Any dutifully bored music writer knows that his handiest weapon is the cross-band comparison—it’s like Joy Division with bongos! Dearer still is the combination: Deerhunter meets Fleet Foxes meets Grizzly Eyes meets Frog Bear. Whatever. It suggests a certain conformity, doesn’t it? In this respect, record label Luaka Bop is a constant frustration.
The independent brand, whose staff has never exceeded two people, has managed to endure for a puzzling 21 years by refusing to repeat itself or copy anyone else. Founded but later cast off by David Byrne, the label has remained successful enough to get by but small enough pursue its mission, deriving purity from its penury like some sort of ascetic.
“If you have [the band] the 2s, and maybe one of the 2s has a side band that’s really good, then it doesn’t makes sense to have them as well,” says Luaka Bop honcho Yale Evelev. “You only have so many resources, and you really want to focus your resources on telling the one story that you want to tell.”
Evelev is a kinetic, excited man with a wild tuft of hair and glasses so thick that his face appears much littler behind them. Over lunch at Essex Street Market, he relived with me his travels to Burma and Cuba, where he was following rumors about some far-out music.
Byrne hired Evelev away from his previous record label, Icon, to run Byrne’s own. Evelev has a typically bizarre story about a silent job interview with the art-rock virtuoso.Though never really “on staff,” as Evelev puts it, Byrne was for a long time the sort of spirit guide of Luaka Bop, making infrequent ethereal suggestions to Evelev or the label artists, who usually found them helpful if imprecise. One Luaka Bop artist relates this comment: “He said, ‘Gee you’ve made a good album, but I think it’s too strange and I don’t know if people will get it. I think it needs a handshake.’”
Luaka Bop began among a legion of indie imprints on Byrne’s then-label Warner Bros. By the time it left Warner Bros., all but two of those labels had died off. In the early 2000s, Byrne detached himself from the label, and headed by Evelev alone, Luaka Bop was briefly taken in by Virgin Records and then V2 before striking out on its own in 2007.
“We’re trying to do pop music, even if it’s from another culture or in another language or whatever,” Evelev says.
The label is responsible for the careers of artists like the polyphonic Afropean group Zap Mama, disco-funk Venezuelans Los Amigos Invisibles and the experimental Brazilian musicmaker Tom Zé; its two most recent signings, though, are from England and New York City.
The label’s most enduring relationship may be with Florida-born singer-songwriter Jim White, who was signed around 1994. White, 52, has never cared about fame or even about playing in front of people. Music was for most of his life a private, almost shameful hobby. A haphazard tape he made found its way to Byrne by coincidence. Since then,White says, Byrne and Evelev worked closely with him on every album.
“I’ll give [Evelev] a song that I think is a great radio song,”White says, “and he’ll go, ‘You know, there are six other songs out like that that are better.’” But, he adds, “They never say you can’t do this or you can’t do that.They just want to let you know what they think is valuable.”
When it comes to his values, Evelev stresses uniqueness, emotional impact, incomparability. But salability, he says, is equally necessary. “Do I know what I can do to get people to hear this?” he says. “It’s not an impossible problem... And again, that’s different now.”
Evelev gasps with excitement over the current music scene in Brooklyn. Its lack of convention, the eager audience. Gone are the days when he was too discouraged by New York “hyperjudgmentalness” to sign local artists. In fact, he can’t help giving himself a little credit when he hears African guitars in the music of Vampire Weekend.
He’s only worried, he says, about the future of the album as a unit of music. He’s outraged when his son downloads one song at a time, and he feels he’s the only person who still buys CDs.The only real squeeze on Luaka Bop’s revenue is the plight of corporate music retail. It was stores like Tower Records and Virgin Megastore that sold Luaka Bop artists. “Small stores didn’t have room for the kind of material we had,” he says. After 21 years, Evelev is as gingerly optimistic about his label as he is about the progression of pop.
“I said this to someone the other day,” he says, “I said, ‘You know, it’s an incredible time in music. It’s not going to last.’These periods last a few years, and then they’re over. It’s just a blip, you know? Life is a series of blips.”
