For more than a decade, the Pernice Brothers have mostly made plush, romantic orchestral pop that doesn’t gild the lily once tended by the Zombies, Walker Brothers and Elvis Costello. True to frontman Joe Pernice’s working-class nature, the band’s sixth and latest album, Goodbye, Killer (Ashmont), does away with the sighing string section and goes straight for the guitars, from the mod-rock riffing of “Jacqueline Susann” to the Teenage Fanclub power-pop of “Something For You.” After a four-year spell between albums, the Pernice Brothers return with their leanest and most efficient effort to date. Pernice will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Pernice: I’m worried about the near future of the publishing industry. In theory, I’m into the digital distribution of books for a bunch of reasons. (And even if I wasn’t into it, it’s happening, so what can you do.) Here’s why the publishing industry is way more fucked than the music industry: Unlike the music industry, where album sales is only one of many potential income streams for both the artist and the label, the publishing industry only has book sales. Nobody is licensing a passage from Life Of Pi for a Volkswagen ad. “Hey, did you see that new Bourne Redundancy flick? They used the jacket text from The Boy Detective Fails! Awesome!” I don’t care what anyone says; there is some fraction of a buying public that will avoid paying for a thing whenever possible. And there is nothing that can be done about that. Stealing is the second oldest profession. We’ve all heard the saying “nobody reads books.” Well, now even less than nobody is going to (pay to) read books. Sure, the publishers might cut their costs by saving on production, distribution and warehousing of inventory, but that seems like a losing game to me. Workers are going to have to be laid off for the publishers to stay profitable. In the long run, I think there will be more and more micro publishers wither super-low overhead. Will that be a good thing? How the hell do I know? And besides, this is MAGNET, not Business Weekly. I guess the joke’s on me. I make records and write books. Dumb and dumber. Fucked and fuckeder. Now go listen to The Chronic.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZxhtavYyw&feature=related
