|
 |
|
Atomized Links: (the Weblog) theUsual Suspects: |
Living in the Machine age
Live in the Air Age. That's the title of an old Be Bop deluxe record. "Radio!", the RIAA mutter to themselves from whatever hole they hide in by day, "bah! We should have stamped that out when we had the chance, before it got out of hand. They give it away practically for free. Advertising, you say? - What revenue is that and what revenue to us?" Recently I passed out of the demographic of my local "alternative" radio station, and they no longer want to have anything to do with me. Maybe they found out I wasn't drinking enough Nantucket Nectar or they looked and saw I don't watch Fox or the WB. It might have been that time I made fun of Limp Bizkit . A discrete silent check in the right places - and they know; my browser has never connected to ticketmaster.com. I am handed a stained coffee cup that says "I love the Atlanta Rhythm Section-1977" and the door closes. "You got one that says '10cc', or 'Supertramp' maybe? ", I call after them, but the door remains shut. So a few years ago back during a month in a revolutionary season. Thermador! [Frimaire, Nivose, Ventose!] When corporate intellectual property rights burned brightly in bonfires lit across the land by a public temporarily maddened. Probably that lysergic acid mold in the rye bread again, just like last time. The cries of wounded capitalism echoed then, piteously, through the towns and villages of this nation. And I, (I admit it) I carried back to my home in the small hours of those nights, a squealing wheelbarrow full of the MP3[base ']s and the Napsters. A mixed bag of bounty it was too. Back in high school; round about when integrated portable cassette players/FM radios first appeared. There was a certain class of person, who rising to the occasion, could be counted on to sit by their radio, tape loaded, finger posed. "I like the Who", you'd say. Or " I like Zeppelin". There was little else you could say. You'd try to hand them a blank tape. "I only use my brand", they'd sniff, "Its a dollar, come see me tomorrow." "Umm, Bron y Yor..." , you'd inquire in a pleading tone. You'd get the look. "Friday then" they'd say after a moment. As record collections grew these same or similar sisters of mercy could be counted on to craft mix tapes to taste and order. Some people were good at it. From those according to their ability, to those according to their need. Mostly it all lay somewhere in the middle. My initial impressions of file sharing didn't change that impression. Mislabled incomplete songs recorded at abysmal sampling rates. But some people were good at it. It was these people the recording industry seemed afraid of. Digital technology allowed these people to be very very good - and that was bad. They always knew people shared their rock and roll and when you took your radio and turned up the volume so all could hear Neighbors, co-workers, taxi cab passengers in Finland...well that just made things much worse. But they had to live with it as did many others. Sometimes I rode my friends bike, too in those days. Strictly speaking, I suppose, the Schwinn people could have rolled into town and broken that right up - "Hey kid, get your own damn bike, we sold that one to George Springston." I organized my napster files into perfect playlists and played them through and through again at work. I might point out that only one or two of these songs were recorded in the last five years and precious few within the last ten. After the hundredth time they began to seem a little stale. I couldn't change the order, though. As an ex college radio dj I held to the view that any given list of songs has only one ideal sequence of segues and clearly the first one I made was it. There was only one path out of this thicket: Winamps randomizer button. And it was here that I had my epiphany. Deft, subtle, satisfying, and entirely random. On it went the stuff just flowed together. It should never. Discordant segues should have been the rule of random, particularly over the disparate lot I had in the "my music folder" (tm). That was the difference; I had picked them, each and every one deliberately in a separate searches through AudioGalaxys share of files. The Apple people tell me it's my music, not so the RIAA folks tell me - it's theirs. The Apple people, in their sympathy with enthusiasm, are a little closer to the heart of the matter. The music industries blinked insistence on only seeing product and property rights, not phenomenon and cultural resonance has led them away from any genuine understanding of Pop and subPop music. An occasional gut check to see if the back catalog still has car commercial currency, and they go back to sleep. All intellectual property is not the same, none of its forms are the same as any of it's others. It cannot be hammered into one transfer/transaction model licensed and metered in its utility, a current flow ubiquitous and fungable. Digital data is not electricity. It has meaning. The digital form in its near perfection; immortal and of infinite extension and multiplicity has changed what seemed apparent in mechanical reproduction. Music - rock music - is an element of popular culture and is embedded in culture. It draws and derives its value what authenticity it has from that milieu it sprang from and its ways of use within it. Rock and Roll was about radio and jukeboxes, 45's and boomboxes. Over-the-top stadium acts and underground garage bands. Its essential nature was shared and collective a distributed object of mass consumer culture. The song. It came over the radio- you came to know it - you couldn't stop it. You bought the record, their record: sire, virgin, reprise. The one with the cool looking cover by hipgnosis and the gatefold - the commodity - manufactured and physical, and it was yours. You could do what you wanted with it. It reflected shared experience and history. It existed in the material as the material of a moment in time. Those who own it today would restrict it to singular and immediate experience both in extent - to the individual and in time - every performance a new transaction. To appearances the property managers seem transfixed with fear and hostility of the digital form. They are in reality neither afraid nor hostile, they see only a transcendent ability to control intellectual value the digital form offers. Control to a greater degree than has existed in human society previously. They are more than willing to strike against any existing common public notions of propriety and cultural ownership and fair use, mere byproducts of clumsy and unfortunate distribution channels during the brief interlude of mechanical reproduction. The close and personal expereriance of performance that they offer in return for or what they are willing to offer in lieu of is not direct performance but technical reproduction - the same previously allowed to exist freely. This reproduced performance is faceted. In rock and pop music the singer and instrumentalists play, usually separately, through amplifiers to microphones whose output is captured in individual channels by a mixing board then reconstructed in a reproduced whole. They will need this commodity to have the same dynamic of mass audience response or genuine response to the group effort in performance in order to meet the market expectations of the product type, but they will have undercut this by undercutting the better part of its human value. It's sense of the shared experience of a time - the reason for embracing it. They (intellectual property rights controllers in general - the RIAA in particular) will either respond by returning to or admitting more open use of these artistic creations (the recorded medium), alongside the market for their specific distribution. This would be whatever lies beyond the distribution of a physical medium of transference - the lp or cd. Or they may react by ever more focusing the recipient on a personality believed to lie at the other end of the recording and video. Ever more firmly making the expression, apprehension and idolization of that personality the point, the object of modern popular music. As one who took up with Minor Threat and Mission of Burma Minutemen, and other similar bands following the initial lead of bands like the Clash into the world of indie rock back in the late 70's and 80's I can't see this as truly furthering their legitimate ends. Certainly not the ends of any musician misfortunate enough to try to earn a living through this system. The music industry can only stagger off, moribund, down this path to inevitable cultural and financial inconsequence.
|
If I'm remembering correctly it had a frame from the movie Metropolis on the jacket. Ironic to say "old" about a Be Bop Deluxe album. They were such intense progrock modernists. The future is what you've got when you get there. I never had a big record collection in the old days. I never developed the "discretionary" part of my income sufficiently to afford one. I was always a radio listener.
