This week is, apparently, World Homeopathy Awareness Week ((… as I discovered over at Cubiks Rube. Thanks writerJames)) so I’m performing my skeptical duty by making you aware of it (wow – even just thinking about homeopathy has made me feel better this morning!)
In the past I have been harsh on homeopathy so in honour of WHAW I’m going to allow some equal time for its proponents. It’s the least I can do. Let me present for you Dr Charlene Werner (a doctor of homeopathy, I presume), who will, using her own words, guide you through the science behind how homeopathy works:
Did you stick it out to the end, or did your laughing fit cause you to hyperventilate like I did? I had to take a whole bottle of homeopathic sedatives to calm me down.
To recap what we have learned from Dr Werner:
• The total mass of the universe is about the same as something the size of a bowling ball (ie, virtually none at all), and is not the 8 × 1052 kg ((Just in case you’re not good with numerical powers, the language description of that would be ‘AN AMOUNT SO FUCKING HUGE THAT YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE IT’)) generally accepted by physicists. ((Estimation based on measured stellar density. There is, as always, dispute on the accuracy of this figure, but I think we can safely say that it’s nearer ‘A FUCKING HUGE AMOUNT’ than it is near Dr Werner’s preferred quantity of ‘none’))
• Einstein’s famous mass/energy equivalence formula is wrong and it should read E=C2. Many of you will see at once that this is in conflict with the ShooTag reworking of it as E=M¾ and so Dr Werner is possibly in error here.
• Stephen Hawkings was ‘sent to Earth by God in His Infinite Wisdom to bring us String Theory.’ This is evidently a different person to Stephen Hawking, the great physicist and cosmologist, who was born naturally of human parents, and, although a proponent of String Theory, can take no credit for its genesis.
• This supernatural Stephen Hawkings dude also discovered a new kind of particle shaped like ‘little U-ies’ that ‘work by vibration’ (no I don’t know what the hell she’s on about either).
• E=MC2 is an expression of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
• Protons, electrons and neutrons, despite all scientific knowledge to the contrary, are made of energy and not matter.
• The ‘definition’ of disease is ‘Transforming your energy into something different’ and has nothing to do with a pathogenic biological process as is generally thought.
• If your neighbour’s dog craps on your lawn, the best way to deal with the matter is to bomb his house. ((Did anyone else start to wonder at this point whether this woman has some serious issues…?))
So there we have it. I hope your awareness of homeopathy is suitably heightened. During the next few days we will be celebrating further illuminating homeopathic moments.
Sundial in thyme garden at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Photographed June 17, 2007 at 12:21 solar time (13:21 Daylight Savings Time). Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License from Wikimedia Commons
Being as I am an atheist, one of the things that peeves me about religion is the idea held by many that without it we’d somehow be completely incapable of navigating the complex moral issues of human existence. Religions would like everyone to believe that they have the answers to all the big moral problems, and claim to have the final word on how we should live our lives. Of course, in the Christian religion, the Mac Daddy of religious moral imprimatur is, without question, the Ten Commandments.
Today on The Cow I thought we might scrutinize the Big 10 and their heritage. Anyone with a Sunday Schooled childhood will know that the story of the Ten Commandments is outlined in Exodus, so it is here that we open our Bibles in order to find out the real nitty gritty behind what Moses brought down with him from Mt Sinai on those big stone tablets. I suggest that it might go a little differently from what most people might think…
To set the scene: The Israelites are fleeing from Egypt under the guidance of Moses. They have been travelling for three months ((To the very day! as the Bible gleefully exclaims, as if to make a point of its superb timekeeping abilities. This is something that is noticeably absent about, oh, EVERYWHERE else…)) when they arrive at Mount Sinai. After laborious admonishments from God that he should come alone, Moses heads on up the mountain to take receipt of the Ten Commandments that we all know and love:
1. You shall have no other Gods before me.
2. You shall not worship idols. (This is pretty much just a variation on #1) ((In the King James version, which is not neatified like some of the more modern renderings of the Bible, God makes no bones about issuing a threat along with this: “… for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”. God is jealous? How sad to believe that an all-knowing being is unable to rise above the petty human foible of jealousy!))
3. You shall not take My Name in vain. (So’s this)
4. You shall keep the Sabbath day holy. (And this is just a sub-clause of 2&3, by any sensible reckoning)
5. You shall honour your mother and father.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
10. You shall not covet they neighbour’s house/wife/manservant/maidservant/ox/donkey/XBox etc. (God is nothing if not circumlocutious. He could have simply said “You shall not covet anything that your neighbour owns”. Maybe he feels he has to spell it out for the really stupid – after all, they must number a fair percentage of his followers)
OK. So that about wraps it up and we can trundle off down the mountain with our slab of stone, and our moral certitude intact, right? ((I just want to bring up something here: how is it, with 2000+ years of guidance from God in their pockets, Christians still transgress the above rules in numbers equal to, or perhaps even greater than, the rest of the population. Are we to think that without these guidelines these people would be even worse? Or is it just that religion provides a convenient excuse for not taking any personal responsibility?)) Oh no, not on your nellie. Now that God’s got the soapbox there’s just a few teensy other things he wants to add…
11. You shall set your Hebrew servant free after six years. Except if he doesn’t want to go, in which case his ear will be pierced with an awl. (It is pretty obvious already that the end of #10 was always going to be a good place for an edit, isn’t it?)
12. You shall not let your daughter go free if you have previously sold her as a servant. Conditions apply. (I’m abbreviating for the sake of sanity. Pretty much all these further Commandments are long-winded and full of caveats)
13. Anyone who strikes someone else shall be put to death. Unless it’s an accident, in which case I/God will decide on a place to send him. (God persists in talking in both the first and third person throughout Exodus. It is really quite irritating. I suppose it’s something to do with him being a Holy Trinity and all that, but you’d think that an omnipotent being would have a better grasp of grammar and language structure).
14. Anyone who attacks his father or mother should be put to death. (No exceptions for accidents here, evidently)
15. Anyone who kidnaps someone and sells them should be put to death.
16. Anyone who curses his father or mother should be put to death. (This is certainly a little stronger than #5: “Honour your mother and father”)
17. If men quarrel and one hits the other with a stone or with his fist and he does not die but is confined to bed, the one who struck the blow will not be held responsible if the other gets up and walks around outside with his staff; however, he must pay the injured man for the loss of his time and see that he is completely healed. (Geez – it’s starting to sound like the minutes of the annual general meeting of a bowling club)
18. If someone beats their slave and they die they should be punished. But if the slave gets up after a day or two, that’s OK, no worries.
19. If fighting men injure a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely, then they have to pay up whatever her husband thinks fair. (Many of these latter commandments smack of rules made by a committee – “But Jehosaphat what if a bearded man goes into the temple and kicks a priest in the balls? Surely we need to cover that?”)
20. If someone knocks out a servant’s tooth or eye, the servant is to be set free. (This Commandment coupled with #18 can best be summarized thus: If you have a servant, make sure any wounds you inflict upon him can – in the grand manner of modern prison retaliation – come under the explanation “He slipped in the shower”)
21. If a bull gores a man to death….
OH GOD ((Yes, I mean YOU WITH THE BEARD)) THIS IS SO FUCKING TEDIOUS. It just goes on and on and on and on like this for a good part of Exodus – for a total of 56 Commandments by my counting. ((Give or take. It’s hard to know which are Commandments and which are just sub-clauses and asides)) I won’t assault you with the rest of them, even though Moses had to stand there and listen to God drone on about what to do if your bull gores someone else’s bull and what to do if your goat gets into someone’s vineyard and the finer points of disputes involving arson. You know Moses lived to be really old, right? He aged about a hundred years on that mountain listening to God yakking.
It is, for the most part, totally irrelevant dreck, unless you happen to be a pre-technological Middle-Eastern goat herder. And even then, it’s hard to see the purpose of many of the abstruse and often contradictory instructions. Here’s just a few more highlights:
32. Do not allow a sorceress to live. (She’s a witch – burn her!) ((Actually, this is not that funny – it was readings of these verses that allowed the Christian Church, throughout history, to kill so many innocent women on the flimsiest of pretexts))
33. Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death. (…and you fuck one goat…)
38. Do not blaspheme God or curse the ruler of your people. (Repetition, much? There are at least four variations of “And don’t call Me any bad names!” among this particular batch of Commandments. If there’s one thing that reading the Bible constantly impresses upon me, it is how utterly petty and childlike God sounds whenever he is supposed to be speaking in his own voice. In fact, for an omnipotent being he seems almost neurotically obsessed with trivia)
47. Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt. (But don’t worry about having Hebrew slaves. They don’t count as aliens and slavery doesn’t count as oppression) ((You want hypocrisy? The Bible is teeming with it!))
And finally ending with:
56. Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. (This last seems to be not so much a moral injunction as a cooking tip. God has plainly run out of ideas by now. One gets the sense that maybe His initial notion was to have 100 Commandments but that he realised somewhere around #50 that this was a tad ambitious. So he battled on for a half dozen more and then just threw in the towel.) ((Don’t get it into your head that he stopped talking, though. He goes on for many more chapters about how to make a whole lot of knick knacks for His tabernacle, including the Ark of the Covenant, the Table of the Covenant and the Lampstand of the Covenant. And not just with general descriptions either – God has some really specific design ideas when it comes to His temple furniture. He’s the epitome of every designer’s nightmare client.))
Anyway, God eventually senses that Moses is nodding off, and He’s a little worried that the people at the bottom of the mountain might be using the idle time to, oh, smelt down their jewellery and turn it into a Golden Calf or something equally as stupid, so he uses his Super Laser Vision ((It doesn’t say that in the Bible – I just made it up. But you have to admit that this was the most colourful image in the whole story I’ve told here today, right?)) to etch the aforementioned 56+ Commandments onto a couple of stone tablets and send Moses on his way.
So, just to clarify the situation at this point: Moses arrives back at the Israelite camp with two chunks of stone bearing the Words of GOD – the supreme omnipotent Creator of All Things – and what does he do? What does he do with the moral guidelines that are to set all humankind on the path to a correct and sinless future?
Exodus 32
15: And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.
16: And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.
…
19: And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.
That’s right folks – he smashes them into bits! In a fit of pique (due principally to his followers getting overly enthusiastic during his fairly lengthy absence) he petulantly renders the Words of God into marble chips in an act that has inspired literary editors ever since.
You really have to ask how seriously Moses was taking any of this, and question God’s choice of representatives on Earth. I mean, think about it. If you were a boss and you were sending an employee to do something really important and they fucked it up because they had anger management issues, what would you do?
Then some time passes. God sends down a plague on the Israelites, appears naked in front of Moses (although He only agrees to show Moses ‘His back parts’) ((He agrees to do this for a most unusual reason: “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.” Wha? He’s fucking OMNIPOTENT! He knows EVERYBODY by name!)) and visits Moses’s tent disguised as a pillar of cloud. Eventually He commands Moses to come back up Mount Sinai with a newly-chiselled pair of stone tablets so that He might refresh them with a second set of Commandments. Here’s a weird thing – God does not seem for a moment pissed at Moses for his careless handling of the first version. Elsewhere, God smites people mightily for infractions that seem a LOT less egregious.
And of course, now that God has Moses’s attention again, he can’t resist in adding a few things. He also rehashes numerous edicts that we’ve heard before, and concludes once more with the perplexing:
Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
In fact, given its repetition almost word-for-word, and its obvious status as the last thing He wanted to impress upon Moses, one has to believe that this Commandment was as at least as important to God as ‘Thou Shall Not Murder’ (which is only mentioned once, and is contradicted at least a dozen times with ‘except-in-the-case-of’ clauses), and ‘Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery’. All things considered, it’s surprising that it doesn’t appear in the #2 slot after the monotonously reiterated ‘Thou Shall Not Take My Name In Vain’ ((The Commandment ‘to not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk’ was probably meaningful to the Israelites and most likely an instruction not to follow Canaanite practices. This is just one of many illustrations that the texts of the Bible were written for their time, not for all time. It seems obvious to anyone with a rational thought process that if you can drop one Commandment because it doesn’t make sense in a modern idiom, then the relevance of all the others is quite reasonably called into question))
A few things should now be clear: The choice of ‘ten’ commandments as some kind of rule set for humans to follow is more or less arbitrary. Nowhere does God actually say – ‘Really, it’s only the first ten that count’. Indeed, the moral value of those ten, as Christopher Hitchens eloquently puts it, is particularly questionable in the first four, which have no bearing on morality at all, but are simply exhortations to accept irrationality as a bedrock of a worldview before going on to anything else.
God, as represented in Exodus, is a spiteful, small-minded and confused being. His thought processes appear meandering and obtuse. He contradicts Himself repeatedly, and repeats Himself infuriatingly. He plays silly games with Moses on numerous occasions, where it seems a less-petty deity would have just directly communicated His wishes. He dresses up as pillars of cloud and burning bushes and delivers terrible dialogue – being on the whole reminiscent of a bit player in a cheap pantomime.
And worst of all, His ‘commandments’ when distilled down to the really useful bits, are nothing more than good common sense. Something that any atheist could have come up with.
The capacity for stupid people to part with huge amounts of cash on schemes concocted by morally bankrupt swindlers never ceases to amaze me. It’s as if there’s a reservoir of schmucks out there who are just busting to empty their bank accounts into the pockets of criminals. Here on The Cow this is very familiar territory. Over the years we’ve seen the duplicitous Shoo!TAG™ scammers bilking all and sundry with their nutso pest repellent scheme; the smarmy Steorn with their ‘free energy’ shell game (a scam that’s centuries old in one form or another); the Space Diamond fraudsters who promise untold wealth via implausible interstellar retrieval schemes. And the list goes on.
Sometimes I like to play this game in my head where I make up the weirdest scheme I can imagine and speculate on whether people would pay money for it. For instance, I’ll look out my window and see something like, oh, let’s see – bird shit – and then make it the centre of some daft scam. I’ll imagine, for instance, that there’s some place that offers to rub bird shit on your face for money. Maybe I’ll even elaborate on it a bit to make it even more implausible – maybe it’s not just bird shit they’re offering to smoosh all over your dial but, oh, let’s see something really off the wall… I’ve got it! Nightingale shit!
Hahahaha! No-one would believe that in a BILLION years. No-one on the PLANET is dumb enough to fork out for that.
A Long Post About Art, Music and Philosophy, and Why We Shouldn’t Just All Stick Our Heads in the Oven.
—————————————————————-⊕—————————————————————-
There are numerous footnotes in this post – there are two ways to read them. You can either hover your mouse over the Roman Numeral and they will appear in a floating window, or you can click on it and you will be jumped to the footnote where you can click on a ‘return’ icon to get you back to where you were. Try it now. ((See, easy!)) There you go. Happy reading! Oh, and much more discussion and clarification in the comments.
—————————————————————-⊕—————————————————————-
None of my Australian readers can have failed to have missed the recent musical debacle featuring two of the country’s most iconic institutions: Men At Work and Larrikin Music. ((I say iconic because of Larrikin’s awesome status in our music history, but that hides a multitude of omissions. Larrikin Records, formerly the brainchild of the inimitable Warren Fahey, is not the company it once was, having been split and sold many years back. The publishing arm and the label are now controlled by big companies. No surprise there.))
For the foreigners, this is the lowdown: Larrikin Music has successfully sued Sony BMG and EMI for plagiarism, claiming that songwriters Colin Hay and Ron Strykert used a phrase from another song as part of the Men At Work mega-hit ‘Down Under’. Here, listen to it now so you can follow me:
OK. So not the most cerebral music clip ever made, nor the most illuminating lyrics ever penned, ((I’m still not entirely sure what the song is supposed to be about, but over the years I’ve inferred that it’s a caricature of the way Australians present themselves overseas, and a burlesque of the Crocodile Dundee-like aura that the country seems to have acquired in the minds of foreigners)) but most of the world agrees that the song has a catchy enthusiasm as a satirical paean to Australiana – enough to make it a considerable success both in locally and abroad. And it continues to earn substantial amounts of money. ((Of course. If it had disappeared into obscurity, I think we can agree that Larrikin would not have been remotely interested in correcting a ‘point of order’.))
The issue is the flute riff that is played near the intro and again by the chap sitting in the tree at about the 53 second mark. It includes a note sequence from a very well-known Australian kid’s song called ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ written by a woman named Marion Sinclair in the 1930s (the rights of the song are held by Larrikin – Ms Sinclair is now dead). I’m using my words here carefully – I say ‘note sequence’ because, unlike the judge who ruled the case, I’m not at all sure that the small snippet is recognizeable to many, perhaps most, people as as a tune in its own right, hanging as it does on the end of another few notes and making a whole phrase that sounds (to my ears) considerably different to the phrase as played in ‘Kookaburra’. Indeed, in the court case, this is what the musicologist called by Men At Work‘s defence argued also. Now, I’ve heard ‘Down Under’ innumerable times in the almost 30 years since its release, and although I know ‘Kookaburra’ as well as any Australian schoolkid, I never once recognized it in the Men At Work song. More pertinent, perhaps, is that no-one else seems to have recognized it either, including Marion Sinclair herself. ((The similarity was pointed out on a popular tv music programme late last year, and Larrikin Music immediately started seeing dollar signs. In a rather disingenuous attempt at justifying his position, director of Larrikin Music Publishing, Norm Lurie (and some of members of the media, it has to be said), tried to evoke a miserable picture of the aged Marion Sinclair sitting penniless and alone in a nursing home while the Men At Work songwriters lived high on the hog. This is a fairly pathetic tactic.)) The reason for this is a simple one of musical context: ‘Kookaburra’ is written and performed in strict time in a major key ((It’s a round, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’)) and the ‘Down Under’ has a lollopping reggae beat and is in a minor key.
Oh, of course I can hear it now – because it’s been the subject of scrutiny – and I accept as any reasonable person must, that it’s pretty likely that Greg Ham, the band member who improvised the part on the recording, was ‘quoting’ the ‘Kookaburra’ melody in his performance. Even so my musical brain needs to do a quirky mental transposition to make it ‘feel’ like the tune I’m familiar with from the children’s ditty.
But truly, this is not the point. The crux of this whole matter is, as you obviously guessed, money. And, despite anything else you might hear or read, about nothing but money; Larrikin Music claims that the addition of this phrase to the song entitles them to between 40 and 60 percent of the song’s earnings. Since the judge ruled in their favour, we have to assume that he doesn’t find that notion quite as ridiculous as everybody else does. ((The actual monetary award has yet to be decided. We shall see how that goes.))
As I write (I swear) kookaburras are sitting in an old gum tree right near my studio, laughing maniacally. Here’s the rather wonderful Colin Hay ((In the interests of full disclosure I will say that I have worked with Colin in the past and found him to be a masterful performer and excellent songwriter. He is also that most rare of beings – a scholarly and gentlemanly musician.)) performing Down Under in recent times (well before any of this madness was even hinted at). It’s a sombre and rather more poignant version of the song, but I don’t think anyone would dispute that it’s a fine piece of work on its own, and it certainly doesn’t depend on the ‘Kookaburra’ riff to make it any better. Definitely not 40 to 60 percent better that’s for sure.
All this brings me to the actual purpose of this post, so if you’re still with me, crack open the whisky and settle back. We’re not even half done.
Recently while I was spending my time over at Bearskin Rug, one of my favourite haunts, I read an article by the redoubtable Mr Kevin Cornell (proprietor of said haunt) called Why the Monkey Dances. Kevin was pondering the wisdom of monetizing such efforts as Bearskin Rug. Or, to be more accurate, he was wondering how the hell, or even if, he might be able to make some cash out of a pursuit which is undeniably of quite some worth, and on which he expends a large amount of time and effort. After all, isn’t it worth something? And, since it is indisputably better than most of the crap on the net, isn’t it worth a decent something?
That post catalyzed a lot of my ongoing thoughts on this topic and it lead me to think seriously about discarding many of my preconceptions about how we artists (especially musical artists because that’s my field) work, and our value in this modern world.
So now I am going to propose some ideas that are likely to be heretical to mostly every composer or songwriter who reads this.
The ‘Down Under’ affair is an example of what I see as just another pneumatic staple in the cheap pine coffin of the modern music industry. The reason that record companies, publishers, distributors and their smug legal divisions even exist – the music – seems to have completely lost its value. “Ho hum,” I hear you say, “I’ve heard that a million times from would-be rock stars and struggling songwriters. When does it get heretical?”
It gets heretical now, when I ask you to consider the value of the music in the first place. This is an expanded version of how I put it to Kevin:
Once upon a time there were no CDs or vinyl records or pianos. If you wanted to hear a song, you had to go find someone who was good at making music and pay them something and sit and listen ((Or perhaps, someone else was paying them to perform for you, in which case it cost you nothing)) – you weren’t paying for the ‘song’ per se, because it wasn’t actually something you could ever possess. You were paying for an experience. And then you went home. If you wanted to take the experience with you, then you had to learn the song, or the tune, and perhaps even learn an instrument to play it – the song itself didn’t cost you anything. At this time, there was no other way of having music. Today we call this ‘folk music’ and now, just as it was when it was written, no-one owns it.
After many millennia of this kind of thing, a way of printing notated music came along and you could more easily and directly bring the music into your home, admittedly with some effort (you had to learn how to read the sheet music). Also, suddenly, the song itself accrued a value – you were required to pay for the sheet music. Some of what you paid found its way, in theory, back to the person who came up with the ‘original’ song. This notion of monetary reward for ‘originality’ had not existed in any formal way prior to this time – until now music had been one great swooshing sea of influence and re-influence, as any folk musicologist will tell you.
The next big event to affect the course of music was the ability to record and ‘keep’ it; the wax cylinder came along, followed by the vinyl record. All you needed now to bring the music into your home was some more money to spend (but relatively little effort on your own part). Now you were paying for the song, a mechanical device on which to play it and also for the rights to play it on that device. But because these things were still fairly rare, the experience was special, and it felt appropriate to fork out some dollars. Note well that the margin of profit on early recordings was very small – you paid mostly for the cost of the technology, and a little to the artist, a little to the publisher of the music and perhaps a small amount to the manufacturer and distributor of the recording itself. This makes sense.
Also understand that because it now had a money value, the music acquired a legal value, and the listener acquired some legal obligations (no-one ever asked whether anyone wanted this – it just became so). At the same time opportunistic intermediaries discovered that, due to the desirability of this ‘music’ stuff, they could insert themselves into the process (which had now become quite complicated) and make a tidy sum wrangling this ephemeral blend of musical art and fashion on which everyone had become so keen. Music was becoming a business. A whole superstructure of people who had nothing to do with the creation of the music itself, needed to earn money from it. The Recording Industry was born. ((I don’t want to imply that nothing good came out of this system – it obviously did. But in the last decade or so the landscape has become embarrassingly barren, and the record companies increasingly desperate to justify their existences.))
Pretty rapidly, the vinyl records became less rare and very popular, and then cassettes and CDs came along, and you could have music everywhere you went – even driving along in your car! It was amazing, and people happily paid for this wonderful experience. Behind the scenes, though, a very important set of changing circumstances wasn’t being revealed to you: the cost of manufacturing the recordings was diminishing at roughly the same rate as the profits of the companies who now owned them was increasing. CDs started to cost only a few cents to manufacture, but were being sold for twenty dollars or more! Most of the money you were paying to hear a recording of your favourite band was not for the CD object itself, nor indeed for the music on it, but to support a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster stitched out of studio executives and A&R people, distributors and advertisers, lawyers and lackeys. The advent of CDs also brought with it another unparalleled phenomenon: with this new digital technology, the corporations discovered that audiences were prepared to re-purchase, for a premium, music that they already possessed. This was music that was already ‘owned’ by the record companies and for which the legwork and marketing had been done years ago. It was a goldmine. Music that had mostly already paid for itself was being sold again. Instead of recognizing this as the bonus it was, the recording industry began to see this enormous incoming flood of money as the status quo.
All this while, the experience of listening to music was slowly becoming less special. The amount of music available to any individual was staggering. Music was now everywhere – in your lounge room, in your bedroom, in airports, in elevators, in buses, on planes. It played in the background of films and tv shows, and had so many ancillary uses that you didn’t even listen to it. I bet that you have music playing right now, as you read this, and you haven’t even been aware of it. Music had became so portable you could even take it with you while you were jogging. Most people in, in fact, didn’t know what a world without music was like.
Then a new revolution began: the computer came along, and with it the invention of the mp3 and the iPod and the capacity to store more songs than anyone could listen to in several years… The music was now ubiquitous and completely unencumbered. It had transcended physical form, and existed only as bits of data – intangible, tiny, transportable and eminently copiable. And, horrifyingly for the recording business, utterly uncontrollable.
And suddenly, because the specialness of the music and the mechanical difficulty of rendering it were almost non-existent, the pecuniary value of the songs per se was revealed to be way higher than listeners actually thought they were worth when it really came down to it. And these insubstantial creations were now encumbered by a host of legal obligations that we had never agreed to in any real sense, and to which we had never really expected to adhere. ((How quickly we forget about the compilation tapes we used to make on cassettes, and swap with our friends. It was entirely inevitable that, once music was freed from technical bondage, it would be swapped and reinvented prolifically and carelessly. It’s the nature of music!)) In quite surreal extremes, people now found themselves being sued for millions of dollars over the possession of a few tiny pieces of music! Others were forced into bankruptcy because they made it possible for audiences to swap and listen to the music for nothing – in a profound sense doing nothing technically wrong themselves. It seemed, to rational people, a system out of kilter. To the recording industry, it was the death of the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Now here’s the heresy.
I propose that the problem we are now contemplating is that the music itself is worth, in monetary terms, exactly what it was always worth – nothing. Or, to be more exact, it is worth as much as anybody in particular is willing to pay for it. I submit that we have contrived to give music a value of zillions of dollars in an arbitrary fashion and we are now reaping the costs of our greed; complicated legal problems, a dearth of spontaneity, constipated creation and yet another (as if we need it) huge cartel of lawyers and go-betweens. And MOST of the money that is feeding this bloated lumbering beast does not go to music creators. The music itself is, and has always been, both valueless and beyond value. It can’t, and shouldn’t be, labelled with a price tag.
Let me rotate it through another angle for you, so that the shock might be eased a little. Consider this: if you are a stickler for being ‘legal’ about your music and still want it without paying any money for it, it is entirely possible for you to do so. You can play Greensleeves and Blow the Man Down, Chopin and Schubert, Brahms and Bach, Beethoven and Debussy, on your piano or violin, on your synthesizer or your theremin, on your harmonica or steel guitar for absolutely nothing. We are talking about some of the most awe-inspiring music ever written and it is entirely free. And here’s the thing: you can quite legally record that music, and sell the recording to your friends. You can perform it in front of thousands and charge them $90 apiece for the privilege of hearing you play it. You can score a film with it, use it as a tv theme and play it as music-on-hold on your phone system, without incurring any cost to yourself or anyone else. Does any of that seem like a bad thing? Not at all, in my opinion. And yet you cannot do any of that with the latest song from Lady Gaga! ((Aside, obviously, from playing it for your personal enjoyment in private.)) How absurd is that? In a fundamental way, we’ve decided that the music of Lady Gaga is more valuable than the music of Beethoven. We have taken music and made it into an expensive and gaudy fashion item. It is, I say, time that we restored it to its true value.
I also ask you to think about this fact: we don’t need to have music in our lives to survive. ((Clearly, music, like art, is an important part of what it is to be human, so it fulfils an essential purpose in respect to our wellbeing, just as art and literature do. My point here is that if you take music away, you can still live a good life, if a much less profound one.)) It cannot be equated with food, or shelter, medicine or running water, warmth or companionship. It is a privilege that, because of its sheer ubiquity, we have begun to take entirely for granted. My feeling is that these days it might even improve our lives to have a little less of it around.
The Men at Work ruling that I talked about above seems, to most people I’ve talked to, intrinsically flawed. I think that’s because we naturally feel that this idea that music can have a value that is determined in money and in ownership, is deeply and fundamentally wrong. Australians don’t like the notion that ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’belongs to anyone, because it is part of our national psyche. Just as we really don’t believe ‘Down Under’ belongs to anyone and will happily make an mp3 of it to send to our friend in Brussels, even though that is entirely ‘illegal’. ((I hope you can see my point here – we may or may not decide to award the song some monetary worth according to any number of criteria, but we quite arbitrarily decide its value. I could give many examples of this: for example let’s say I own the song on a CD, but I feel it is OK to make a copy for my Dad, because he’d never buy it anyway. Or, I don’t own it, but I want to send it someone so they can hear the ‘Kookaburra’ riff that I’m talking about. Or, I own an audio-only version of it, but I think it’s OK to disseminate a couple of YouTube clips through my blog even though I don’t know where the legality of this stands. I submit that everyone reading this has done something of this nature. In other words, the value you have determined the song is worth has nothing at all to do with the record company’s, or the band’s, estimation of it.))
Songwriters and composers who are reading will be champing at the bit by now, and I can feel the indignation and fury fairly fuming out of my screen. Surely it’s our right to make a living from the sweat of our labours? Well, yes and no. Not our right, by any means, any more than it is our right to make money out of motivational speaking, or balloon folding, or portraiture, or photography, or stand-up comedy. But, if we do something people find enjoyable, or moving, or profound, then certainly we should expect that they might pay us something to do it. But I don’t think the correct way to go about that is by imposing what must necessarily be an arbitrary value on the music itself. ((How much is a song worth? Some years ago I was involved in a commercial where the advertising agency wanted to buy the rights to use 60 seconds of a Pet Shop Boys track for their ad. The Boys’ publisher wouldn’t sign away the rights for anything less than $400k Australian dollars. I hold two opposing thoughts in my mind regarding this: $400k is a fucking HUGE amount of money for a song. And yet, really, it’s the Pet Shop Boys’ total right to value it how they like, especially if it’s being used to give cachet to dog food or something. My point is that in some kind of bizarre Shrodinger’s Cat-like parody of quantum simultaneity, the song is at once worth precisely nothing (if they don’t sell it) and $400k (if they do). And really, they didn’t care either way. In the end, the advertisers wouldn’t fork out, so in this case it was worth nothing. The Pet Shop Boys probably didn’t even notice. This seems entirely wrong to me.))
I believe we need to revise the idea that if we pull some notes out of the air, and arrange them in some order, that they belong to us. I propose that the music itself, like information, should be free. ((In both senses of the word: ‘free’ as in costing nothing, and ‘free’ as in unfettered to go where it will.)) Aspiring songwriters are crying “But surely my new masterpiece is worth something???! Surely all the time and emotional outpouring I’ve put into this song is valuable in some way?” I say no it isn’t. It’s absolutely worthless until such times as someone decides to pay you money for it. And then it’s worth exactly what they’re willing to pay. Sure – go ahead and concoct a value for it if you like, but don’t complain when the audience doesn’t see it like you do. Where is their obligation to do that?
What’s more, I predict that we are now in an age where the outcome of all I’ve suggested above will be determined to be so no matter what we decide to do!
To step sideways into another realm of other intellectual property for a moment, that of online journalism, we see corporate media giants struggling to understand the profound change that confronts them. Rupert Murdoch has said that he wants to charge people to view his online newspapers. I predict he will fail if he tries to do that. Murdoch is “striving to fix a ”malfunctioning” business model” and says that “The current days of the internet will soon be over.” ((The business model is only malfunctioning according to his rules, ie, that he’s not raking in the billions he used to. He doesn’t understand that his time has passed – his infallible business sense has come up against an inexorable assault on the zeitgeist.)) Murdoch can’t understand why he’s lost almost half a billion dollars on MySpace when the rest of us can see it as plain as day – the value that he and his old-world cronies are putting on these enormous social clubs is completely arbitrary. It’s as fickle as any fashion. The MySpace party got uncool and everybody left. Now they’re dancing over at FaceBook, but that will, in time, go out of fashion too. These big corporate heavy-hitters just can’t bear the thought that there are tens of millions of people out there doing stuff, and they can’t be relied on to generate any money!
So their solution is completely laughable – throttle the pipe! Dominate the net! Dam the stream! Stop the fun!
Such a solution will fail.
And now the rhetoric is becoming unsettling. Even people who should know better are clinging to a model that is fairly cracking under the weight of its own inability to cope. A few days ago on The Guardian I watched a video of Jaron Lanier telling us that Web 2.0 was a dismal failure. ((Lanier, in the article accompanying the interview clip, also says of the web in general: “Oh, I think the web has been a massive success. The web gave us the first empirical evidence that vast numbers of people really are creative, really do have things to offer, and really will do it – really will get their acts together.” He seems to be able to split the web experience into pieces in his head, somehow labelling things he doesn’t like as ‘Web 2.0’. He really is confusing for someone who is supposed to be some kind of digital guru.)) Well, of course it is you nitwit. Web 2.0 is a stupid and meaningless conceptual term dreamed up by people who think they can predict the future and make money from it. ((The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee, quite rightly called the term ‘Web 2.0’ ‘a piece of jargon’, since his original concept of the web already embodied the ideas it hijacked.)) In the interview Lanier looks like a deer in the headlights when he says:
Some friends and I had this thought that perhaps that the internet would be such a fountain of wealth and opportunity that it could be entirely open, that people could give away the fruits of their brains and hearts and the opportunities they would get in return would be huge.
He goes on to be amazed and appalled that a great number of people who inhabit the open prairies of the net can’t communicate sensibly, are argumentative and petty, prone to theft, operate in packs, and are conservative. He bemoans what he sees as the demise of ‘culture’ and starts to sound unpleasantly just like Rupert Murdoch when he says that people need to be corralled in their internet habits for their own good. ((I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s definitely the gist of the Guardian interview)) He says categorically that nothing good has come from the open source movement, which is one of the most daft things I’ve heard anyone say about the net in a long time. ((Just in case it needs to be clarified, Lanier is saying that there is no ‘good’ in things like Wikipedia, Facebook, blogging, open source software such as Firefox or WordPress, contributive open concepts like YouTube, Flickr and Make, and what I would call ‘Capitalist’ open-market concepts like Etsy and Zazzle. And they are just a few of a host of marvellous working ideas. Now, this makes one really wonder about his meaning of the word ‘good’…))
His main criticism seems to be that the web has turned into one big mediocre mush – again, I think it’s peculiar that he finds this at all surprising. It is just mirroring how people really are. Jaron Lanier has plainly never been to a town council meeting. He seems to have, for a while at least, entertained the naive idea that enabling everyone to have a voice would somehow change the fundamental structure of the human condition. How quaint! He sees the web turning into a big, noisy, chaotic, sprawling, stinking, confusing, confronting bazaar when he wanted something more akin to a nice polite knitting circle. Ha!
OK. Given all that stuff, where do we go from here? Why shouldn’t we, as I’ve suggested in my sub-heading, all just stick our heads in the oven and be done with it? Well, first of all let me say that I’m not going to suggest ‘solutions’. A need for a solution infers that there is a problem in the first place, and I think the main problem we’re seeing here is that a whole lot of people are unhappy that they used to make money under a system with which they were comfortable, and now they’re not. To take on that complaint is then a lot like sympathising with people who used to make their living out of harpooning whales, or shoeing horses, or sweeping chimneys. Things change, and it’s tough. And also, as I’ve said above, it’s not a God-given right that we should be compensated for something that has no pressing utility, and we need to accept that as a baseline. ((Believe me, this is difficult concept for an artist to swallow. It’s taken me an awful long time to get to this point, but now I’m here, everything seems a darn sight clearer. Once you cross this Rubicon, the view is spectacular!))
However, despite everything I’ve written above, and despite how gloomy this might all appear, I’m very optimistic about the future of creativity; about the future of music; about the future of news dissemination and journalism; about the future of fine art, digital art, writing, poetry, movies and comedy. My optimism stems from one single fact: human beings, by their nature, are prolifically creative. This is not to say that everybody is as creative as everybody else, nor indeed that we will care for much of what gets created. But I contend that a deep desire to ‘make stuff’ runs through us, and will continue to do so no matter what.
Whether we like it or not, people will create stuff for nothing, and some of that stuff will actually be good. Despite what Lanier and Murdoch and others might believe, we don’t need their guidance to amuse and entertain ourselves. And, I suggest, we don’t need to be taught ‘culture’, nor to be taught the value of it.
Jaron Lanier made one tiny glimmer of sense in his Guardian article: he mentioned the idea of micropayments. I think this might just provide an angle on how creative people can get some small kind of monetary reward for their efforts (I say small, but in fact I don’t see any a priori reason why this would necessarily be so. It’s probably helpful for most artists to think of it like that, though). Once you abandon the idea that your music, or your art or your journalism has any inherent value, this starts to look pretty interesting.
This ((I’m not claiming this as an original idea, by the way, but it is rather novel and strange if you’re accustomed to seeing your income from CD sales, or song royalties.)) is how I think it might work:
Let’s say you visit a website – maybe The Guardian, since we’ve bandied them around a bit – and you read an article by Jaron Lanier. If you thought that article was valuable – that it informed your day, or amused you, or enlightened you – would you chip in a cent or two if you knew that money was going to the person who wrote it? I would certainly do that. If you went to a music site and you heard something that lifted your spirits, or made your heart flip, would you chip in a few cents for that experience? I would do that too. And (perhaps it’s me being naive now) I think a lot of people would do that. Technically, I don’t see there’s much of an impediment to doing this kind of thing anymore, and it will only be a short time before someone implements a viable scheme. ((One such pending scheme is Flattr, which, although interesting, has a fatal flaw in my view. Perhaps I’ll go into that another time…)) It would be straightforward: you set up an account much like a bank account and deposit some money into it – maybe a baseline $100 or so. Then as you tour around the web, you’d see little icons that said, maybe, ‘1c’ or ‘5c’ attached to creative enterprises. You click that icon and the appropriate amount is donated to that person from your account. When your account is depleted to a certain minumum threshold, you’re informed by email that you need to top it up. The system can’t be anymore complicated than that or it won’t work. ((This is exactly the way that my electronic road toll account works, so this kind of system is nothing new.)) Of course there is going to be the explosion of exploitation that comes with this idea – it’s entirely inevitable. You can’t stop human nature, and unlike Jaron Lanier, I’m not going to kid myself or anyone else that we won’t get huge troughs of pig swill – it exists in real life too, but on the internet, you get to know about it.
OK, it doesn’t take much in the way of brains to see that this is a tiny trickle of income – a few cents here, a few cents there, how is anyone going to make a living out of that? Well, my speculation is that not many will. To be more accurate, I think that a large number of people will make some pocket money, and a very small number of people, proportionately, will make a living. But here’s the thing – that’s really no different at all to the way things are now. If you are an artist of any kind you know exactly what I mean. Artists, musicians, journalists, writers – all spend the vast part of their lives scraping a living. It is only a very very small number who garner any great success out of their craft. And, if you do happen to get successful, you stand to make some reasonable money – not stupid insane money, which is what I suggest happened under the old model, but decent money. ((I predict that the people who complain the longest and the loudest about my ideas will be those who were the most successful under the old paradigm. Those of us for whom that paradigm really didn’t work that well are likely to be more receptive to change.)) Let’s go back full circle and look at the Men at Work song I talked about at the beginning of all this. Now, I don’t have a clue what kind of sales that record made, but let’s say for the sake of argument it’s been played, here or there, legally or illegally, 10 million times (I don’t think that’s an unreasonable figure – probably on the low side, in fact). If that song had been awarded 5c for every play, that’s a tidy $500,000 for a song! And $500k that goes straight to the song’s makers, to boot. ((Yes, yes, I can hear someone saying that Colin Hay and Ron Strykert probably made much more out of ‘Down Under’ than that, but they’re not listening – that model IS DEAD! FORGET IT! NOT HAPPENING ANY MORE!)) If you write ten successful songs in your career, you’re making a fair living – better than most. Plus, I’m going to suggest something else that is entirely new to the model – I propose that you don’t rely solely on your music to make you money. As well as being a songwriter, you now need to take on all the other attributes of a successful artist and be the total entrepreneur ((You could, of course, pay someone else to do this – no reason not to, except that you dilute your earning capacity. The great thing you have going for you with the web is that your potential audience is vast and the legwork required to reach that audience is comparatively small.)) – sell the t-shirts, sell the lyrics, sell photos of the band, sell your outtakes and your improvisations and your blog posts all for a few cents! In short, think laterally and exploit novelty. Rely on the idea that people will throw you a coin even if they won’t buy you champagne. ((Of course, none of this is really new to anyone who has been paying attention in recent years. It’s pretty much where a great number of people are headed in the music world, at least. Like I said before – I believe that these solutions will impose themselves upon us, no matter what we think or do.))
So to this end, I propose that we all stop calling ourselves ‘artists’ and start thinking of ourselves as pragmartists. Because you can be sure of two things:
•Trying to impose control on the system will fail spectacularly, detrimentally and miserably. It’s already starting.
•If you think what you do is of a value $X, there will always be someone who is creating something just as good or better for $0. Those people are your competition. And they won’t go away.
Phew. There you have it – the longest post in Cow history. Who’d have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? How many of you stuck with me, I wonder?
The day before yesterday, Cow Central was besieged by enormous thunderstorms that lasted several hours throughout the afternoon. It was spectacular and scary. I had the great idea of attempting to record the thunder – it was the best rolling, echoing thunder I’ve heard in a long time. As I set my machine into record a phenomenal tearing shriek of thunder made me jump about three feet off the ground and sent The Spawn scurrying under the house. Here’s what it sounded like:
– only a million times louder. Whatever did that, also knocked out the power to my house and brought down my internet. My net connection is not managed by the dreaded and appalling Telstra, but instead by Optus, another of our laughable telcos. I don’t have cause to ring Optus much – generally our net connection stays up – but since I was still completely cut off from the world when I woke up yesterday morning, I picked up the phone…
Oh crap. Now they have a robot too. It’s a little more brusque than the Telstra one, and a little less obsequious, but it’s still STUPID. But not as stupid as the real life operators, it seems, when I finally got through to one…
ME: Hello – my internet connection went down in the big storms yesterday and I was wondering if you could give me some idea when it will be up again.
CANDY: ((Her real name. Or at least the one she told me)) OK. Where are you situated (I tell her). OK. I’ll check for you.
♫ …tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking and wh… ♪
CANDY: It looks like all the connections down there are affected by the storms.
ME: Yes I know that.
CANDY: On your modem, can you see a flashing light?
ME: Yes. There’s a line error.
CANDY: But is it an orange flashing light?
ME: Yes. Well, it’s a green flashing light on my modem, but yes, it tells me the line is out.
CANDY: Well that orange flashing light is the reason you don’t have internet.
ME: No, Candy, surely the reason I don’t have internet is that the line is down because of the storms. The flashing light is just an LED that tells me what’s going on.
CANDY: …bzzz..t..bz..tsszz….bzzzz… (I swear I could hear her brain making that kind of noise) Well, it looks like there are problems with the internet because of the big storms down there.
ME (wondering if garrotting is still a popular form of murder): Right. So, can you give me any kind of idea when the problem will be fixed?
CANDY: No, I’m sorry. When the orange light stops flashing the problem will be fixed and your internet will be working again.
Two Hours Pass.
I call again. This time the robot is unable to parse my sentence. When I try and explain that I want to talk about an internet outage, the machine doesn’t ‘understand’ me and goes through the process of trying a bunch of alternatives. It’s like playing a guessing game with a monkey. No, scratch that. It’s like playing guessing games with a lobotomized monkey.
After it finds that it can’t guess what I want, it says ‘Hmmm. I’m not understanding you.’ Jesus fucking Christ. ‘Hmmm.’??? Someone has programmed the damn thing with attitude!
I really hope they’ll eventually give it a nose, so I can punch it.
