Music and Politics

the Democracy Now website has up a transcript of an interview Amy Goodman conducted with "Hip Hop Journalist Davey D on Police Surveillance of Rappers, the National Hip Hop Convention and the 2004 Election."

I confess I haven't read it yet. I stayed up way to late watching Bowling for Columbine, which I'd, confessedly, never seen before. I have however copied the article to my Palm Pilot (Tungsten E, if you're curious) and will read it tomorrow. Tomorrow night, I'll tackle some of the extras on the Bowling for Columbine DVD.

So Wilco's got a new album -- A Ghost is Born -- coming out near the end of June. So the album got leaked to the net and a number of folks downloaded it (I confess to being among them). What's a fan to do? Obviously, you've no desire to wait 3 months to hear the album--you're going to download it. How then do you quell your qualms over whatever immorality may exist in that action? You can commit to buying the album when it comes out, but that's all promises bought on the future. What about now?

Wilco fan Ronen Givony, who runs bemydemon.org, contacted Jeff Tweedy (Wilco hombre) and then set up justafan.org. Under the heading TRUST is a TWO-WAY STREET is an outline of the site's mission and existence:

Over the last few years, Wilco and other forward-thinking bands have entrusted their fans with free streams and downloads of their soon-to-be-releasted material, oftentimes several months in advance of official releast dates. In April 2002, even months after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot first began circulating on the Internet, Wilco's fans repaid that trust. We bought enough copies of the album to propel it to a #13 debut on the Billboard charts--the band's highest-ever chart position--thereby refuting industry expectations and conventional business wisdom. In so doing, we demonstrated what bands like Wilco have known all along: that a community of devoted fans will always and wholeheartedly support the bands they love, as we will do again when Wilco's new album, A Ghost is Born, arrives in stores on June 22. Meanwhile,instead of embracing the Internet, and nurturing the work of genuine artists--not glossy novelty acts, or mere sex symbols, the music industry has sought out a scapegoat. It has responded with a string of lawsuits and recrimination--blaming the very fans that sustain them for the poor sales of their own increasingly mediocre products.

It is our intention to support bands and music that embrace the future rather than shrink from it. Thus, in recognition of A Ghost is Born having leaked to the Internet in March 2004, donations are being collected for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, an organization selected by the members of Wilco themselves. These donations are a symbolic down payment or promssory note in advance of the album's release on June 22, and a show of thanks to the band for its continuing generosity and trust--on behalf of the fans of Wilco, and of real, original music everywhere. We do this as a measure of good faith: to show that there will always be an audience who will pay for good music; to remind record companies that their marketing efforts should target music lovers, not only teenagers; and to prove that reports of the death of the music-buying public, indeed, are greatly exaggerated.

Wilco's manager, Tony Margherita, according to a Rolling Stone article, notes:

The band and I think this idea is great because it just underscores something we believe very strongly: that real music fans are prepared, even anxious, to prove their loyalty and support their favorite artists. They want to participate. These people are not the enemy . . . They're the backbone of what we all do. Plus, we get to support a charity that we think is very important, and I'm certain that a vast majority of the people who are downloading the record are going to want the real thing when it comes out in June.

This sort of proactive thinking--and acting--on the part of fans and bands is important and ever more crucial to clearly mark the distinctions between the world of musicians and fans and the music "industry". I look forward to more examples of this.

The Lincoln Plawg has picked out a couple of highlights and analysis from speeches by Powell and Copps before the NAB's Summit on Responsible Programming.

Industry self-governance? Expanding the powers of the FCC? Where does a crackdown on indecency take place within a larger 1st Amendment arena? Who's staking out what territory in this scrimmage? Politicians always go after "offensive" media and the mainstream media pull out their concerned faces. usually not much changes. Will this be any different? There's a larger, heavier discourse of appropriate speech issues going on right now as well with regards to Patriotism(tm) and Partisanship. I still don't understand why the Crass Commercialism of the Superbowl halftime show gets lumped as the fault of the Liberals. but hey....

From Wired News comes this report that a U.S. District Court judge in Florida has found, like a judge in Philly, that the RIAA must file seperate suits against individual song-swappers, rather than the limps of 2,000 or so they have been blasting at in one shot.

Seems rather like a class action suit turned on its head.

New York Times article in the Fashion & Style Section called "A Bush Surprise: Fright-Wing Support" discusses politically conservative punks who have organizations like GOPunk, Conservative Punk, Punkvoter Lies, and (my favorite name) Anti-Anti-Flag. The Republican Party organizer dismisses the punks out of hand, but as the author notes, that a pretty dismissive and counter-productive move. There are some interesting quotes therein.

22-year-old Nick Rizzuto, founder of Conservative Punk, believes that "punk has been hijacked by an extreme left-wing element." He also notes:

"Punks will tell me, `Punk and capitalism don't go together.' I don't understand where they're coming from. The biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries like the U.S., Canada and Japan. I haven't heard of any new North Korean punk bands coming out. There's no scene in Iran."

I would perhaps surmise that the biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries specifically because they're capitalist. Punk is often associated with both alienation from the system and the comfort of bourgeois life to a very working class subjegation by the system. It would make perfect sense that the largest punk scenes would be in countries that are dominated by a capitalist "ethic". Of course there are issues of repression and freedom of expression that may limit the exposure of the scenes in places like Iran. Though, just because this guy's never heard of it, doesn't mean it's not there. Look at the importance of underground, revolutionary music acts like the Plastic People of the Universe.

On the interesting quote tip, Ian MacKaye of Fugazi and Minor Threat

likened the punk aesthetic to furniture. "Once it's built you can put it into any house," he said. "You can be a lefty and go to Ikea or you can be a right-winger and go to Ikea." Punk, he said, "is a free space where anything can go — a series of actions and reactions, and people rebelling and then rebelling against rebelling."

Jackson Browne's NYT Op-Ed, Songs of Cuba, Silenced in America, while not as much of a smack-down as it could have been, is still an effective and personal read on the U.S. hypocrisy and oppression in dealing with Cuba.

From TalkLeft comes the story of yet another morning show firing:

Larry Wachs and Eric Von Haessler were suspended after they
accidentally left a microphone on while taping a bit during a
commercial.

Over the sound of a Honda truck ad, Lane could be heard describing sexual acts in graphic terms.

The Guys had planned to play the tape backwards during the show to
mock the government's campaign against indecency. They cancelled that
plan after realizing that the words had been broadcast live.

From one of the comments on TalkLeft, it seems these guys are second rate shockjocks--hardly surprising, but I've got to wonder if playing obscenities backwards is really any sort of defense. They still would have aired them. I guess the idea is just being able to pull a fast one on the FCC. Not necessarily the best route to protest the current state of affairs.

via boingboing, we find that Creative Commons has issued a new Music License. the folks behind Creative Commons have put a lot of solid effort into these licenses. It not enough to just kvetch about the absolute, monolithic idiocy that permiates the corporate "art" world--but coming up with strong alternatives like CC are essential.

What a mess. As the relentless P2P saga continues from Napster on down, Kazaa is now being sued by a Romanian man who claims he wrote the Kazaa source code while working as a freelancer in 2000. He now lives in the US and works for Microsoft. Apparently he and Sharman networks have sued and counter sued each other before. I've no idea of the background, but it's just another wrinkle. [BBC story]

You could suppose, though, that a company that employs the tactics noted in Wired is not unused to a little shady dealing. I've no knowledge one way or another, nor am I trying to accuse either side in the source code dispute, but just read Wired's description:

Amsterdam-based Kazaa.com went dark and Zennström vanished. Days later, the company was reborn with a structure as decentralized as Kazaa's peer-to-peer service itself. Zennström, a Swedish citizen, transferred control of the software's code to Blastoise, a strangely crafted company with operations off the coast of Britain - on a remote island renowned as a tax haven - and in Estonia, a notorious safe harbor for intellectual property pirates. And that was just the start.

Ownership of the Kazaa interface went to Sharman Networks, a business formed days earlier in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, another tax haven. Sharman, which runs its servers in Denmark, obtained a license for Zennström's technology, FastTrack. The Kazaa.com domain, on the other hand, was registered to an Australian firm called LEF Interactive - for the French revolutionary slogan, liberté, égalité, fraternité.

What a tangled mess they weave.

Got this in my email today. Spread the word.

The Future of Music Coalition has been working in partnership with the Pew Internet & American Life Project and an array of other musician-based organizations to design a balanced survey that will give musicians, performers, and songwriters a chance to speak up about the Internet, file-sharing, and copyright issues. The survey is now up and functioning, administered by Pew Internet and Princeton Survey Research Associates, so please visit http://websurveyor.net/wsb.dll/11719/Music.htm from March 15 - April 15, 2004 to participate. It will take about 20 minutes of your time to complete.

Why survey musicians?
We've all heard speculations about what musicians are "really thinking" in the changing digital landscape. Yet, from our vantage point inside the music community these projections have always seemed too narrow to represent the complex concerns we regularly experience in our discussions with musicians.

It's time to stop projecting our thoughts and preferences onto musicians and, instead, ask musicians to share their own experiences and opinions.

For the text, head to: http://www.futureofmusic.org/research/musiciansurvey.cfm

An interview with Henry Rollins from this past February, while he was up in Maine on his "Shock and Awe My Ass" tour. No great revelations--downloading music can take money away from musicians who probably should get paid, but the big labels are greedy slags who deserve it, so how do you as a consumer with perhaps some modicum of morality approach it? (up to you, he says); Everytime Bush speaks it prompts Rollins to speak (hmm.....); The right wing doesn't put too much research into their books--mostly mudslinging and generalizing; and tickets to his show were $20. But hey, you can read it for yourself.

From Tangerines in a Red Net Bag:

There are no humans in pop music anymore, it can be assembled out of elements that already exist, in this way the vocals seem to be vestigal, reminding that this is "pop music" as opposed to something else, something that has not been named yet.

We have gotten so close to noise, beats, percussion and mechanical percision, so that we have producers becoming the new kings and queens--this does not mean that they do not have autonomy.

Missy chose all of the noise, both organic and inorganic in her track, and its brilliance is how the organic (horses braying, handclaps, her voice) grates against the inorganic (the rest)

Britney manages to make herself completley inorganic, a barbarella sexbot, and so we miss the organic. That's the problem with this single, and her transition in the last few albums, she has moved from narrative to fractured forms, but it seems almost by accident (is this what Madonna is correcting, in her subtle, almost hectoring tone here ?) As well, that title her refusal to engage with what was traditionally called music. Its her, popbot versus the musics kudzu like growths.

Back in the day, I had the idea of creating a website that would observe the intersections of music and politics. The politics of music, the music of politics, music and politics. Time took over and I never made it. I had the domain registered for some time (musicandpolitics.com and .org). Today out of curiosity, I checked it out and musicandpolitics.com was taken--by some monygrubbing squatter--I'm not ponying up the $288 they want. However, .org was available and that's where my focus had always been, so I bought it again. It'll be pointing to this blog soon enough, I imagine.

So, welcome to the new home of musicandpolitics. Feedback is always encouraged.