The first official recipient of the "Capital G" Award for unbridled greed and dishonesty goes to the bete-noire of all dormitory-insulated students and MP3 toting technophiles, the music industry and its copyright shrieking attack dogs (my apologies to most canines).You’re saying: “Man… isn’t Kenney ‘Boy’ Lay and friends, who is magnificently framed in the adjacent picture, and who stole billions from customers and shareholders or the recent wave of corporate frauds doing their perp-walk into US Congressional hallways for further public handouts, more worthy recipients?” Indeed they are, but lets not bite off too much our first time mon ami.
Every decade in the twentieth century had specific sounds and creative elements that both inspired youth and infuriated cultural conservatives. At the turn of the century, black musicians began introducing “the blues,” a direct progeny of the old time Negro spirituals that elicited soulful feelings of hopelessness and misery. The sounds that emerged from this genre were far from mainstream and were considered unfit for refined upper-class consumption. In the 1920’s the sounds and flavors of African music continued to percolate through society with the evolution of jazz, which at the time was considered the ‘Devil’s music’ by encouraging inter-racial mingling and purportedly raucous dancing.
The transformative rhythms and sounds that emerged from the children of former slaves, created throughout the 20th C. numerous acoustic innovations, in the likes of rock n’ roll, R&B’s, 70’s punk, Hip-Hop, Chicago house, Detroit techno, and urban rap. What would our world be today without these sounds and the legendary performances by those artists? What would the 60’s been without Jimi ‘Are you Experienced’ Hendrix; the 70’s without Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd; the 80’s without The Police and REM; the 90’s without Pearl Jam, electronica, and white suburbanite kids ‘whigging’ to Public Enemy? Music of the 20th Century transcended class, ethnicity, and geography, and brought forth the expansion of western idealism, the undermining of communism, and a universal human connection.
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century what do we have to show for ourselves? At first there was the demise and fall of the pre-fabricated teen bands, only to be resurrected in the buffoonery of ‘American Idol.’ Every band that ever made money in the last quarter of the 20th century and few that did not, went back on the road to allow devoted fans to witness, as in the case of the Rolling Stones, that last fitful glance of Mick dancing like a chicken on Viagra. In the decade of the war against global terrorism we were subjected to a vast litany of re-heated and recycled sounds and entertainers. Urban hip-hop degenerated into guttural sounds encompassing such vibrant themes as “who’s the bigger thug”, “who’s got more bee-a-tches”, and how long someone can spool a 3-second bass and drum riff into an entire song. The decade of the zeros was a cultural wasteland bereft of a singular example of creativity.
Having done nothing to encourage new ideas, new sounds, or even promoting artists with talent, the music industry has engaged in a decade long assault on its customers, by lecturing, taunting, intimidating, and suing us. Earlier this month, the RIAA obtained a $1.92 million judgment against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother living in Minnesota who denied illegally downloading, in a jury trial in Federal court in Minnesota. Her crime was placing twenty-four (that’s 24 as in the hours in a day) songs on the old Kazaa file-sharing network. These pirates of high-capitalism have filed more than 30,000 similar copyright lawsuits against people they accuse of illegally swapping songs through Internet file-sharing services.
Once a mundane area of legal activity, copyright law has morphed into an all-encompassing juggernaut that can be found at the heart of many art and science disputes. Copyright litigation has entailed such high-minded cases as suing the Girl Scouts of America over the use of campfire songs and biotech firms demanding royalties on the detection of cancer causing human genes in sick patients. Ultimately these corporations and their legal shills do not improve our society; they do not make our society more decent, freer, or creative as this decade has proven. What they and their greed-head management want is nothing more than what the financial mandarins of Wall Street have been doing this dismal decade of deceit, that is creating money, for themselves of course, from nothing. These are the rancid offspring of Ivan Boeskey, 1980’s trader and convicted felon, who proclaimed, “I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Well Boesky, RIAA, and all you music industry executives; fuck you!
The basis of copyright has been to provide the creators of new works an exclusive right to profit from their intellectual property for a limited period. Everything in our lives is to some extent borrowed, extended, or graft onto our individual being. Muddy Waters wrote famously that, “Blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll.” The point being, is that many corporations and white musicians like Elvis profited handsomely throughout the 20th century from the originators of the blues, jazz, bluegrass, country music, and rock and roll, but never felt it necessary to pay compensation to those who created the music in the first place. In fact, on more than a few occasions, these lamprey-faced pickpockets did not even live up to their fiduciary responsibilities to their actual black clients and simply pocketed the royalties for themselves.
In April 2009, Bono issued a statement on behalf of Pay for Musicians, saying, “It’s only fair that when radio makes money by playing a recording artist’s music ... the recording artist should be compensated just as songwriters are already.” What was the industry’s response to making sure that artists are adequately compensated for their work? U2 had their single “Get on your boots” pulled from some radio stations play lists in retaliation for supporting royalties for musicians.
What then is the value of the music industry?
They don’t produce or promote the generation of quality music.
They treat their clients (the musicians) with contempt.
They harass and sue single women and children on bogus and inflated charges.
For all these reasons, the music industry receives my first Capital-G award for corporate greed, legalized parasitism, and gross public incompetence.
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