Full Frontal PR Report
Nate Schaps

Taking advantage of the world’s premier music celebration to launch a new consumer education campaign against illegal file sharing on p2p websites, National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Inc. (parent of the GRAMMY Awards) President Neil Portnow introduced “What’s the Download?” during the 2004 GRAMMY Awards telecast.

Essentially, the President of The Recording Academy (GRAMMY’s parent) stood up on music’s biggest stage and told many of the show’s viewers that their Kazaa-loving lifestyles were destroying the music industry. As if making viewers wait more than the 3-plus hours they already had to hear Outkast’s “Hey Ya” was not enough, he thought it timely to introduce a campaign that certainly would not be popular with young music fans.

Because the campaign would alienate many fans, key messages and every individual word definitely had to be chosen carefully. If your message is largely unpopular, then you have to skillfully assemble the biggest and broadest possible coalition.

So what does Portnow do? Exactly the opposite. Rather than sticking to facts about illegal file-sharing and the associated job loss, the brash president connected his message to perhaps the most divisive current issue of all: the war in Iraq.

“If our leaders spend our resources to search for something, it ought to be for tools of mass education and cultural enlightenment in our nation,” said Portnow in an unmistakable reference to the US -led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent search for WMD’s.

Portnow is not the first celebrity to play the political wild card. It had been about an hour (enough time for five or six downloads on a slow dial-up) since Coldplay singer Chris Martin had dedicated the group’s GRAMMY for their Record of the Year to John Kerry, “who hopefully will be your President one day,” said the Englishman (without irony).

Going backward. Little did we know how much political “expertise” entertainers were hiding until the beginning of the war in March of 2003! Tim Robbins (where the Baseball Hall of Fame’s cancelled its 15th Anniversary celebration of his “Bull Durham” because of a few anti-war comments), Pearl Jam (who saw many fans walk out of a Denver concert after smashing a likeness of President Bush on stage) and the Dixie Chicks (those gals who lost radio play—then gained hype—after going public with their strong anti-war sentiments) are just a sampling of a few celebrities who have felt a backlash for straying from entertainment into politics.

For this discussion, the issue is not whether the war is right or wrong. The issue is why do celebrities find themselves unable to keep their political beliefs to themselves? Recent election results show that in this deeply divided country, no single school of thought is dominant; any political stance is going to contrast with that of basically half the country.

Aside from the argument about whether or not it is moral for Robbins or Martin to use star power to promote his political leanings, it certainly is a potential PR day or nightmare. Publicity types need to impress on their clients the importance of staying out of the emotional, troublesome tar-baby world of politics. The bottom line is: if an entertainer who makes all of his money because her or her act is popular with fans, chance of annoying those fans makes unnecessary political statements incredibly risky.

Michael Moore, who famously lambasted President Bush last year during his acceptance speech at last year’s strangely eerie Oscars, wins special distinction for alienating the most people possible by bringing politics AND religion into the equation. Moore not only ripped the war, but also said that Bush’s “time [was] up” because the Pope was against him. Left-leaning Catholics loved the speech. But are politics and religion, not even appropriate for the in-laws during dinner, really appropriate for primetime national television?

Leave it to Kid Rock to be the (not so articulate) voice of reason, “Why is everybody trying to stop the war? George Bush ain’t been saying, ‘You all make sh—y records.’ Politicians and music don’t mix. It’s like whiskey and wine. [Musicians] ought to stay out of it.”

Really though, does anyone care if Condoleezza Rice thinks the last “Lord of the Rings” was a bust? “That Peter Jackson should quit! I want James Cameron, and I want him now!”

In a sad epilogue, eventually Kid couldn’t restrain his bad self. He goes on to say that we should kill Saddam—“slit his throat” in fact. Think maybe a few people were put off by that?