Category Archives: Music

Rhythms of Life

When I was 20 years old in January of 1969 and a senior at Princeton, I went to work for The Band as their first tour manager. At the time most of the American music that was being played on the FM stations came out of San Francisco and Los Angeles–Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds. The whole aesthetic of The Band was from a parallel universe, located somewhere between the fiction of Faulkner and Willa Cather, the blues of Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, the photography of Walker Evans and Robert Frank and the harmonies of the Carter Family.

It was an aesthetic that endured and I spent last weekend immersed in it at the end of Grammy week. On Friday I went to the Musicares tribute to Bruce Springsteen. The highlights of the night were provided by the young bands that are directly in the genetic line of The Band–The Alabama Shakes, Mumford and Sons and The Zac Brown Band (with Mavis Staples sitting in).

It was this same music that dominated the Grammy show on Sunday night. Mumford and Sons won Album of the Year, The Lumineer’s, Black Keys, Zac Brown and Jack White all played brilliantly. Every bit of the music was real and the world of Auto-tune was banished from the stage. For me the final tribute to Levon Helm of The Band brought the rhythms of life full circle. Zac, Mavis, and the Mumfords did a wonderful version of “The Weight”, which was a fitting end to a great night of Americana.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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Forty-three years ago I worked for Levon Helm. I was the tour manager for The Band and in my book, Outlaw Blues, I recounted how Levon changed my whole notion of the “cracker”, a name he proudly embraced.

The first night back in LA the guys brought me down to the pool house and in Sammy Davis’s playroom (complete with giant bed and mirrors on the ceiling) they played me what they had recorded in the three months I had been away. The first tune they played was The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and by the song’s end, tears were welling up in my eyes. Once in a while works of art open up a window to a world one didn’t understand or didn’t even know. James Agee and Walker Evans had collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and it had opened up a window onto the life of the sharecropper. For me and many others, Levon’s plaintive singing on Dixie achieved the same effect, but in three minutes time. For a Northern liberal who had marched with Martin Luther King, all “crackers” were like Bull Connors to me. But the song gave me an understanding of Levon’s world that would last me the rest of my life. I never viewed the South with the same eyes after that night.

Looking back years later, I think the root of that understanding was that Levon could embody a mournful 19th Century Southern cracker in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and yet live as one of the hippest 20th Century gentlemen I knew, who could hang out with Sonny Boy Williamson and loved Marvin Gaye’s music. The brilliance of the Robbie Robertson song of Southern defeat is that Virgil Caine (Levon’s character in the song) confesses at the end of the Civil War that “the very best” (including his brother) are dead and “like my father before me, I will work the land” (as a sharecropper?). There is no glory in war and you can’t eat off Dixie pride.

This contradiction embodied in this wonderful man, Levon Helm, is a contradiction we are still living with in America. This is the argument I have with the Techno utopians like Alexis Obanian. 99% of musicians, writers, actors are just “working the land”. They don’t need to get rich, they just want the honor of getting paid for their work. Levon and Garth Hudson made a good living ($150,000 a year) off royalties from The Band’s eight recordings in the 60′s and 70′s up until 2001 when the Big Pirate sites like Limewire and (in 2003) Pirate Bay really got going. And then the record royalties came to a halt. Levon and Garth did not write songs (I was there). Robbie, Richard and Rick did. There is the difference in income.

But the point is that in a normal economy (pre-piracy) Levon would have made a good living for his whole life, just for having been a brilliant singer and player on all those great records.That was quite enough.

His death hit me harder than I thought it would. Listen to “The Weight” and “Dixie” right now. You will agree he was one of the greats.

Censorship Con

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A profound reversal in attitudes has taken place in the last twenty years. While in the 1960′s the cries of “freedom” and “liberty” came from Progressives, today it is the right that sees liberty under attack. The campaign rhetoric of the four Republican candidates for President all put the defense of liberty at the top of their agenda. They see in Progressives attempts to regulate bad actors in the world’s of finance, health insurance, or environmental pollution a basic attack on the free market. As Rick Santorum said on Super Tuesday about Obamacare, ”Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom in America. Once the government has control of your life, then they got you.”

I think we need to really consider whether liberty is the value that trumps all others in our society. Let’s take the case of the publisher of backpage.com.

The biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com. This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equityfinanciers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake…

There’s no doubt that many escort ads on Backpage are placed by consenting adults. But it’s equally clear that Backpage plays a major role in the trafficking of minors or women who are coerced. In one recent case in New York City, prosecutors say that a 15-year-old girl was drugged, tied up, raped and sold to johns through Backpage and other sites.Backpage has 70 percent of the market for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization.

Now the State of Washington has passed a law creating criminal penalties for sites like backpage.com for advertising girls under the age of 18. And what is the response from backpage.com–”Censorship”.

“There’s going to have to be a challenge to it,” said Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media Holdings. “Otherwise it would effectively shut down an enormous portion of the Internet that currently permits third-party content.”

Now where have I heard that before? The defenders of Kim Dotcom and the other pirates who have lived luxuriously off the stolen work of musicians and filmmakers around the world, say that any attempt to block these sites is censorship. This is utter nonsense. As I have pointed out before, the issue is not Google or Baidu’s precious freedom, but their precious revenues.

How did we get to this point that the Libertarian rhetoric dominates our political debate? The Village Voice’s liberty to service pimps of underage girls, trumps society’s right to protect those girls from exploitation? The selfish individual’s liberty to not buy health insurance and make the rest of us pay for his emergency room care trumps society’s right to create a working health insurance system? Megaupload’s liberty to host stolen movies trumps the artist’s right to get paid for his work?

As I have said before, we must come off the barricades and stop using this foolish rhetoric of censorship and liberty where it really does not apply. You have no right to free food. Why do you think you have a right to free music? It is time for all the parties involved to sit at the table and figure out some solutions that afford the creators of imaginative work to get paid for their considerable labors.

Copyleft Bullshit

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At USC we have students turn their papers in electronically to a system called Turnitin,com. It automatically checks for plagiarism. So what are we to think about the group of German critics about to award a $20,000 prize to 17 year old novelist, Helene Hegemann, who now admits she lifted whole pages from an earlier book for her novel?

“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

This reminds me of the arguments from the copyleft, regularly heard in the halls of the academy. One of my graduate students recently left a gathering of these prophets of freedom. This is their argument on why all music and films should be free.

a) “art really doesn’t belong to anyone,” b) “artists shouldn’t be creating for money,” c) “everybody” they know is happy to just to be heard, and d) “everyone” can now make music, movies, art, etc. anyway, so why should some people get paid for it?

I’m sorry, but the cult of the amateur, fueled by this kind of nonsense, has led us to our current “500 channels and nothing on” media landscape. Yes any idiot can put their cat flushing the toilet video up on you tube and call it a movie. Yes any aspiring Lady Gaga clone who can’t sing a lick can post her songs on My Space and show up for an audition of American Idol, convinced they’re a star. But that doesn’t make it so.

2009 Music Hits-WTF?

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To give you an idea of what a musical Interregnum we’re in, look at the top selling artists of the year (including Digital sales):

Michael Jackson
Taylor Swift
The Beatles
Susan Boyle
Lady Gaga
Andrea Bocelli
Michael Buble

WTF? A dead guy, a second rate country pop singer, a band that was a smash 40 years ago and a granny that sings Broadway Standards. Now obviously the list of most illegally downloaded songs would look pretty different, but this actual hits in the real music economy doesn’t speak very highly of our current era of musical innovation.

The Long Tail is Dead

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FF_170_tail2_f I don’t mean to pick on Chris Anderson again, but he’s such an obvious cipher for the “Information wants to be free” brigade. Now it turns out that his original “grand theory of everything” called “The Long Tail” is totally bogus. Charles Blow explains.

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

This means that Anderson’s declaration that the “80-20 Rule” was dead (80% of the revenue would come from 20% of the product) was completely wrong. In fact it is even worse–it’s the 80-1 Rule. One of my doctoral students tried to explain to me yesterday why so many academics come down on the side of the “screw copyright” crowd–they don’t believe there is such a thing as genius–so they see any attempt to enshrine a particular artist as a continuation of the “great man” theory. If Jackson Pollack is just regarded as the vehicle that channeled the post war zeitgeist onto the canvas, why should he get the rewards for the collective consciousness? So the notion that Bob Dylan was just taking old folk melodies and putting new words to them is an academic trope that vastly underestimates Dylan’s talent and cannot account for the difference between his work and that of Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and all the other singer songwriters of the era.

This seems to me to be a totally warped view of artistic work and yet according to my student is totally “the party line” in many academic departments.

ISP Music Fee

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Sound Exchange and some other backers of the notion of a ISP license fee to solve the music industry’s problems have put up a site called A Price For Music that let’s you play with various scenarios. I know the Copyleft is going to say it’s slanted, but it’s still a good start towards a conversation about what I think is the only sustainable solution for the long term health of poular culture.

No Free Lunch for Chris Anderson

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Chris Anderson, the Editor of Wired Magazine, who has made a mint stating the obvious (The Long Tail), has a new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which will cost you $27 bucks to absorb his faux-wisdom. Fortunately, you can save yourself some money and time by reading Malcolm Gladwell’s biting review in The New Yorker.

“Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.”

As I have said before, I know a great many musicians in their 60′s and 70′s with a lifetime of recorded music that is being devalued by Anderson’s ethos and attitude. While he’s out giving $30,000 lectures on “Free” , they are facing bankruptcy because of health costs. It is little comfort that this smart-ass tells them to go out and tour. Obviously we have been trying to counter this nonsense on this blog for a while, but Gladwell has a great platform to debunk Anderson’s hypocritical claims (he sells his books and doesn’t give away Wired Magazine).

It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Timesshould be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?

The “Free Economy” has certainly benefited Google and a few other powerful corporations. I’d be hard put to find a single artist it has helped. Maybe Anderson should donate all his book royalties to The Blues Foundation.

Jonathan Taplin

Director, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab