Carol Anne
Joined: 09 Apr 2005
Posts: 1739
Location: Seattle
Back to top |
 Posted: 10/30/05 9:09 am ::: |
Reply  |
|
When you jump out of a plane, you'd better have a parachute on. By coming out, Sheryl Swoopes took a comparable leap this week. That Sheryl also announced that she'd signed an endorsement contract with Olivia Cruises and Resorts seems to offends some people. Well, I think of Olivia as Sheryl's parachute. She won't be playing in the WNBA for too much longer. There is life after basketball and there will be bills to pay.
For those who had never heard of Olivia Cruises before this week, much less Olivia Records, here's a quick history.
| Quote: |
Olivia, named for a feisty heroine in a pulp novel who fell in love with her headmistress at French boarding school, was the brainchild of ten radical feminists (Furies and Radicalesbians) living in Washington, DC. They wanted to create a feminist organization with an economic base, so that activists wouldn't burn out or have to go find a "real" job, but they didn't know what this business should be. Meanwhile, an unknown singer-songwriter named Cris Williamson came to DC to do a show and was shaken to greet 300 to 400 women fans. "She became so non-plussed that she forgot the words to her song and out of the audience came this voice and it was Meg Christian singing it back to her," says Judy Dlugazc, a founder and current owner of Olivia. The next day, on the radio show Sophie's Parlour, Cris suggested that it would be cool if women had their own label. Olivia was born.
In 1973, the collective put out a 45 with Meg Christian on one side and Cris Williamson on the other. Yoko Ono responded and said that she wanted to do a side project with Olivia, but the collective lovingly declined. "The image that we were projecting was that we had our own music and vision," Dlugazc recalls. "And I think we weren't smart enough at the time to realize that [Yoko] could have been a good thing." Without hooking up with anyone high-profile, they made $12,000 with that 45, enough to put out Meg's first record, and soon after, Williamson's: The Changer and the Changed.
The Changer and the Changed sold between 60,000 and 80,000 copies that first year. At present Olivia has sold over a third of a million and is still selling five to six thousand copies annually. ([By contrast,] Ani DiFranco's best-selling record has sold 240,000 copies). Williamson's album changed the alternative women's music scene, giving it an economic spine that supported Olivia, Ladyslipper, and countless feminist bookstores--Changer enabled them all to grow, connecting women through a record the same way Kate Millett's Sexual Politics magnetized political women a few years earlier to begin fighting on their own behalf. Women's music became a movement.
Olivia moved to Los Angeles to be where the industry was at and then to Oakland. The remaining five women of the collective, who had been pooling their money and even living together for the past seven years, began to disperse. The Reagan-Bush years hit, Olivia stopped putting out new records and performed a series of 15th anniversary concerts in 1988. The two at Carnegie Hall in New York were the largest grossing concerts at that venue in its history. The Times barely mentioned the show. Dlugazc, the sole remaining founder was tired. Even though Olivia put out world music and salsa records, they were most successful with acoustic solo acts. The folk music that was cutting edge when she began Olivia was not going to be the music for the next generation of women. "To continue, we had to reinvent what we did and how we did it," she says. "And it didn't make real sense for us to do that." Olivia Records became Olivia, the lesbian cruise line, later that year. http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/women%20music.htm |
By the way, I'm still reeling with astonishment that a lesbian-owned company, catering to lesbians (and other women) has become so successful. 
|
|
VandyWhit
Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 897
Back to top |
| Posted: 10/30/05 12:13 pm ::: |
Reply |
|
| Quote: |
| thank you for an insigtful article. By the way Plight, you inspire me. |
I'm really having a hard time understanding where you're coming from. An article that very much took my POV gets kudos for being "insightful", and I'm an "arsehold" for "nit-picking about the money."
BTW, I'd like to live in your world where "high six figures" is a "small amount of money.
| sparkfan33 wrote: |
Who gives a shit. Sheryl did it her way.
Who gives frigging leap that she did in a way that launched a small amount of money in her pocket.
You arseholes, it gives me so much grief that you nit-pick about the money. |
|
|
