Black Keys drummer, Patrick Carney:
“We felt the album was the best we’d done, but there wasn’t a single,” the drummer says. “Everyone, including Brian (Burton, aka Danger Mouse), told us that there is nothing that will change your career more than getting a record played on radio. You can make all the great records you want, but your audience will stay basically the same. There is a limit to how far you can go without a radio hit. So we spent 14 hours total over two days working on one song; we’ve made whole records in that amount of time.”
How much did they want to change their career, though? Many mainstream pop radio artists have a very short shelf life and even fewer have successful touring careers. It just seems kind of odd that a band that has slowly grown a genuine following over 8 years of touring would suddenly want to manufacture a “radio hit.”
They do have a point about live hip-hop, though. I can count on one hand the number of hip-hop acts I’ve seen that actually are worth the price of admission. Other than the acts with lots of familiar catalog material to draw from, the genre just doesn’t have a compelling live experience for the average fan.
Carney says he and Auerbach are hip-hop fans, but he fears for the genre’s survival. “It is an art form that is totally at risk of dying,” he says. “With the decline of record sales, that genre is exposed. There never really was a live hip-hop scene. When you think about rock ‘n’ roll, you think concerts. With hip-hop, you think albums. Other than Jay-Z, hip-hip shows aren’t big business. I feel bad for a lot of rappers we work with because they have a hard time making a living. Promoters don’t want to put on hip-hop shows because a few (unreliable) rappers have screwed things up for a lot of other rap artists.”
Read: Turn It Up: Black Keys’ breakthrough year: Here’s how they did it.