Anything for a Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music Industry goes a long way toward explaining the culture of misogyny that, at best, looked the other way as women were mistreated and, at worst, cultivated abuse ... One thing missing from this memoir, which could provide some light in all the darkness and strengthen our trust in the narrator, is music. Carvello never shows any sense of wonder at hearing a great song or discovering a beautiful voice. Her greatest claim to fame as a woman who has spent most of her career scouting talent is bringing the hair metal band Skid Row to Atlantic. O.K., that and her affair with the INXS singer Michael Hutchence. Having good ears is essential to A&R; Carvello’s book convinces me she has good eyes.
The music industry is long overdue for its #MeToo explosion, and this memoir seems ready to light the fuse. As the first female executive for Atlantic Records in A&R—artists and repertoire, the talent scouts who sign the recording acts—Carvello describes in dirty detail a 'culture of toxic masculinity' that pervaded the company in particular and the industry as a whole ... She dishes unsavory details about industry giants such as Doug Morris, Irving Azoff, and Tommy Mottola, and she shows how she suffered from a reputation as 'a troublemaker.; Yet her own attempts at revenge and her mixing of business with sexual pleasure suggest that she was willing to play the game by the same rules as the rest of them. No matter how sleazy you might have heard the music industry is, this memoir suggests that it was worse.
In this hard-hitting, profanity-laced tell-all recounting 19 years at some of the biggest recording companies, Carvello takes readers inside the pre-digital music industry of the 1980s and '90s ... Carvello is piercingly honest in this discouraging look inside the music industry.
