We should all know by now that the music industry is a broken system. But if you didn’t already know, here are three songs that brought the sinister workings of the industry to light. Some more tongue-in-cheek and subtle than others, but they all have one thing in common: giving record labels a big middle finger.
“Love Song” by Sara Bareilles
Sara Bareilles released “Love Song” on her 2007 album Little Voice. As her major-label debut, it’s a bit ironic that the lead single turned out to be a diss on the record label itself. But, as Bareilles later explained, she was being pushed to write so much for the album that she got burnt out. Nothing was working after that until she decided to write a song for herself instead of at the label’s urging. Luckily, the label ended up liking the tongue-in-cheek song, but maybe because they didn’t know it was about them.
“It was actually written for my record label,” she said in 2011. “I had been turning in new music, [and] I was getting the red light. I couldn’t go into the studio yet because they were waiting for something. But they wouldn’t […] nobody said what they were waiting for. So I kept turning in new songs, thinking like, ‘Is this what you want? Is this what you want?’ And it was always a big thumbs down, and I ended up writing ‘Love Song’ out of frustration.”
“I Do” by Lisa Loeb
The origin of Lisa Loeb’s 1997 hit “I Do” is similar to what happened to Sara Bareilles a decade later. This proves that maybe the music industry is a little bit broken. At least the hit-single model that record labels depend on definitely is. Loeb wrote “I Do” in response to her label not seeing a single on her album Firecracker. On the surface, it’s about realizing a relationship isn’t working out as you thought. That this person isn’t right or you after all. But in reality, it was a subtle diss on Loeb’s label.
“We were almost finished recording the album, and the record company told us that we still needed a single,” Loeb explained in the liner notes of the 2005 compilation The Very Best of Lisa Loeb. “I decided to write a song that sounded like a song about a relationship but was actually about the record company not ‘hearing’ a single on the record already. You can hear it in the lyrics, ‘You can’t hear it, but I do.’ The song ended up being an expression of strength and power even when someone’s not treating you right.”
“Y’all Want a Single” by Korn
While “Love Song” and “I Do” are more subtle disses at record labels due to their radio-friendly pop restraints, Korn had no such hangups. In 2003, they released “Y’all Want a Single” on their sixth album. It’s about as blatant a response to a persistent record label as you can get.
At just over three minutes long, “Y’all Want a Single” features the F-word 89 times. Additionally, it includes the repeated line “Y’all want a single, say f**k that / F**k that f**k that”. Korn pulls no punches here. There’s no tongue-in-cheek mischievousness happening on this track. It’s blunt force trauma straight to the head, and it’s a surprise the entire record label industry didn’t collapse after this.
In 2003, guitarist James Shaffer explained that their record label wanted a repeat of “Freak On a Leash” or “Got the Life”. That didn’t fly with the band at all. “We were really appalled by that scene,” said Shaffer. “For the first time in our lives, we were dissecting our music, and trying to analyze the structure of those songs, trying to figure out what made them huge hits. But Korn never works like that, and while we were all wondering, Jonathan [Davis] came up with a line: ‘Y’all want a single? Say: F**K THAT’ and we wrote ‘Y’All Want a Single’ as a big ‘f**k you’ to them.”
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