Books in Brief
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It by Peter G. Peterson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 233 pp., $24). The nation’s economic Cassandra, Peter Peterson, has now produced Running on Empty, which builds upon previous demographic doomsday scenarios. Commerce secretary under Nixon and now chairman of the Blackstone Group, Peterson contends that western welfare states’ aging populations and swelling budget deficits threaten to bankrupt pension and health care systems. Peterson’s accusation that we risk looting our children’s future rings true; every day many of the 76 million baby boomers are taking early retirements.
An expensive new war on terrorism, congressional gridlock, and polarized political orthodoxies further darken this grim gray dawn. Peterson warns GOP hard-liners that if they intend to starve the welfare state to the point of economic cataclysm, they’d best remember that massive societal crises always favor big-government messiahs.
Peterson proposes indexing Social Security payments to prices, not wages, and mandating personal retirement savings accounts. For Medicare, he prescribes the same combination of personal choice and managed competition currently offered federal government employees–along with annual spending caps and malpractice limits. He wants overhauls of the federal budget process, and an end to “safe seat” gerrymandering of congressional districts and escalating campaign expenditures. Peterson yearns for renewed commitment to civic duty, responsibility, and the future. But the future belongs to those with children. Peterson recognizes that rising affluence and changing sex roles fuel the birth dearth; but he has no remedy for the rising childlessness of Western nations. And that’s the deeper problem.
—Frederick R. Lynch
So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star by Jacob Slichter (Broadway, 286 pp., $21.95). The pop music industry is bizarre in its business practices, generally sucky in its product, and altogether hard for an outsider to understand. Its celebrities include people like Jennifer Lopez whose music no discerning audience has ever celebrated. The radio stations would sooner keep years-old, played-out dreck in heavy rotation than let a single off-beat number past their gates. And then there are the massive record companies, whose manners are said to make Hollywood look genteel.
Fortunately for those curious about what the business is like, there is now Jacob Slichter’s So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star Slichter is the drummer for the Minneapolis band Semisonic, whose second album, Feeling Strangely Fine, was a multiplatinum hit on the strength of its number-one single, “Closing Time,” which, six years after its release, can still be heard in many bars around the time of last call.
From punk bands with their do-it-yourself ethic to singer-songwriters like Ani DiFranco and Aimee Mann who have gone so far as to start their own record labels, the argument that music must be saved from the ravages of corporate America has gotten a full airing. For his part, Slichter doesn’t complain much about the lap of corporate luxury, only studio politics when they result in picking the wrong track for a single. Most impressively, the drummer shows a light touch with vignettes involving the radio programmers who boycott a single if a band refuses to play its festival or if a competing station has started to play the song. But none of these tyrants bests the studio executive who requires recordings be approved by his teenage son.
With a refreshingly untortured conscience, Slichter describes the waves of money splashing around to promote singles through the lobbying of radio stations and the making of videos. These expenditures are tallied as debt, along with recording and touring costs, which the band repays with record sales. Or the band doesn’t repay because of bad sales–and is then dropped, as MCA unceremoniously dumped Semisonic after its third album sold less well than expected.
—David Skinner
