The Music Industry's Broken Record

As the 51st annual Grammy Awards wrapped up last night, the 2009 version of a broken record was heard around L.A.'s Staples Center: A plea to President Obama.

Neil Portnow, president of the industry group The Recording Academy, didn't ask for a bailout or tax cuts or even a federal crackdown on file sharing. Rather, he wanted a new Cabinet position in Obama's administration, a Secretary of the Arts.

Isn't that a little ... counterintuitive?

It's clear music vets have found an administration with better agreeable odds than in the past. The Grammys have twice awarded now-President Obama for audio renditions of his nonfiction works, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took home a prize in 1996 for the spoken-word version of It Takes a Village, making for an already Grammy-packed Cabinet.

Word is that producer Quincy Jones, a long-time supporter of such a potential position, is the arts community's No. 1 pick for the job, which would add 27 more gilded gramaphones to Capitol Hill's collection.

But this raises the question: With the arts already well-represented and an administration that seems to care for the cause, is a formal and official position really necessary?

After all, there is a long history of American arts flourishing in tough economic times.

Film became a major national art form during the Great Depression, when people found the ability to escape into other peoples' lives through theatre entirely worth their hard-to-come-by cash.

Fashion designers meshed with grunge musicians during the economic recession of the early '90s and created a new look at working-class America characterized by old workday standbys like heavy footwear and flannel.

With the country back in recession, federal tax receipts look more like a New Orleans piano player's tip jar than a famous film director's nest egg. As the president enforces salary caps on government employees and pushes to pass another bailout bill, it might not be an ideal time to create a new and pricey Cabinet position for a culture that has traditionally fared well without guidelines or formal representation.

What Obama might look to do instead is reestablish the opportunity for traveling arts ambassadors, as were part of American government in the mid-20th century.

Hey, if it was good enough for those guys -- Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong among them -- maybe no potential arts secretary can complain.

by Marisa Rindone