Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times Magazine
April 6, 2008
Pg. 22
Consumed
By Rob Walker
To the Fallen Records
A week or so before the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, the Pew Research Center released the results of a poll asking Americans roughly how many U.S. military personnel had died so far in that conflict. Only 28 percent of respondents got the right answer: 4,000. (A plurality, 35 percent, guessed 3,000 deaths.) It was by far the lowest percentage of correct responses in the nine times this poll has been conducted since 2004. Another Pew survey, a few months earlier, reported that only 6 percent of Americans named the situation in Iraq as the news story they were following most closely; by comparison, 12 percent named the death of Heath Ledger. If the war were a TV show, it would be canceled.
The war, of course, is not a form of entertainment. And the apparent loss of interest is a source of frustration to current and former military personnel. Among them is a young veteran in Newport, R.I., named Sean Gilfillan, who has found a way to convert that frustration into something positive — a form of entertainment.
In 2006 he founded To the Fallen Records, which has since released three compilations of songs made mostly by current military personnel or recent veterans. He did so in part, he says, because he hoped the resulting music would “give some insight to civilians, because there’s such a wide disconnect. It’s a great opportunity to bridge that gap.”
There’s a challenge here. A variety of books about the war (some written by veterans) have come and gone, and movies and television shows about it have not been hits. So far, To the Fallen hasn’t had much of a boost from commercial radio, Gilfillan acknowledges, and its customer base has been in large part made up of military personnel and veterans. But in the last few months the attention his project has received has come from sources as diverse as N.P.R. and Rolling Stone. And in any case it’s probably a rare thing for the founder of an independent label with absolutely no music-industry experience to have any base of support. Having come to the business of music so recently, he hardly considered traditional retail distribution and has instead pursued an online strategy in both recruiting new acts and promoting To the Fallen.
Gilfillan is a veteran of the Iraq war, having served (as a captain in the Second Brigade, First Armored Division of the Army) an active-duty tour that ended in January 2006. He had a hard time finding a job that he really cared about, and a harder time dealing with his discovery that the war hadn’t aroused the country to either support or debate. Pew’s research indicates declining coverage in news outlets — and in our finely cut media culture, the news itself is just another niche that may or may not hold consumer attention. Everyone he met expressed polite support. “But,” he says he wondered, “what are you doing? Are you joining the military? Are you protesting? What percentage of your life does the war actually take up?” Most people seemed more likely to have a strong opinion about Britney Spears than about Iraq.
He knew there were plenty of musicians in the military. Soon, with a business partner, Sidney DeMello, he formed To the Fallen, started soliciting material via MySpace and was inundated with thousands of songs — including, for instance, hip-hop tracks not only written in Iraq but also recorded there. Whatever challenges the label faces on the demand side, the supply of aspiring musicians who want to share something of their military experience is considerable. (In a reflection of the reality of niche culture, To the Fallen’s compilations are genre-specific: one rock, one country, one hip-hop.) He also got tracks from veterans who have established themselves as musicians, like Keni Thomas and Mike Corrado. Even songs completed in the more conventional setting of a U.S. studio often speak directly of the military experience, which includes the sometimes-bitter feeling of returning to a culture that’s thinking about other things.
Gilfillan muses that if there were, say, a draft, or a 25 percent sales tax to finance the war, those Pew research numbers would be markedly different. But failing that, maybe dispatches from the front lines, filtered through song, might be a way to introduce listeners to what war is like (similar to, he says, the way suburban teenagers use rap as a window on ghetto life). “If we’re going to war, everyone in the country is going to war,” Gilfillan says. “Everyone should be focused on the fact that we’re actually at war. Right now.”
April 6, 2008
Pg. 22
Consumed
By Rob Walker
To the Fallen Records
A week or so before the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, the Pew Research Center released the results of a poll asking Americans roughly how many U.S. military personnel had died so far in that conflict. Only 28 percent of respondents got the right answer: 4,000. (A plurality, 35 percent, guessed 3,000 deaths.) It was by far the lowest percentage of correct responses in the nine times this poll has been conducted since 2004. Another Pew survey, a few months earlier, reported that only 6 percent of Americans named the situation in Iraq as the news story they were following most closely; by comparison, 12 percent named the death of Heath Ledger. If the war were a TV show, it would be canceled.
The war, of course, is not a form of entertainment. And the apparent loss of interest is a source of frustration to current and former military personnel. Among them is a young veteran in Newport, R.I., named Sean Gilfillan, who has found a way to convert that frustration into something positive — a form of entertainment.
In 2006 he founded To the Fallen Records, which has since released three compilations of songs made mostly by current military personnel or recent veterans. He did so in part, he says, because he hoped the resulting music would “give some insight to civilians, because there’s such a wide disconnect. It’s a great opportunity to bridge that gap.”
There’s a challenge here. A variety of books about the war (some written by veterans) have come and gone, and movies and television shows about it have not been hits. So far, To the Fallen hasn’t had much of a boost from commercial radio, Gilfillan acknowledges, and its customer base has been in large part made up of military personnel and veterans. But in the last few months the attention his project has received has come from sources as diverse as N.P.R. and Rolling Stone. And in any case it’s probably a rare thing for the founder of an independent label with absolutely no music-industry experience to have any base of support. Having come to the business of music so recently, he hardly considered traditional retail distribution and has instead pursued an online strategy in both recruiting new acts and promoting To the Fallen.
Gilfillan is a veteran of the Iraq war, having served (as a captain in the Second Brigade, First Armored Division of the Army) an active-duty tour that ended in January 2006. He had a hard time finding a job that he really cared about, and a harder time dealing with his discovery that the war hadn’t aroused the country to either support or debate. Pew’s research indicates declining coverage in news outlets — and in our finely cut media culture, the news itself is just another niche that may or may not hold consumer attention. Everyone he met expressed polite support. “But,” he says he wondered, “what are you doing? Are you joining the military? Are you protesting? What percentage of your life does the war actually take up?” Most people seemed more likely to have a strong opinion about Britney Spears than about Iraq.
He knew there were plenty of musicians in the military. Soon, with a business partner, Sidney DeMello, he formed To the Fallen, started soliciting material via MySpace and was inundated with thousands of songs — including, for instance, hip-hop tracks not only written in Iraq but also recorded there. Whatever challenges the label faces on the demand side, the supply of aspiring musicians who want to share something of their military experience is considerable. (In a reflection of the reality of niche culture, To the Fallen’s compilations are genre-specific: one rock, one country, one hip-hop.) He also got tracks from veterans who have established themselves as musicians, like Keni Thomas and Mike Corrado. Even songs completed in the more conventional setting of a U.S. studio often speak directly of the military experience, which includes the sometimes-bitter feeling of returning to a culture that’s thinking about other things.
Gilfillan muses that if there were, say, a draft, or a 25 percent sales tax to finance the war, those Pew research numbers would be markedly different. But failing that, maybe dispatches from the front lines, filtered through song, might be a way to introduce listeners to what war is like (similar to, he says, the way suburban teenagers use rap as a window on ghetto life). “If we’re going to war, everyone in the country is going to war,” Gilfillan says. “Everyone should be focused on the fact that we’re actually at war. Right now.”