Death, Taxes...And Online Music

Somebody at Slate is onto my Internet music tax idea. OK, so it wasn't my idea but it certainly felt like my idea. At any rate, as I read these paragraphs I could not contain my slow, affirmative nod:

Despite all the downsides, something like the music tax simply has to happen. Most of us don't want to steal music. But it takes a saintly person (like me) to jump through hoops to pay for something you can get for free. I use eMusic and Amazon.com, which both offer DRM-free MP3 downloads. Yet cheapskates galore still have their Limewire and BitTorrent and whatever future file-sharing tools savvy Web guerrillas haven't even dreamed up yet.

That's why piracy can't be stopped. Meanwhile, artists aren't being compensated in a sensible way. Sure, some musicians will make a living by playing live shows and selling T-shirts. A massively popular band like Radiohead can give away its music and still make millions. But plenty of other artists will no longer be able to make a living in the music business as royalties dry up, which will leave our culture a little less vital and a little less fun. What we need is a reward system, one that could eliminate middlemen and encourage a massive upsurge in creativity.

Yes, yes, and yes. But from the looks of it, I doubt the big music companies and iTunes will ever agree to such an arrangement. Why? Because it diminishes the opportunities for canny but lazy businessmen to make excessively vast amounts of profit. And that is what our country is founded upon. Reihan Salam writes: "What plan will work best for music lovers and artists? Instead of a fake music tax, the best solution might be—sorry, libertarians—for the government to step in with a real music tax." Ah, but the day the United States government regulates mass media to such an extent as that may not be a day you or I will live to see. Salam concludes:

When the costs of discovering new music are zero and artists are paid on the basis of how often songs are played, listeners are more adventurous and bands with dedicated followers can make as much scratch as bands that record big hits. Bands get paid, music lovers can listen to their hearts' delight, and the record companies will slowly turn to dust. What's not to like?

Well, from the record companies' point of view, plenty.

Frankenstein

Call and response drumming...keytar...synthesizer solo...does it get any better than this?

Montana Exposed (sort of)

Some of you may look at the above picture and see controversy. Others may look at it and see a young girl rushing out of bed, late for first period English. I look at it and honestly say, "So what?"

Is it because she's suppose to be this wholesome, innocent role model for our own teenage daughters? Lest we forget that we entrusted our children to Britney Spears just a few short years ago; was there not the same controversy when she went from innocent to indecent in just one album?

Did the moral fabric of the family unit get torn to shreds and stomped into the floor like a fiery bag of feces? No. Did terrorists really learn to fly planes because of it? Probably not. Did teen pregnancy spike because of it? Only if you lived in a Mormon Compound.

The truth is that this is a mild example of bad judgment on the part of Vanity Fair. In their defense, artistically the picture is pretty good, I mean Ann Leibovitz did the photo shoot, not Hustler. However, Vanity Fair is a magazine marketed to adults; maybe a fifteen year old girl shouldn't be posing in such a provocative position (she does look a little loved up).

At least wait until she's seventeen.

Persepolis (Paronnaud/Satrapi)

Now here's an animated feature I can get behind. No Pixar anthropormorphic rodents for this movie. Hell, in Iran, they catch you talking to a rodent and they'll chop off the arms of one of your uncles.

You know, I take that back. Because actually, I've always been surprised by what I hear about Iran. I have met people who claim to have family there, and who have even visited, and they insist that the vast majority of Iranians want to be young and have a good time and watch American movies and get drunk and live exactly like the rest of us. In fact, a couple of years ago I heard of a survey gauging the popularity of the United States throughout the Middle East. The only country with a strongly favorable opinion of the United States, this survey concluded, was Iran, because since Iranians automatically distrust every single piece of information their government provides them, they believe the United States is wonderful and that George W. Bush is the greatest leader of our time. I suppose no one's informed them of this whole "Axis of Evil" business, but hey, let's keep it between you and me.

At any rate, Marjane Satrapi hit the jackpot with her life story, because not only did she have a crazy childhood, but she had a crazy childhood...in Iran! I mean, all she needed to do was to hit all the key points and not make anything up and inject just the right amount of humor in there, and presto: the funny Iran movie with heart. It seems so easy, but I suppose in the wrong hands it could have gone dangerously awry.

In his review of The Squid and the Whale, A.O. Scott wrote, "Coming of age, with its attendant thrills and traumas (generally summarized under the headings school, sex and parents), is an inexhaustible subject because no two people go through it in exactly the same way." And I often ask myself if I could ever truly tire of the genre. Sometimes I am of the persuasion that if every suitably intelligent person simply sat down and wrote about his or her own childhood in a way that was clear-eyed and honest and free of sentimentality, I would be up for it. In some ways it is a mystery why more artists refrain from doing so. Maybe instead of trying to stretch and contort in order to generate some mind-blowingly original storyline (which nine times out of ten is full of cliches anyway), filmmakers could stick to the storyline than never fails: their own. Most likely it is because it's about as fun to think about as giving Madeleine Albright an enema. But perhaps there is more to this coming of age gig than merely having the guts to write about it, i.e, it helps to be from Iran.

It also helps to be able to draw. Persepolis solves the visual problem by having lots of pretty pictures with clean lines and arresting shapes rolling across the screen. In this age of generic cinematography I don't know why more movies don't go for the animated option. It is an easy way to make a film visually pleasing. I guess optical originality is not high on the priority list of the producers. Or when they do go for animation, they go for high-budget Pixar cheese. But I like the look of Persepolis more than I like the look of Ratatouille. Why is that? Ratatouille must have cost a lot more money to make. But the animation in Persepolis has personality and character. It feels unique, harder to come by. Any studio with Pixar's money, I feel, could animate like Pixar. But not any studio could animate like Satrapi, Paronnaud & co. And it makes me like their movie more.

"Film critic" rating: ****
"Little Earl" rating: ****

Sandwiches

If there's one thing I love more than vaguely obtuse economics talk and French theory, it's sandwiches! I've experimented with sundry ingredients such as kimchee, English muffins, and sriracha sauce. This article describes 7 interesting culinary stacks available in New York.

The "Sandwich Marguez au Harrisa": "Mr. Atif’s time at the Cordon Bleu served him well, but eventually his cooking circled back to the spicy, paprika-reddened merguez sausages he said he learned to make from the Jewish butchers of Casablanca. The merguez are made daily at the cafe, cooked to order and stuffed into crusty, grilled “petit pain” — “little bread” in Casablanca, a.k.a. Italian rolls in Queens — with cubes of cucumber and tomato, chopped green olives and a hot-pink, spicy, garlicky harissa, also made in-house. “I mastered it through many kitchens,” he said. Wine vinegar and extra oil emulsify Mr. Atif’s harissa into a tangy sandwich spread that takes a bow toward mayonnaise."

I think I'm more exited to try that sandwich than to see anything else in New York, and I'm pretty interested in seeing New York.

French Theory in America = Freedom Theory?

Mr. Fish has been on a roll lately. I've enjoyed his two recent columns decrying the recent guilt by association nonsense in the political press. And on top of that there's his two part discussion of French Literary Theory, another hobby horse of mine. The basic idea of French Theory is that we can't know the capitol T Truth because language affects our understanding of the world. This strikes me as somewhat common-sensical, but maybe that's because I've watched the Matrix too many times. Fish's point (or the point of the book Fish is discussing because Fish doesn't say things, he only says things about things *wink*wink*) is that French theory is accurate, but that it doesn't matter. This was the conclusion that Little Earl and I came to 5 years ago in our undergrad English program. Maybe Stan wouldn't be such a bad guy to have over for some arugula after all.

Any Econ Fans Out There?

Reading about economics is a hobby of mine, and I particularly enjoyed this speech by Jamie Galbraith, "The Collapse of Monetarism and the Irrelevance of the New Monetary Consensus". Galbraith critiques Milton Friedman's, and by extension Greenspan's and Bernanke's, approach to monetary policy. He believes that the current crisis demonstrates that government should concern itself with regulation of banking and speculative investment instead of focusing solely on the money supply.

Jamie Galbraith is the son of famous liberal economist, John Kenneth Galbraith. Wikipedia provides the following summary of his book The Affluent Society: "Galbraith's main argument is that as society becomes relatively more affluent, so private business must "create" consumer wants through advertising, and while this generates artificial affluence through the production of commercial goods and services, the public sector becomes neglected as a result." A lot of populist economics is drivel, but I agree with that criticism of America. I could do without the extra few inches on TV's and different flavors of corn chips in exchange for better mass transit and schools. I think I'll add it to my summer reading list, after Bleak House and Against the Day.

I Laugh At Torture

So as I was reading this charming little piece in the New Yorker detailing the history behind the notorious photos from Abu Ghraib (found by way of the Slate review of Errol Morris' new documentary Standard Operating Procedure), I couldn't help but laugh. Yeah, fine, torture is no laughing matter, yadda yadda yadda. But it's just that the whole enterprise reminds me so much of something out of a bad week at scout camp. I mean, sure, when I first heard about it, I was like, "How could this have happened?" But the situation, as presented in the article, is so basic, so common-place, really, I feel like I could have just as easily done the same thing. It's just the age-old problem of the people in charge not bothering to tell the underlings where to draw the line. Besides, once we decided to go to war like we did, what was the point of acknowledging any sort of moral rules at all? It's like, "Well, we can invade any country we want, but once we're there, remember not to abuse any of the prisoners!" Uh, don't think so. It's war. What did people expect? Some choice bits:

“I’m like, ‘Hey, Sarge, why is everyone naked?’ You know—‘Hey, that’s the M.I. That’s what the M.I. does. That’s the M.I. thing. I don’t know.’ ‘Why do these guys have on women’s panties?’ Like—‘It’s to break them.’ Guys handcuffed in stress positions, in cells, no lights, no windows. Open the door, turn the light on—‘Oh my God, Allah.’ Click, turn the light off, close the door. It’s like, Whoa, what is that?"

The M.P.s on the M.I. cellblock never learned the prisoners’ names. Officially, they referred to their wards by their five-digit prison numbers, but the numbering system was confusing, and the numbers told you nothing about a person, which made them hard to remember. So the soldiers gave the prisoners nicknames based on their looks and their behavior. A prisoner who made a shank and tried to stab someone was Shank, and a prisoner who got hold of a razor blade and cut himself was called Slash. A prisoner who kept spraying himself and his cell with water and was always asking for a broom was Mr. Clean. A prisoner who repeatedly soaked his mattress with water was Swamp Thing. There was a man they called Smiley, and a man they called Froggy, and a man they called Piggy. There was a man with no fingers on one hand, only a thumb, who was called Thumby—not to be confused with the enormous man called the Claw or Dr. Claw, because one of his hands was frozen in a half-clenched curl.

Harman said that she began photographing what she saw because she found it hard to believe. “If I come up to you and I’m like, ‘Hey this is going on,’ you probably wouldn’t believe me unless I had something to show you,” she said. “So if I say, ‘Hey this is going on. Look, I have proof,’ you can’t deny it, I guess.”

“I guess we weren’t really thinking, Hey, this guy has family, or, Hey, this guy was just murdered,” Harman said. “It was just—Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them, I go, ‘Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.’ But when we were in that situation it wasn’t as bad as it looks coming out on the media, I guess, because people have photos of all kinds of things."

Adventures In Rap #2: The Sugar Hill Records Story

To truly gain a comprehensive picture of rap's early days, I decided to give the 5-disc Sugar Hill Records Story a listen. And oh, the oddities I found.

The Sugar Hill Records box set takes a scholarly approach towards music that was never in one hundred million years intended to be viewed in a scholarly light. Think of it as the first set of The Complete Motown Singles series...without the following nine. Here we find rap as some sort of mutant bastard child of disco. Indeed, it is not clear from the music gathered here that rap would have been headed toward any sort of meaningful artistic future.

With the surprise success of "Rapper's Delight," Sugar Hill Records, one can assume, decided to milk that fluke for all it was worth. And so we have the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Reprise (JAM-JAM)" (chorus: "Jam jam a jibbie a jam jibbie jibbie jam jam jam on"), Wayne & Charlie (The Rapping Dummy)'s "Check It Out," and The Moments' "Baby Let's Rap Now (Dance A Little Later)," which is actually a straight-up soul ballad containing nary a whiff of rapping. Sadly the world would never hear from Super-Wolf again, although his introductory anthem "Super-Wolf Can Do It" suggests otherwise:

I'm the people's choice in this Rolls Royce
The ladies freak when they hear my voice
Every rich girls' dream and every poor girl's supreme
Often known as a sex machine
I'm the ladies' pimp and the men's threat
If you're looking for better they ain't made it yet
I know I'm tough, I've got the soul
When they made the Wolf, they broke the mold
I'm the Super-Wolf from Cherry Hill
I never work and I never will
My daddy was a player, my grandpa too
I don't know nothing else to do
So when you hear this beat and you hear my howl
You know the Wolf is on the prowl

And let's not forget West Street Mob's "Ooh Baby," in which a sexy chorus of disembodied disco divas chant "We - want - you...to have a funky par-tay/But - make - sure...that you don't hurt nobody," to which a male vocoder voice replies "Ooooooh baby, I want to see you dance/Ooooooh lady, I want to touch your pants." Or Kevie Kev (Waterbed Kev)'s "All Night Long (Waterbed), which begins with the exhortation "Kev touch himself to prove that he's a freak!" The track that takes the cake in the strangeness department, however, has to be Chilly Kids' "At The Ice Arcade," which I am convinced appeared on Sugar Hill due to a mix up at the plant involving a shipment of Disney records, because otherwise I have no reasonable explanation for how it ended up here:

My homework's gotta wait, you know I'll do it later
But we rocked the Ice Arcade playing - Space Invaders!
I flunked my test, the teacher's annoyed
But we rocked the Ice Arcade playing- Asteroids!

But mostly the tracks are just standard generic disco/funk with the occasional curveball thrown in. It's interesting to note that at this stage in the game, the backing still consisted of live performance from Sugar Hill's house band rather than from sampling or DJ production, which is a major reason why Sugar Hill rap does not sound particularly far removed from that polyester-bespangled genre. The lone exception is Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel," which cuts between samples of "Good Times," Blondie's "Rapture" and Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," and which, so I'm told, can lay claim to featuring the first recorded appearance of scratching.

Another aspect of early rap that feels like spillover from the disco era is the rather extended song length. Very quickly, rap songs became a good deal shorter, eventually nearing an average of roughly four to five minutes per song. Why do you suppose that is? Is it because rappers began taking the emphasis off dancing in order to stress emotional urgency?

It couldn't have been a bad move, because at this embryonic stage, it seems as though rappers didn't really know what to rap about. Take "Freedom," the debut single from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, for example:

Melle Mel is right on time
And Taurus the bull is my zodiac sign
And I'm Mr. Ness and I'm ready to go
And I go by the sign of Scorpio
My name is Raheem, I don't like to fuss
My Zodiac sign is Aquarius
Kid Creole is the name of mine
And Pisces is my Zodiac sign
I'm Cowboy and I'm running this show
My zodiac sign is a-Virgo
And Grandmaster Flash cuts so odd
His zodiac sign is Capricorn

Apparently rap needed a little more time before it realized that suitable topics extended beyond a) sexual prowess, b) video games, and c) astrological signs.

What I want to know is: who was the target audience for this music? What did early rap offer that standard disco did not? Was it really worth one's hard-earned money to hear second-rate Barry White wannabes rhyme about waterbeds? Then again, only a select few of these tracks were genuine "hits," so perhaps we have our answer right there.

Fortunately, rap would quickly find its own voice with the 1982 release of Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five's "The Message."

Add Another Blogger

Hello all.

A select few of you might recognize me from my various comments on this here blog, and some of you might even know me in person (luckyyy). I have accepted an invitation to offer up my point of view on subjects first hand as opposed to simply leaving a couple of poignantly scathing tidbits in the comment section.

I hope to bring a little more variety to the blog, and a little different viewpoint since it is blaringly obvious that I am a smidge more conservative than pretty much everyone posting or reading this blog. But forget all that; I don’t intend to blab primarily about political issues (regardless of the upcoming election), but instead to throw something different and fun your way.

Here's to fun.