, and the like. No matter what his look, Adam is a guy with fashion savvy, and I thought it might be fun to think about why Adam has changed his look and what it means for our ride into the Trespassing era.

First all, why did Adam change his look at all? Unlike his current male competition in the pop arena – men like Michael Buble, Bruno Mars, and John Mayer – Adam has no interest in being the guy next door who sings. Instead, Adam has chosen to follow in the path of a previous generation of male stars – men like Elvis, Elton John, and David Bowie – and closely integrate fashions with his act. Many of his fashions for FYE and the Glam Nation Tour were really outlandish – glitter, cod pieces, top hats, platform shoes – and we all loved him for it.


Elton John in 1975

Adam has said that his world travels have exposed him to the world of high fashion. It looks like that means we may be seeing him wearing more silk, fine wool, and cashmere rather than spandex. As a gay man, Adam’s fate is to be judged often on something other than the quality of his music, and I am guessing that his new look is intended to help people pay more attention to the launch of his new music, to see him as a serious artist and not just a larger-than-life personality.

But I think it is more than that.

We all know that Adam deeply admires David Bowie, who of course is famed for his frequent image changes, assuming entirely new characters for different albums and playing with the idea of what is real and what is artifice. I see Bowie’s influence on Adam but I don’t think Adam is really very much like him. Adam emulated Bowie quite consciously with the launch of FYE and it was arguably the biggest mistake he ever made (arguably). Adam presented himself as a camped-up hermaphrodite on the album cover, and as a fantasy sexual dominator in the video and AMA performance of “For Your Entertainment.” Later, in a mastery of understatement, Adam said in an interview that he learned that people “didn’t identify” that much with the images he initially presented.


David Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World, 1970


Adam Lambert, For Your Entertainment, 2009

Adam’s choice of words is telling to me, because clearly Bowie didn’t care whether anyone identified with him. No one is supposed to identify with Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, or the Thin White Duke. In creating a kaleidoscope of images, Bowie made a mystery of his real self that persists to this day. Adam, by contrast, is not about artifice. He does care about what his fans think. He is about “realness.” He has promised to confront difficult issues, deal with real feelings, and look life square in the eye. He has invited us to trespass into his life and I think we would all agree he has trespassed into ours in surprising ways. These emotional responses are completely at odds with Bowie’s created characters.

Instead, Adam reminds me a lot more of something that Elvis’s first producer, Sam Phillips, said about him. Elvis, Sam related, didn’t seem to have any internal boundaries. “He had the most intuitive ability to hear songs without ever having to classify them – or himself … He didn’t draw any lines.” Like Adam, Elvis steeped himself in all the music he could find, and he mixed up all the fashion he could find. Long before he ever became famous, Elvis was wearing crazy combinations of high fashion, work clothes, and African-American hepcat wear, with feminine touches (pink shirts with ruffles, eyeliner). His hair combined the slick looks of the movie stars he emulated with the sideburns of the truck driver he was. When his first employer told him to cut his hair, Elvis found another job instead. Sounds just like Adam’s story about the infamous “Max,” his boss on “The Ten Commandments”!


Elvis’s fashion choices were considered so outrageous by Memphis standards that before he became famous, his friends worried about him getting chased and beaten by rednecks.

I believe that Adam, like Elvis, has a true connection with his audience and wants to display more of himself (sometimes literally) than most other artists would even consider. Whenever he performs, it is a happening, a religious experience, an event. He really lives inside the music; singing, he becomes not a crazy character, but more completely himself. In the new performances of BTIKM on Jay and Ellen’s shows, Adam just belted it out, and left his heart on the floor. Allowed a glimpse of his private passion, we are stunned into submission.

I have no doubt that when Adam goes on the road, he will wear costumes and makeup that can be seen by the fans at the back of the balcony. That is the kind of person that he is. As many people once knew but have forgotten, or pretend they have, Elvis wore his famous, much-parodied sparkling jumpsuits so he could be seen by the fans in the cheap seats at the large arenas where he played on tour. The costumes were created anew at the beginning of each touring cycle and had names of their own among the fans: the Mexican Sundial, the King of Spades, the Peacock. When Elvis put on weight in the last two years of his life, he worried not about his health but that the fans would be disappointed. He responded by making his costumes more elaborate and colorful than ever before.


An Elvis “floorgasm”

That was the least of Elvis’s unfortunate choices during his last months, but what is relevant to this discussion is that Adam has wisely noted that attempting to top himself in a kind of “Glam Nation II” would risk self-parody as Elvis did. Adam has all kinds of choices to make about costuming, style, and on-stage persona, decisions that will determine how well he showcases his music, projects his personality, and connects with us, his fans.

Adam has shown himself willing to experiment with many themes in his costumes and fashion. I expect he will always mix and match ideas about erotic vitality, mythology (aliens, outer space, gods and goddesses), and morality (light vs. dark, good vs. evil, transgressions). I believe that whether he goes down-low or uptown, he will always choose a look that intensifies our experience and keeps us coming back for more.

***

P.S. The title of this blog comes from this sweet song: