The following is a short letter to my friend, Elijah; a part of a discussion we were having about the up-cropping of services like PMP Worldwide [pnpworldwide.com]* that allow producers to sell/license beats online. The beats go for as little as $25 US! In my opinion, the popular notion of rockstardom; that a very fortunate [very]* few can ‘make it’ and become wealthy by slapping together some samples and synths and/or by buying said beats and vocalizing along with them; is threatened by this commodification of music production. And whether I’m correct or not, it is an interesting topic for discussion.
Elijah,
My opinion is that [much of the time,]* music, ultimately, is [and in many cases should be]* a commodity**, and that very successful musicians are [usually]* overpaid***… And people should be able to, more or less, make a living doing what they enjoy, even if it’s making beats that aren’t that remarkable… And when the dream of becoming a superstar is dead, many people who are making art for the “wrong reasons”**** will stop making it. So ultimately it will be a good thing because there will be less crap and a higher proportion of creators who are actually driven to do it by inspiration, rather than doing it solely for fame and fortune.
Wedding/Cover Bands and DJ’s are evidence of how regional and/or less substantial talent is adequate for many of the purposes that music is used for (the popularity of Karaoke is interesting in this respect too). [In most cases,]* these are musicians***** who make a blue-collar salary or less doing what they do, so it’s likely that many of them do it because they enjoy it.
And I’m in the camp that music belongs to everyone, and isn’t something that should be only ‘left to the professionals…’ In the old days (pre-record-industry), music was something people did together in their homes with their families, at social events, and at church Etc… And this has largely gone away… We need it back because making music, especially as a group, fulfills some sort of deep-seeded human need. I suspect that singing, chanting, harmonizing and/or making rhythm with others has always been a spiritual experience for humans.
Actually, some research suggests that music originates as long as 60,000 years ago, along with visual art and religion.
I feel like the disappearance of participatory music from our culture, largely because of the existence of capitalist industry, is probably a very bad thing for us. And I also feel like, in general, creating art, as an individual or as a group, whether it’s journal-keeping***** or wood-carving*****, graphic design*****, or a church choir*****, is a basic human need. I believe it makes us healthier people in many ways: Execution and mastery, introspection, meditation, as well as social benefits and [probably many more benefits that I'm not able to pull out of my ass at the moment]*.
-Andrew
*The brackets [ ... ] are just where I made some basic edits to my original letter. Don’t let it get to you. It’s not a sign from Yahweh or anything.
**By ‘commodity,’ I mean that in most cases, music serves a utilitarian purpose. People that want to dance, will dance to just about any dance music that fits into their idea of what is “danceable.” Music is often used to set a mood in a room, and in this way, it could be compared to lighting (the particular lamp doesn’t matter, as long as the desired effect is achieved). I realize that this a slightly controversial idea, especially to people who make music and consider themselves artists. But I’d argue that in most cases, artistic merit is not required for music to serve its purpose. Churches don’t usually kick out the bad singers from their fellowship. I can think of a lot of music that I’d consider highly creative or artistic that I don’t want to listen to while driving. And I can think of a lot of music I consider very artistic that I don’t want to listen to at all, ever. Also, there’s a lot of ‘dumb’ music that’s enjoyable or fun. And besides, what is considered artistically significant to a listener is subjective and probably largely the result of the listener’s cultural influences. For instance, I don’t suppose many white, english-speaking people who’ve grown up in the USA are able to discern the relative artistic merit of various mariachi bands. So let’s not let ‘artistic merit’ get in the way. Most of the time, music is a commodity.
***Overpaid? Says who? OK, well let’s just get it out of the way that I’m probably a Socialist. Whether or not someone can be overpaid is something that we can argue about later. If you find that idea completely offensive, then I probably don’t want to be your friend, and I think you should give all your money to the poor.
****The ‘Wrong Reasons’ for making music or other art is something we can argue about later. ’Wrong’ is probably the wrong word to use. Most people, I think, will understand what I mean by this and agree that there are ‘wrong reasons’ even if it sounds silly to suggest that people shouldn’t just make music, or paint, or write, or whatever, for whatever reasons they have. It might be easier to think about this in terms of food. Is there a wrong reason to make food? Maybe it’d be better to say ‘for reasons that doom the outcome to failure.’ Imagine cooking, only for the sake of using up a gallon-sized can of Nutmeg. Is that a horrible analogy? I don’t know. I’m sorry for saying ‘wrong reasons.’ I was in a hurry and I was having a hard time thinking of a more elegant, less naive-sounding way of wording what it is I’m getting at by using the phrase. Help?
***** I’m really not in the mood to argue with anyone about whether or not DJs are musicians. And I’m also not in the mood to argue about the difference between art and craft, or ‘fine art’ vs. folk art. For the sake of moving on with our lives, let’s just lump it all in together, at least for today. OK?
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
Thanks, Erik!
Hi Mr Krasny, and thanks for all the great work you do with Forum.
I’m writing this to tell you that I really want to read your new book, Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest. The thing is, I don’t really read books. I can really only benefit from the book if there’s an audio version.
I find it a little ironic that thre’s no audiobook version available, since you work at a radio station, which has all the production facilities needed, and since you already know the best voice-over talent to choose for reading the book for the purpose of producing an audio version (you).
Anyway, I wanted to offer my help. If it’s not merely an issue of copyright (maybe you are prohibited from proceeding on producing an audio version yourself), and you could actually find the time to record a chapter here and there, I have professional audio production and editing facilities. I’d also be willing to mail you a field audio device so you could do this in the comfort of your own home. I’d do this in exchange for getting to hear the book. I’d also be willing to do basic editing and sound enhancing for the project. Then perhaps you could get your publisher to do their thing with it. It really should be available through Audible, for instance.
I’m sure we could do a totally professional job producing this thing. What do you say?
Thanks,
Andrew A. Peterson (Sebastopol, California)
Crunchy is Granola
I lady I know was given a mix tape by an old boyfriend and I asked her to make a copy of the mix for me because it contained a lot of interesting tracks.
For one, it contained this really obscure, super left-wing, hippy folk song from the Eighties about Nuclear Power. To me, it sounds like a very familiar if not cliche kind of ‘folk’ music: Celtic influences, singer-with-guitar, political message, Etc. The kind of thing you’d expect to hear at a protest rally.
“Power to kill!” it exclaims, in a ferocious, dare I say militant-sounding female register. It’s interesting to me how popular opinion about nuclear power has changed so much. I don’t mean that I think everyone loves it now, but it seems like we are a little more rational.
[display_podcast]
I can still remember how afraid we were of ‘nuclear’ anything in the Eighties. I was a little kid. But the movies at the time had really scary scenarios in them. War Games (1983) and Dreamscape (1984) come to mind.
Cover of a Metal Album I Owned When I was 13
The Russians were going to blow us up at any moment. Then we were going to blow them up automatically and the sky would turn red and there would be air raid sirens as the burning flesh is torn off our bodies by an impact blast just before everything is completely vaporized. All life on Earth would be destroyed except cockroaches. And if there was anyone anywhere that survived, they would be deformed because of the radiation. Or maybe some part of the species would retreat underground for hundreds or thousands of years. Anyway, I think we were scared, and possibly a little too scared.
This song seems to be a pretty good manifestation of that hysteria. And now that I just looked it up, I see that this song came out before the Chernobyl disaster! Wow.
I wonder what issues we are overly afraid of today. Privacy online? Genetic Engineering? I’m not saying I believe we should be less worried about anything per se, but it’s interesting to ponder. I guess we’ll know in thirty years.
Anyway, back to the song. The origin of the song was a mystery to me for a long time. I’ve googled, trying to figure it out a number of times. Finally, I have success!
The cover of the album. The Smiling Sun was designed in 1975 in Denmark. The logo soon was adopted by the anti-nuclear power movement. In 1977 the Smiling Sun was trademarked by Denmark's OOA (Organisation for Information on Nuclear Power), an anti-nuclear energy group.
I googled some of the lyrics I found a page crediting a Nigel Gray as writing the lyrics (as a poem only) (Lyrics Below). So I googled the name of the poem and the name of the poet and voila! I found awebpage for the album. Super crunchy!
It’s called “Nuclear Power No Thanks!!?”
So according to the track listing and credits, this must be the vocalist (see video):
Alison McMorland (what a voice! …the less flowery one)
Finally, here are the lyrics to the once mysterious song, a musical adaptation of a poem by Nigel Gray:
Sleep well my little son and dream
Time flows faster than a mountain stream
I wish you happiness in Spring
Come Autumn it may be too late to sing
While you sleep necessity drives
workers down uranium mines
repair men into the jaws of Hell
radiation through the human cell!
Sleep well my little girl and dream…
Madmen tear the earth apart
like werewolves at the human heart
The powerful crave more power still
Nuclear power; power to kill!
Sleep well my lover and dream…
Acid pond. Poisonous leak
Ships collide. Plutonium slick
Yellowcake waste. Lead-lined tomb
You’re not even safe in Mother’s womb!
Sleep well my unborn babe and dream
Time flows faster than a mountain stream
I wish you happiness in Spring
Come Autumn it may be too late…
Mostly, when it comes to finding new music, I’ve retreated to music recommended by friends and/or software-based recommendation systems like Last.fm. I mean, I generally don’t listen to ‘Radio’ with the exception of my local NPR station, KQED, which I mainly listen to for News/Culture type programming.
But Erika.net plays such a high percentage of music that is interesting to me that I end up seeking out music I hear on Erika probably about as frequently as three times per hour! And the rest of the music I hear on erika.net is almost always totally welcomed.
So in a nutshell, I think these people, whomever they are, have awesome taste in music. From their homepage:
erika.net has been broadcasting a 24 hour mp3 stream since 1999. We hand-pick music and organize it freeform style: all types of music at all times of the day. Our goal is to bring you music you can’t hear on other radio stations, presented in a unique style. …[can be found] in the ‘Eclectic’ section of iTunes radio.
If you have more conventional taste in music, try erika.net when you’re recovering from surgery or, for whatever reason, under the influence of hallucinogenic substances.
The page that displays what they are currently playing and what has recently played is HERE
(about as eclectic as it could possibly be)
erika.net is a serious improvement to my quality of life. I am listening to them frequently now. I wish I could stream them while driving.
erika.net people: If you read this, thanks! You are awesome.
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P’ansori or Pansori is a form of Korean music/story-telling. It’s kind of like Opera in form. The singing is very beautiful and strange to me.
The site links to sites who are also under attack and when the bug is running correctly on those sites, the sites redirect the hits to the final destination,
which is http://www.zml.com/
I don’t know if zml.com knows this is happening. I mean I suppose it’s possible that some unscrupulous SEO or Marketing guy promised them traffic and then resorted to this to get it. I’m contacting them now to inform them of this uncool practice being committed on their behalf, and if they are not willing to cooperate on putting an end to it, I will have no choice but to give them some negative attention.
The process of extracting the bad links from the content was long and hard since the strings of code inserted were very inconsistent.
The following is a list of the sites being linked thru, which I assume are all victims of this malware. If you own one of these sites, feel free to drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction as far as putting an end to this.
Message to ZML:
Hello,
I am a developer and recently one of my clients who is running WordPress for her personal website was attacked by some Malware that inserted thousands of links throughout her content. Those links resolve to your site, but via redirects thru other sites that I assume are also victims of the malware.
You look like you’ve built a pretty nice site here. And I’m writing to give you the chance to get on board with fixing this problem before I am forced to create some negative attention in the blogosphere and social media.
It doesn’t seem like you would want to be resposible for malware. But it also doesn’t seem like anyone would go through the trouble to make all these links back to you unless you were paying them. Perhaps you hired some marketing or SEO people and were not aware that they would be using these tactics? Please write back soon as I have very little patience for this kind of thing.
Thanks,
Andrew A. Peterson
Some samples of weird code that the bot inserted:
<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d0%b0%d0%b2%d1%82%d0%be%d1%80%d1%81%d0%ba%d0%b8%d0%b5-%d0%bf%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b3%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%bc%d0%bc%d1%8b</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ?????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>
<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d1%81%d0%b2%d0%be%d0%b1%d0%be%d0%b4%d0%bd%d1%8b%d0%b9-%d0%bc%d0%b8%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%be%d1%84%d0%be%d0%bd</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>
I don’t even remember how I found his website, which is beautiful.
I mainly wanted to draw your attention to a thing Mark “Jake” Baker wrote that was touching to me. It’s sort of a manifesto for modern life called ”The Human Condition.”
It’s an interesting Internet find. It says so much!
HERE it is. I think we will all be wiser people if we read it.
I just got a newsletter update explaining that they support a three-strikes policy for file-sharing.
Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.
How backward-ass!!
As an artist, I am going to have to revoke my membership if they don’t do some serious back-peddling in the next few days.
I thought the FAC was a forward-thinking organization. Maybe not.
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