GOODFELLAS

BAR

DUELING ?1M40

MTV, which regularly aired her 1984
video for her version of the Rolling
Stones' "Beast of Burden" (which fea-
tured a prancing cameo by Mick Jag-
ger). But she is even more upset by
the current state of commercial radio.
Like other gifted pop-music veter-
ans, Midler, 52, has discovered she is
persona non grata on radio. Her trade-
mark stylistic eclecticism — pop,
blues, swing, country, rock, torch bal-
lads and more
-- makes it
impossible for
myopic radio
programmers to
pigeonhole her
in their rigid
niche-format-
ting system.
As a result,
the typically
diverse Bath-
house Betty has
been largely
ignored by
radio. Her lack
of radio airplay,
despite good
reviews, has her
seething.
"They don't
pay any men-
don to me," she
said, speaking
from her New York home.
"I do what I do, and you can't force
them to play what they don't want to
play-. They are such Nazis and such
fascists in their tastes. And I think it's
bad for the business. I'm talking like
an accountant, but truly, it's bad for
the business.
"The more music people hear and
know, the more they will buy, and the
better it will be. The narrower the
tastes of the population, the worse it is
for everybody. To me, radio is shoot-
ing itself in the foot. I think it's poiso-
nous for society, and for the cus-
tomers, to have their tastes shaped in
such a narrow way. It's dreadful."
Does Midler know of a remedy?
"Yeah, shoot them all," she replied.
"The first thing we do, to paraphrase
Shakespeare, is kill all the marketing
people. I don't know what to do.
Everything is so fragmented, and the
niches are so tiny, and it's only gonna
get worse. It is the Balkanization of
music and society, and it panders to
really stupid people."
For all her frustrations, though,
Midler is savvy enough to realize she is
now at the flip-side of a cultural gen-
eration gap she first experienced sever-

al decades ago from the opposite per-
spective.
"There is a new generation every
five years, and radio and MTV goes
on twisting these kids into these
robotic people," she said. "They just
throw the other generations aside as
soon as they get too old, which is
what we did to our own parents and
what is happening to us now.
"I remember when that sort of
bland, postwar
pop music was
no longer played
and rock 'n' roll
came in. Now
it's happening to
us, and I can't
really complain.
Because I
watched my own
generation do
the same thing."
A child of
rock 'n' roll,
Midler cites the
electrifying rock
'n' roll of Janis
Joplin and Tina
Turner as pivotal
musical
moments.
She saw them
perform, sepa-
rately, at New
York's fabled Fillmore East in the late
1960s. Her life was irrevocably
changed, and music supplanted acting,
her first passion. Both worlds came
together when she portrayed a Joplin-
like character in the 1979 film musical
The Rose, for which she earned a best-
actress Oscar nomination.
However, despite hanging out at
the Fillmore East, Midler never
bought into the era's counterculture
scene.
"I was always an outsider," she said.
"I was never in a movement, never,
ever. I watched, and I wore embroi-
dered blue jeans, but that was it. I was
interested in the poses and gestures,
and the accommodations people made
to fit in."
Mimicking and creating various
poses and gestures has long been a
strong suit of Midler, who is able to
shape and occupy myriad personas
with ease and authority, be it in song
or on stage. Since releasing her debut
album, 1973's The Divine Miss M, she
has distinguished herself equally in
music and film, drama and comedy.
She scored two of her biggest hit
records with "The Wind Beneath My
Wings" (which was featured in her

Out with a new
CD, Bette Midler
has her say on
radio programmers,
favorite performers,
growing up in
Hawaii and
Monica Lewinsky.

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Detroit Jewish News

91