I never read reviews because if you believe the good ones you have to believe the bad ones too.
--Shel Silverstein
Back last year I imagined the imminent deconstruction of the music business through the good offices of greed, stupidity and general obstinance, possibly the three most stable and predictable forces in the world. I predicated the notion with my own three most stable methods, wishful thinking, trend analysis and wishful thinking.
Well, Wired magazine must be consulting the same fortune teller that I do (Madam Zuzu?), because they're out with a news flash: the record industry is in exactly the kind of deep doodoo that nearly every recording artist has ever wished on them, which may say something for the power of curses. Going beyond the usual level of histrionics common to media reporting (except mine, of course), this article went so far as to imagine the death of the industry in five to ten years. Kiss it g'bye, baby, the meat market's closing down.
I'm not so absolutely certain about all that. The Biz has its diamond- and- platinum- ring- encrusted pinkies tight around the throats of an awful lot of very popular and valuable properties, stuff that people love, continue to love and don't have any intention of loving any less in the future. That stuff constitutes a goldmine of unlimited potential, particularly since the copyright law was extended to life plus 99 years or whatever it is. Don't cry for the pitiful media elephants, they've got their work cut out for them.
The rest of us, however, are about to experience some unexpected consequences of the ASCAP Exclusion Principle (tm). As you may recall, the AEP theorizes that any monopoly creates a shadow of opportunity around its chosen zone of control. Take over the railroads and there's a boom in autos. Clamp down on the landlines and wireless goes crazy. And when the music business slaps massive restrictions on the use of their hot property, well, whadya know, the cold property starts to heat up.
But what form can these outsiders hope to see in their careers? Bereft of the legendary starmaker machinery, can they expect to be the next Springsteen or Bowie or Blink 187? Well, more's the point, would they want to be?
Even discounting the element of sour grapes, there's a lot of truth in the endless parade of cliches about success (with a capital sucks) in the Wide Wide World O' Entertainment. My personal brush with that reality came back in the 70's when I was picked up hitchhiking by the husband of Phoebe Snow, who offered this immortal observation about the music business: "It's rotten clear through, and there's nothing good about it." And as Hunter Thompson would add, there's also a negative side.
Time was when the majors were the only game in town. If you wanted to be solvent, you had to go with the big guys and let them do with you as they willed. And as has been richly described in well-exposed memoirs by the likes of Courtney Love and Janis Ian, what the majors willed was genteel plantationism, with artists lashed to crucifyingly one-sided contracts and held in near-slavery at the behest of corporate profits, most of them not even making all that much real money.
But all along we've seen some cracks in the wall. Even at the height of the Age of Dinosaurs, pioneering artists like Frank Zappa had the extraordinary notion of self-management and production. Ani DeFranco, the Righteous Babe herself, built a pocket empire on nothing but talent, savvy and a relentlessly independent spirit. Burrowing beneath the rolled lawns of heavy commerce, a thousand (literally!) minuscule singer/songwriters have forged small but highly functional careers playing house concerts and selling CDs off the stage and online. And the indie spirit in rock, far from faltering after the Big Buyout of the 90's, burns eternal in the basements and garages of our land, suborned by fiendish A&R golems with back- of- the- napkin contracts but springing up afresh like weeds in a cracked sidewalk.
Artists like these point the way into the Pretty Good Future of the unaffiliated performer. By utilizing the tools of the dot.com boom -- cheap hardware, powerful software, a universal internet infrastructure, innovative commercial tools, and not least, the rise of file sharing -- unknown acts can find gigs, create product and build audience, even distribution, without ever seeing the inside of an office or exchanging insult one with a suit. They might never get rich. They might never get famous. But they'll eat, they'll play, and if they want, (fade in patriotic music here) they can go a long ways towards a reasonable slice of the American Dream! Yes! They can realize the vision of our Founding Fathers who said "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom! Let..." (What? It isn't? It is? You don't say... Coulda fooled me...)
Wait a minute! (patriotic music unceremoniously scrubbed). How can we possibly sort out all these upstarts? Why, with so many of them scuttling about, none of them will ever be reviewed! How will we ever know if they're any good?
Well, uh, actually... The question of being "any good" becomes increasingly irrelevant in this Brave Though Irreverent New World. If an artist builds an act, finds an audience, distributes his product and lives happily ever after, who gives a hoot in a hailstorm if all the critics love him in New York or not? Not only that, but the Web has more and more manifested a delightfully decentralized and thoroughly anarchistic process of peer review, comparable to the rise of weblogs, capable of straining through a zillion bileous musical camels to find one genius gnat. Don't believe me? Talk to Wilco.
To a great extent, all professional critics have ever done is provided labels for stores to put on record bins and deigned to imprison music and musicians in this slot or that, as "country rock" or "alt-folk" or "surf-adelic." In the glad days that shall be, bands will find their own slot, or none, and critics and record stores will be increasingly relegated to the circular file of crass commercialism, itself a pretty delapidated piece of real estate.
It would be a glorious piece of irony if the same overbearing principles of conquest that are bringing down the faux-granite edifice of Big Music dragged the sniggering, self-congratulatory apparatus of Big Criticism down with it, freeing thousands of creative workers from the shackles of convention and leaving millions of consumers to actually make their own decisions for once. Why, it could revolutionize our whole culture.
Mmmmm... revolution...
The other day a good friend of mine, a woman, as they say, of size, was on a bus and got into an altercation with a man who immediately escalated to calling her an "ugly fat scank ho." As the studio audience chanted "JER REE! JER REE!" he vilified her appearance like Strom Thurmond dissing the NAACP. When she retorted that at least she was spared from being hit on by turds like him, he replied "I'm gay."
Well, no great surprise there -- assholes come in all flavors (bleh!). But public display of obesity is rapidly becoming the Last Minority, target of choice for bearers of repressed anger too wise or chicken to openly snark at blacks or latinos -- or gays, for that matter. Apparently the most significant impetus for this is the eternal popular supposition that fat folks bear the mark of a character flaw in their bulk, that if they weren't "lazy" or "heedless" or "greedy" or "[insert your favorite moral failing here]" they'd lose that awful bulge and look like everyone else. The truth, that overweight is a mystery that baffles physicians and dieticians and plays hob with every theory that tangles with it, is typically ignored, even by the folks it baffles.
While it's not new to ask "What makes people so damn mean?", there's more to this kind of hazing than meets the eye. We live, as all humans do, in a self-regulating social system. Almost anything you see going on can be traced back to either the system's homeostatic mechanisms or ornery human reaction thereto. This process is by no means as simple as mere repression -- jack-booted thugs actually litmus a pathological breakdown of the normal channels of feedback. Mom and Dad are a lot more involved than the Cop On The Corner, not to mention Sis and Bud and Mister High School Vice Principal. And the principle tool of control is the need to belong.
Face it, we all want to fit in somewhere. People are social animals. We want friends, companions, a crowd to hang with. It's a need nearly as poignant as food, shelter and clothing. And the price we pay to be a part of it all is to recognize what's Normal and what's not, and to cleave to the one and eschew the other. This in many ways resembles the economic principle of managing the price of labor through the threat of unemployment. As long as there are poor saps without jobs around, you can keep your workers from getting hifalutin notions of self-worth and trying to jack up the payroll. And as long as there are fat people to torment, The Norm maintains its power.
That Norm can vary tremendously. In some societies it's a concrete straitjacket, a cradle-to-grave railroad track without switches or sideyards. In ours, it's decidedly more subtle, especially in the face of our purported love of that Enemy of the People, freedom. Here, you gotta sweat to earn enough to buy your straitjacket, and if it hasn't got a designer label you're expected to fake one.
We've been internally colonized by Leave It To Beaver, that sweet sappy vision of suburban perfection whose dark subliminal message is that individualists (The Beav, folks) must and will be assimilated by any means necessary to become productive, reproductive citizens. Like the Tom Paxton song says, "What will it take/to whip you into line?/A broken heart?/A broken head?/It can be arranged..." And behind every wise platitude delivered around the stem of a pipe by Ward or loving reprimand from June or palsy-walsy wise-up from Wally, there lurks the Enforcer, the leering, meaner-than-snake-shit visage of Eddie Haskell and his hulking buddies, ready to punk you for your bus change at the drop of an opinion. God spare Dear Young Clarence if he's fat in the bargain.
There are gays who want to be normal and accepted, no matter how artificial and brittle that acceptance is. They want to marry and have kids and get a good paying job and live in a nice house in the suburbs and join the country club and mix with the better types. Judging from some reports, they're joining the Republican Party in droves. They hit the gym like nobody's business. And like new inmates in the Yard, they're ready to Haskell the first poor miserable outcast they can claim conventional superiority on.
But like the economic collateral damage of unemployment, use of a social norm for social control creates a permanent leper class of the weird, forever grinding their teeth and their knives in the shadows. And look the fuck out if the rules get too narrow (and they always get too narrow) -- those teeth and those knives are going to come out. The just plain folks may be satisfied with conventional, but the geeks are going nuclear.
A pal of mine, successful in the software industry, used to say that the world is a big meatgrinder, and some people turn the handle and some go through the hopper. He preferred turning the handle. I haven't heard his opinion on the subject since he was downsized.
I love my country, but I'm afraid of it too. Welcome to the United Normalcy of America. Embrace and extend your Inner Beaver. Dare to be Eddie.
Living in West Seattle has its perks, like more green spaces than most of the rest of town, and its downsides, like the damage to powerlines inflicted by those self-same green spaces whenever a Pineapple Express blows through.
S and I aren't entirely opposed to power failures. When we lived wild, we traveled in a trailer and van entirely fired by DC. Plugging in was an option, and one we frequently refused when it was offered. We cited various suspicions about the perils of AC and its accompanying magnetic radiation -- that it frazzled the nerves, that it impacted the immune system, that it chased away the friendly spirits we cultivated. We were young and cute and opinionated, and we flew through life on gossamer wings, too light and insubstantial for dross material things like 120 volt current. And if it happened that our circumstances included grid electricity and it proved unreliable, why pah! sir -- methinks our propaned and batteried lodge sufficient to stand the (non) shock. Ah, but stay, sweet minstrels! Nay, we must depart, the highway calls. And so forth.
Well, like we magickal practitioners say, that was zen and this is tao. What would our lives be without microwaves and computers, electric heat, even -- (vague choking sound) -- television? We live in the All Electric Future now, and it doesn't seem to be hurting us all that much. Course, we don't know -- It's not like we can go back and live some other life for comparison. But that don't mean we aren't still hip to how the gypsies get by in their painted caravans without they got the old do-re-zap.
By the time gray drizzly dawn arrived without the return of the 21st century, or even the 20th, I resigned myself to a earlier, simpler era and rose to construct morning beverages. I've reduced my caffeine intake to Red Rose tea and the occasional cup of Seattle Black on special occasions. S, however, is a Javacrucian through and through, and I was therefore constrained to perform the classic ritual of preparation using the fable Acoustic Javacrucian Prayer Wheel, the brass hand-grinder, donated by an Oregonian friend years ago, that was our constant companion on the road. I stumbled outside and brought in from the porch the habachi-style barbecue we'd picked up during the summer, set it on the cold dead electric stove and fired it up. Water boiled and whistled merrily in the kettle, and I turned to pulverizing sacred beans. Soon the haunting strains of the Javacrucian Mantra were echoing through the house:
We all worship the black bean
body of the god caffeine
where there is life there is coffee
where there is coffee there is life...
-- taught to us in ancient times at a mystic retreat deep in the hills of Northern California, where S became the only living initiate into the secret order of the Pagan Plates. We've chanted it countless times in concert, as a prelude to our rendition of Java Jive. But there in the kitchen of the house I actually own that actually sits in one place, a decade older and certainly no more to the wise, I was drawn back to the mobile days of driveways and rest areas, of the kindness of strangers and the recalcitrance of brute machinery, of itinerant entertainment and dumpster poaching. Times gone with the previous millennium, gone and unlikely to return, a chapter of our lives written, edited and sent to press.
As a child, I was beset by an emotional state that I could not explain, one of a lonely melancholy which yet had the taste of longing for some lost state of grace, a longing carrying with it the desire to travel, to find other places, to see the unknown happy land beyond the next hill. It was a feeling I came to think of as the Call of the Wild. As a young adult, I pursued the Call down the highways and biways of the West Coast, always one step behind the Door Into Summer. And I pursued it further after my marriage, with a partner as keenly driven as myself, pursued it in vans and trailers and cars and motorhomes and a thousand musical jobs.
But in the soaked morning light of the present, reconstructing rituals of wanderlust in my stationary kitchen, I could feel the Call, but I was no longer sure I want to heed it. It was never a reliable companion or guide, however poignant. Perhaps it was something my brain cooked up and sprang on me, some embedded wetware selected for by countless thousands of years of nomadic forebearers seeking new ecosystems to exploit and disrupt. No amount of rambling came near denting it -- I feel it as clearly and unrequitedly now as I did when I was six.
And yet, it's been a source of inspiration and meaning to me my whole long weird life, a reasonless reason for focus and action. No faith or hope or love of craft or art ever moved me like it has. Even now, anchored and secure as I've ever been, it remains a spot of jarring color on a landscape of existence ever more bland and beige, spurring me to twilight woolgathering and midnight rides. It's my own personal crazy streak, as wedded to me as my hands and face and history, and whether or not I yield to its yearning, I'm stuck with it.
But not to lack of electricity -- apparently the invisible forces that had perpetrated the outage were satiated by the Ritual of Brown Water. About five minutes after I'd finished making the coffee, the power came back on, along with the present day, and I went back to my regularly scheduled broadcast. The Call of the Wild would just have to wait.
But the struggle continues. Even now, oppressive forces stalk the world, grinning bloodstained gallows-birds of brutality and pillage, and stolid indomitables rise up to meet them in righteous battle. To this storied pantheon, we today find ourselves compelled to make an addition, one more member of the exalted club of Those Who Oppose. And that addition is --
--the fertilized feline zygote.
Among commensals, cats bid fair to qualify as the most paradoxical. Their undeniable skills at rodent control combine with their contrary personalities to make them the independent contractors of the Great Corporation of animal husbandry. The aloofness of the race of kitty is legendary the world over. Of all our pets and livestock, cats are the only ones able to compliment us with their fellowship, reprove us with their absence. What is the automaton loyalty of a dog, the stoic submission of a horse, to the tender touch of a cat's tail under your nose as you read? And who could mistake the dismissal of a fluffy posterior retreating, that same tail now disdainfully hoisted, through a pet door?
As it turns out, this "Who needs you?" attitude is a little more deeply embedded in the felix genome than it would appear, even at second or third glance. Recently, a biotech company made news by announcing the world's first cloned cat (named cc, appropriately enough, although I'd have chosen "Copycat" myself). Triumphantly, the company presented to the press the two living representatives of its claim: on your left, the original, Rainbow, a handsome, stocky tricolor calico; on the right, her clone, cc -- slender and grey-striped. Same genes, recalcitrantly different beast. Seems that in this particular critter-case, incidental appearance is specifically and randomly affected by developmental factors -- which is to say that, even in the womb, the fetal cat reserves the right to walk by itself.
This is individualism carried to a loud and proud, even caterwauling, extreme. What kind of a world is it when genotype isn't even morphological destiny? That just a lowly ovum can have choices beyond its heritage must stand as a monumental affront to the purveyors of Big Science, of neo-Newtonian determinism, bent on rendering every perceivable action, process or event down to quantifiable, controlable atoms of data. Worse, it plants a banana cream pie square in the pudgy face of every politician, king, overlord, pundit, business manager or economist who swells with self-proclaimed wisdom of what's best for us:
I mean, it's bad enough that these weaseling relativist physicists purvey the obscenity of quantum mechanics and its odious Uncertainty Principle, but we could tolerate that -- after all, it only holds at extremely small sizes, and it's good for making computers work. Nothing to worry about for those of us who are used to seeing the big picture.
But this! This wasn't just some bungy-brained egghead research project. This was industrial product development. They were going to build brand share in the potentially limitlessly lucrative pet replication market, freeze-drying Fluffy and Fido for future reanimation. It could have been worth millions! Millions! And now the genetic material stubbornly refuses to cooperate. How in the heck do you motivate mitosis, anyway? Why, it's liable to disrupt their income stream, impact their whole business model. Enough to make a corporate executive reach for his golden parachute, I tell you. I'd sue, if I knew who to serve.
Po' po' y'all. The big dogs and all their whining puppies are just gonna have to get used to the notion that not everything in the realm of the senses is pining to line up to be benignly administered by God's Chosen Viceroys. It's a self-regulated complex system universe, kids, and we just live here with all the rest of the throbbing thermodynamic circus, stormclouds and ion streams and kittycat reproduction all dancing in glorious anarchic splendor.
Ah, but it's time for the Climactic Counterargument, and here to deliver the Climactic Counterargument is none other than our own Ms. Ayn "Hot Pants" Thropic, chairperson of the University of Bigger Than Thou Department of Absolutism:
"So, you say that nature is too chaotic to understand? Too complex to control? You say we have no business trying to rule the world? How dare you? The quest for knowledge and control has brought human beings out of the caves and into the light of reason. We live lives of power and conquest undreamed of by our stone-chipping ancestors (or yours, maybe -- mine were metallurgists right from the start). What do you expect us to do? Crawl back into the ground? Sit around and grow maize and worship idols of ignorance? Waste our time just goggling blank-eyed at the imponderable universe? Why do you hate the human mind so much?"
Ouch! Chill out, girl -- it's not me, it's a just a little ol' replicant tabby. You got a problem, take it up with her. Me, I'm gonna go dance in the moonlight. Naked. With a cat.