Tag Archives: Music

The Big Lie

Kim Dotcom is the alias of a modern day digital mafioso, who made more than half a billion dollars in the last few years by selling advertising on a site filled with stolen movies and music. Like any mafia lord, Kim hangs out with various low talent artists hoping that a little blow might be left on the coffee table. So today Kim and his lame ass disco music friends have released a song that is on a par with Triumph of The Will for those who study propaganda. The master of the field was Joe Goebbels who wrote “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”

In his brilliant attempt to square the circle of his fortune built on stealing from artists, Kim equates his struggle with that of Martin Luther King. He attempts to hijack the whole Occupy movement to aid in his redemption. But in deciding that he could make $ million by selling advertising on Megaupload–with an inventory of quantities of stolen digital content–it’s easy to think that Kim Dotcom believed he was above the law. And the sad thing is that huge corporations like Google and Yahoo—some of Kim Dotcom’s early advertising partners–support this kind of conduct by enabling an underground advertising market that funds both piracy and pornography (usually on the same site) in the huge “remnant ad business” on the web. Continue reading →

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.

Liberty, Anarchy & The Digital Age

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Sabu

About a year ago I was at the house of my friend David Fanning on the Massachusetts coast when a call came in that messed up our weekend plans. David has been the Executive Producer of PBS’s flagship show Frontline for 25 years. He has fearlessly told truth to power, despite all the possible reverberations in Congress or elsewhere and the fragile funding of PBS. The call came from his webmaster who said that the whole Frontline website had been destroyed by a hacker collective called Lulzsec. Lulzsec and their leader, Sabu had been outraged by a frontline documentary on Julian Assange and had vowed revenge. I had seen the show and found it to be very evenhanded, but Sabu and his friends objected to a passage in which Julian Assange’s tactics were questioned. When Assange first gave the raw intelligence cables from the State Department, all of the names of the local informants in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere were in the docs. The editors of the Guardian and the New York Times insisted on redacting the names of the local informants so they wouldn’t be killed for helping the Americans. Assange insisted the names stay in and started dumping the raw files out on Wikileaks. That anyone should even question Assange was too much for Lulzsec and so they waged cyberwar on Frontline. They didn’t just bring down the website, they destroyed it and all the archives. It took David Fanning weeks and a lot of money to restore the site. Continue reading →

Weekend Update 1/21/12

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A rainy Saturday in Los Angeles seems like a good time to put down some random thoughts.

The SOPA Battle

So SOPA is dead, and as I said earlier in the week, it was a fatally flawed piece of legislation. But before the Free Culture crowd gets too self-righteous, please consider your new hero and spokesperson, Kim Dotcom.

Kim’s a fun loving guy with 30,000 square foot mansions in three countries, a fleet of Ferraris all made possible by selling stolen content from artists around the world. A bunch of the musicians I worked with in the 1960′s and 1970′s, who made wonderful records that are still on everyone’s I Pod, have seen their royalties cut by 80%. Not enough for a retired 70 year old to live on. American’s are truly stupid when it comes to discussing this issue. The one thing we make that everyone else in the world wants to get a hold of–our music, our movies, our video games—the knuckleheads on the copyleft want to fight a death match to make sure they are free to the whole world. Of course these same people don’t mind paying an arm and a leg for their German car or their Japanese TV. Continue reading →

Outlaw Blues

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As you can see to the right, I have a new book out which I hope you will enjoy. It’s kind of a personal narrative of the counter-culture and its role in American society in the last century. Obviously much of it deals with my adventures in the music and movie trades from 1965-1995. A quote from the preface may give you a little insight into my thoughts.

But the artistic explosion of the 1960’s didn’t just get delivered from the heavens by aliens—it was the work of men and women who understood that they were part of an American tradition of “counter-culture”. Bob Dylan was no more a rebel than Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday or Orson Welles. But as the political establishment of America moved right, it served the culture warrior’s purpose to paint the artists that made American music and film the envy of the world as dangerous desperadoes. And in a sense they were. I call this movement The American Vanguard, using the English term for the French “Avant-Garde”. The spiritual godfather of the movement Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so much as for the right.” To which Bob Dylan replied, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

You need to read it on an I Pad, because it has more than 100 embedded videos of the artists. Enjoy

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.

Old Masters and Young Geniuses

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In researching my book I have been reading the work of an economist named David Galenson, who is trying to understand the life cycles of artisitic creativity. In his book, called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, he notes two artistic prototypes–Experimental innovators, who work by trial and error and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. Cezanne represents this archetype. In contrast the Conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age. Picasso represents this archetype.

As I was trying to apply this schema to music I put Bob Dylan in the Conceptual innovator camp and Louis Armstrong in the Experimental innovator group. And then in the midst of my sadness over the sudden death of a friend, I found myself listening over and over to a piece of Dylan’s late work called Workingman’s Blues #2. It showed me that an artist can burn bright and hot in his early years (for Bob almost too hot) and still have the great later work of a Cezanne. Here’s the last verse of the song.

Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I’m all alone and I’m expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even means

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

Proud Father

No Gas In Nashville

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Our co-conspirator T-Bone Burnett reports from Nashville where Raising Sand is about to start touring again.

I just got into Nashville, and a low fuel message rang in the
Escalade. The driver said that Nashville was running out of gas, and that she had just enough fuel to get back to the office.
She didn’t know what they were going to do for the weekend.
There are near mob scenes at gas stations in western North Carolina. Virginia Fox country. Somehow, even with the gas shortages, I don’t think people are
going to be staying home from the polls.

Your weblog is wailing!

WTF. Blade Runner.

Jonathan Taplin

Director, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab