"I'm sure they're sincere about her geographic origin," Bill said. "Light skin tone is not all that unusual among Venezuelans. As a nation, they retain a much higher percentage of Spanish blood in their citizenry than the more familiar Latin American nations like Mexico and Cuba."
"So you'd nut on her too?" Jake asked him.
"Does all molecular motion stop at absolute zero?" Bill replied.
Jake looked at him for a second. "Does that mean yes?" he asked.
"Fuckin' A," Nerdly agreed.
"I thought so," Jake said.
"Okay," said Matt. "Now that we all agree we would nut on her, let's continue our shit-talking session about her and her crappy pop band and how the stupidity and complete lack of musical taste among the American public allowed them to keep us from our rightful place on top of the goddamn music chart."
"You already know the answer to that, Matt," Jake said. "It's a demographic thing. They sing pop music. Do you remember what 'pop' stands for? It means popular. The crap they produce is designed to reach out across the entire demographic spectrum. It's not harsh like rock and heavy metal, it doesn't twang like country."
"Country?" Matt said. "Don't even mention that word in my presence!"
"Forgive me," Jake said. "But anyway, pop bands specialize in catchy tunes that the musically unsophisticated — which, I'm sad to say, make up the majority of the American public — can bop and sing along to. They don't have to have strong lyrics or good guitarists or musical depth of any kind. They just have to have a backbeat you can dance to and a catchy chorus that will stick in your head. If they can get that formula down, two-thirds of the goddamn country will buy their shit, and that crosses pretty much all of the demographics. They're just as likely to have a twelve-year-old boy buying their shit as they are to have a sixty-year-old woman. It's amazing that we've held our own against them with as many songs as we have. You ask me, it's a testament to our musical ability that we're even on the single charts at all, let alone vying for the number one spot."
"Are you saying that we're falling into the pop music category?" Matt asked, appalled at the very thought.
"No, not at all," Jake said. "I'm saying that our core audience are the late teen to mid-twenties crowd — the high school and college age demographic. Those are the ones who like hard rock music and we've dominated that demographic ever since they started playing Descent on the radio. However, our stuff is so musical, so enjoyable to listen to, that we've crossed demographics into the traditional pop music crowd. Most of these people buying CTL singles would never buy a Van Halen single, have never even heard a Led Zepplin or an AC/DC tune, and are only buying our songs because, through no fault of our own, our lyrical and back-beat formula are meeting the requirements they want in pop music."
"So you're saying," said Matt, "that Crossing The Line and The Thrill of Doing Business are being played by people because they like the beat and the chorus?"
"Most of them are probably not even listening to the verses," Jake said. "And if they are, they're not comprehending the meaning of them. Our core demographic catches our meaning and appreciates us both musically and lyrically, but then our core demographic are the people buying the entire album, not the singles."
And so far, that demographic was keeping The Thrill of Doing Business — the album — number one on the album charts for its ninth straight week, with no sign of dropping anytime soon. They had neatly dislodged the albums put out by both Tina Turner and Lionel Richie, both of which had formerly held the number one spot.
"The singles don't mean shit in the great scheme of things," Jake said. "I mean, sure, they're making some money for National and they amount to prestige for the individual songs, but it's the album sales that are first and foremost here. By Christmas, we'll have sold two million copies of Thrill and almost three million copies of Descent. That's where hard rock pays for itself. Our fans — not the pop music faggots who are buying the singles — but the real fans, the guys and girls in jeans and leather, with long hair, the ones smoking pot and chewing shrooms, they buy albums, not singles. Our strength here is that our first album was full of good music. It didn't just have two or three songs that were good and the rest that were shit. People heard Descent the song, then they heard Who Needs Love. That's when the album sales started picking up in the cities we hadn't toured in. Now that we've established ourselves as a group that makes good music, our core fans snatched up copies of Thrill — the album — the moment it went on sale. Thrill is full of good music too. The core fans will develop favorites out of the tracks that aren't even played on the radio at all. That's what we need to focus on in the future. Keeping our core fans happy, not the pop fans."
"And the way to keep the core fans happy," Matt said, seeing where he was coming from, "is to keep making albums full of good music instead of albums with a couple of catchy tracks that will sell singles."
"Exactly," Jake said. "The worst mistake we could make is to start catering to the pop fans. If we start making music that's catchy instead of deep, if we start writing songs with the thought of what the video will look like when its produced, or with the thought of how it will sound on the radio, we're going to fade into obscurity within two more albums. I don't want that."
"Fuck that," said Matt, horrified by the very thought.
"I agree," said Bill. "We need to be our own quality control. But how do we do that?"
"We need to keep doing what we did before Shaver and National Records came along," Jake said. "We need to write our songs and produce our music without interference, to do it from our hearts, just like we used to."
"Crow isn't going to like that," Matt said. "It'll take too long."
They knew this to be true. They had had a meeting with Crow just the day before and he had already started pushing them to get into the recording studio for their next album as soon as possible.
"If we can get you in there by the first of December," he told them, "we could realistically expect to release the next album by the first of April."
"The first of December?" Jake asked incredulously. "Are you serious?"
"Is that a problem?" Crow responded. "I'm already working on reserving the studio time."
"There's the small matter of us not having any fucking material to record," Matt said. "Since you won't let us record It's In The Book and since the other four tunes we got in the hopper aren't album quality, I'd say that's a pretty big problem."
"We haven't worked on anything new since we signed with you," Jake said. "It takes some time to come up with ten tunes."
"More like fifteen since you assholes reject at least a third of what we come up with," Matt said.
"Well," Crow said thoughtfully, "there's always those numbers our songwriting teams came up with as filler for the last album. There are eight of them, including Embrace of Darkness, which is a really good tune. We haven't farmed those songs out to anyone yet so all of them are available to you. That means you would only have to come up with two songs of your own."
"Ahhh," said Matt, "I was wondering when we would get back to this."
"Look, guys," Crow said, "I know you don't like the tunes. We gave into you last time — very much against our better judgment I assure you — but this time we're going to have to stand firm on this. We need ten songs from you by December 1. If you can't come up with them on your own..."
"We're not doing your songs," Jake interrupted. "Period. End of story. That's the final word. I thought we established that the last time we butted heads with you people. We would rather have you sue us for breach of contract, ruin our entire careers, and garnishee every wage we ever earn for the rest of our lives than record a song that someone other than me or Matt has written and composed."