Intro: Lately I've been carrying the art revolution across the country and beyond by posting short articles on numerous Internet newsgroups. Most of those who responded agreed and supported my ideas, some had questions, and only a very few voiced opposition - that was until I got to the English music newsgroup uk.music.alternative. There the debate heated up - to put it mildly. Here are some of the lively excerpts from those posts. (For unedited versions see the newsgroup). Thanks to all those quoted for their imput. Enjoy. Art S Revolutionary
SHOULD 4 OLD MEN CONTROL ALL THE MUSIC?
MUSEA:How few companies controlling all the music before you begin to see it as a danger. If 4 is acceptable then will you worry when it gets to 3? 2? 1?
JYOTI: Music cannot be controlled. It's not a physical substance like land or water.
MUSEA: It can too. Look, no one outside of these 4 can get A airplay on commercial radio B stocked in major record distributors or in major retailing giants, C reviewed in major magazines, D etc. etc. If that's not control what is. Don't be naive. These 4 have the power to make the music, review it, and give it awards when it's lousy.
JYOTI: What you're talking about is the "commercial sale" of music which is an entirely different matter. And has fuck-all to do with art.
MUSEA: You must be young. There used to be a time when a strange phenomenon happened. The best quality music counted. That started at the beginning of TIME and lasted till about 1980. I assure you this is a special time and a dangerous time. It's promotion over quality all along the line.
JYOTI: So, are you against capitalism or not?
MUSEA:What you're asking is am I against capitalism without restraint that allows the larger companies to use commercials and leverage to control all competition. YES Am I against fair competition. NO. This is nothing new. In 1948 in the US the courts said that Paramount (or some film company) could not both own the films and the theaters they played in. That was an unfair monopoly and against the law. Now it's called synergy, but it's the same thing except now it's world wide and more monopolistic.
JYOTI: 1. What you're saying isn't revolutionary
MUSEA:Then tell somebody you think 4 companies are too few and watch how they try to shut you up.
JYOTI: 2. What you're saying isn't about art, it's about COMMERCE.
MUSEA: No it's about art being run as commerce and that's the danger.
JYOTI: 3. Everything you do serves to promote yourself, your fanzine and your own music. You should get a job as an A&R man.
MUSEA: How many ads did you see on my site. NONE did you say? Now that's a moneymaker hey. If YOU want to stand up for 8 years and fight these 8 conglomerates of corp. art and be treated as completely invisible by all your peers, you are welcome to the job. But I don't see a big line waiting to lead the revolution.
JYOTI: I'm now very angry and disappointed because I naively believed you might actually mean what you say. Still, it's not the first time I've been let down, nor the last. Where's Ulrike Meinhof when you need her?
MUSEA: Lighten up. You haven't heard anything yet. I've been doing this since '92. You've thought about it for an hour or 2 at best not years and years and years. That isn't exactly a lark or a whim. This is my LIFE, as a musician, painter, writer, I'm fighting for the right to have a fair chance to be acknowledged for what talents I have. Same for my talented friends that are being blocked out of the arts due to the whims of $$$ greedy 8 CEO's...
MUSEA: And I'm glad to see some in this post actually caring about the quality of lyrics and challenging those they thought not that good. (If you come to the revolution check out the lyrics of Dallas's Hunkasaurus and Pet Dog Guitar)
RHODRI: your lyrics?
MUSEA: Yes. Note that they communicate. A part of the revolution (in music) is that lyrics should communicate something to someone other than the author. A problem I have with most lyrics today is they're too surreal to mean anything. Not profoud, merely foggy.
MUSEA (on lyrics): But why put up with it? Why can't good music have good lyrics too?
JYOTI: There's no reason. Just as there's no reason that music on a major label is automatically less arty, less worthy or worse than music on a true indie. Although I don't buy much major label music now (that's a new release), I wouldn't throw out all my Beatles, Beach Boys, Pink Floyd etc. etc just cos they're on major labels.
MUSEA: NOW is the key word. Rock has become everything it started out opposing. Of course the old music was great. If it wasn't for reissues none of these 4 old men would have companies. I'm talking about the mainstream mess. The Grammy Award winners that are awful, the ones you don't buy because they're promo sales music. That means the only way anyone buys them is if they're promoted enough - no quality there. (If you come to the revolution check out the lyrics of Dallas's Hunkasaurus and Pet Dog Guitar, the only performers in the world that play their concerts in a MOVIE THEATER BOX OFFICE. http://Musea.digitalchainsaw.com But if you do come to my site be prepared to be revolutionoized in EVERY aspect of every art. No one here settles!)
JYOTI: Hmmm... I wasn't that revolutionised myself. Perhaps because what you're doing seems to be good but I've seen it done before (and often better) by people like Sarah, El, Dischord, Yo Yo, Guided Missile and Slampt. And they didn't claim that Newcastle was the centre for world art revolution. (How, in fact, can a democratic world arts revolution have a centre?)
MUSEA: All those names. Good music? But none in the mainstream. Seems they're all being blocked from proper fairplay/airplay by these 4 old men. Back to where we started. End the monopoly. As for the arts rev. center. It has started here. Everything starts somewhere. And these 4 old guys have the big cities locked up. It takes someone from outside the mainstream to attack the mainstream. Most of the problem is These 4 old men, who don't care, don't listen, can't be bothered about the records their companies put out. They just want the $$$$$$, so those that control what music is made, play it safe, give the audience the sanitary versions of what it already seems to like and innovation is out the door. Wham.
JYOTI Yep. You're absolutely right. When profit is king, art will always lose. But there's plenty of so-called indie labels that act no differently and just have more meagre resources for exploitation. The problem isn't big or small capitalism, it's capitalism.
MUSEA: Yeah true, but when you have COMPETITION AND VARIETY all the music gets better and some of those lousy indies get bad reps and loose out.
JYOTI: Not too convinced about your rather centralist view of revolution but full marks for actually getting off your arse and doing something you believe in. I hope your goal of a vast co-operative network of artists does succeed. Count me in, for whatever that's worth. I also like the fact that you see the need for a true alternative media. If zines like the ones on your site and Freaky Trigger, Robots, Lexicon etc can get more support, then that can't be bad.
JIM WRAITH: Seriously, it makes me wonder when you hear some people say that they are in music for the love of it, then complain that the majors won't let them get rich. I'm not begrudging them their opportunity to make a living, but they shouldn't put up a facade, claiming they don't want to make money, then feeling cheated when they don't. (By the way, I'm not a purist, and it's an extreme example.. personally, I'd love a crack at making a half-decent living from my music..)
MUSEA: Yeah I'd like to make zillions too, but the majors aren't going to sign me (thank God because of a 100 reasons that they treat artists like idiots - first you have to be under 25 or you'll know what a scam it is etc.) for the reason that I'm vocally opposed to them (when was the last time you heard a musician do a song with lyrics called "I hate Sony and the 4 man Monopoly". I don't have a song like that but the point is nobody could do lyrics like that in the industry today. Try it and see how powerful the monopoly is.) I want to make money the old fashioned way, good quality music with NOT all beat (too hard) NOT all melody (too sappy) but the best of rock & roll. Also why any format? Formats are designed not for listeners, but to better sell ads. I'm also for no format music. I call it WOW, wide open world music. In the end it's a variety of lots of sources of music making and production that insures quality music, and 4 companies is not a lot, it's a monopoly.
JIM: Maybe we need more bands getting big and spreading a message (cough cough Rage Against The Machine cough splutter).. But is it really effective? Just one of many questions I don't want to even start answering..
MUSEA: Unfortunately you won't get big if you spread this message. In my little town of Dallas I'm invisible to all the ad driven media. I've been printing my zine since '92, playing concerts in a theater box office, doing art revolutionary festivals, and for the most part I'm totally invisible to the local print and TV and radio media. Attacking advertising is more revolutionary than you can imagine.
RHODRI: they aren't "controlling the music"!! Music isn't fuckin' washing powder or toothpaste - it's an art form. What BMG get up to has absolutely no relevance here - of course the majors A&R policies stink, but they always have.
MUSEA: It's not an art form to these 4, it IS toothpaste and it is marketed like toothpaste, and when you hear the Grammy Award winners it sounds like tooth paste being spit out.
MUSEA: CD's cost 50 cents to make. If it wasn't for the 4 company monopoly the price of new CD's would fall drastically and the market would open to more artists, (remember all the fuss about stores selling used CD's. These 4 wanted to shut them down). As to access to markets. In the US MOST records are bought: A. Because they were heard on the radio and only these 4 get on commercial radio - so no indie music is ever heard on the radio - and B. at the major chainstores like Target, Wal-Mart, etc. And they only carry music from the majors. Wal-Mart has gotten so dictatorial that they won't carry CD's with covers they don't like, so they demand the record companies change them to suit Wal Mart AND THESE 4 WEASEL COMPANIES DO IT. Now is that fair competition? If it was any other industry except the arts (it's true not only of music but film, books, etc - see my site) it would be unfair trade practices and illegal.
STEVE: As I've said before I don't particularly care what label music I buy is on, as long as it's the music I want and I pay a reasonable price for it. However, I think the consolidation of the record industry is worrying because it gives too much power to a few individuals whose overriding concern is profit not art - the key phrase being "a few individuals" because, as Jyoti notes, I'm sure over 50% of indie label bosses are in it for the money too.
MUSEA: Ask your favorite band to do a song called I HATE THE BIG 4 (the 4 company monopoly of music), or ADS SUCK, etc. and watch how fast their chance to make a living in the music business fades. If any of you think it's not revolutionary then call up your fav. commercial radio station and ask them to play anything besides music from these 4. You'll change your TUNE real fast I can assure you.
RICK: The other was an idea which hit me midsentence (though I should have ducked)-- just that the revolutionaries in pop culture basically disrupt corporate market expectations & either point up the existence of an audience that no one suspected or else create their own audience, which then takes awhile again to get mapped by the marketeers & under control... Not a very useful thought, really, as it's either saying that revolutionaries tend to make revolutions, or that what people want is the very thing they want...
MUSEA: I think you're right here. But that's the normal cycle of any revolution and any society must have it's upheavals. They're healthy. Now it's time for one in the arts. And if this art rev. is successful and it produces a golden age of art, it will gradually decline to mediocrity and foolishness sometime in the future and someone will come along and change it again for the better BUT ONLY IF WE HAVE A SYSTEM THAT ALLOWS FOR CHANGE AND Corporate Art (now down to 8 companies) does not allow for that real change. So the danger is more real now.
RHODRI: name one time, in any field, where the mainstream has anything to do with art whatsoever
MUSEA: Every time before 1980. From the beginning if the king/priest didn't like it it didn't go. Specifics: all Greek Plays, Chaucer, all court lit./ painting/ Dutch painting, Shakespeare and all his contemporaries, etc. etc. etc. etc. Even the Impressionist painters were somewhat involved with the Salon, and it acknowledged them (corp. art treats indies as invisible)
STEPHEN KENNEDY: I don't have a favourite commercial radio station, they're all crap. I listen exclusively to BBC Radios 1 and 5 and am very much the happier for it.
MUSEA: That's my point. Why should mainstream radio force all people who love music to go to alternate sources to find it. I assure you this has never been the norm in history before. Most of the best rock from the 50's and 60's was universally played on all mainstream radio. Top 40 radio (which by the way was developed in Dallas) was by far the mainstream radio all over this country. I really fear you never knew a time that art was not controlled by so few. I do.
STEVE: Some of the major differences over here are: a thriving music press with no particular bias towards the majors (can of worms maybe); a national commercials-free music station (BBC Radio 1), with amongst the dross, esteemed indie warriors like John Peel, Steve Lurpak, and Mark & Lard;
MUSEA: If they are on government radio they aren't indies. They are depending on the government to get airplay. In the art revolution I say no ads, no sponsors no government grants
RHODRI: you are just on a different planet to us. I've no idea why you're even in this NG.
MUSEA: A much more revolutionary planet for sure. Come on and try to find a hit from 1980 to now. Surely England had ONE. The US did not.
MUSEA: But what if you think "BANDS" are passe, no longer innovative, are the opposite of everything that is good in music? Don't you see how brainwashed every one has become? Tell someone that bands are out of date, old fashioned, washed up, and you'll begin to see what real innovation is about. Bands reinforce the mainstream at every turn. And with a monopoly there will be no one allowed to voice opposition to bands. Try it and see how far you get. Look at the opposition I'm getting here and its from so called innovation lovers, and indie supporters.
JYOTI: Do you know anything about the British music scene, major or independent?
MUSEA: I know you're under the same 4 company domination of music that I am and that you are so brainwashed by them that you are vehemently defending them when even one voice thousands and thousands of miles away opposes them. You should be welcoming a different viewpoint.
MUSEA: You're not wrong when it's your opinion. Here's mine. No, what I'm saying is that the Corporate Art 8 must grant you their permission before anything you do has a chance to be seen, or heard by anyone outside of your bedroom (unless you want to spend your whole life doing what you love and what you are good at in total obscurity). In music that means access to commercial radio, their review media, their film soundtrack albums, their talk shows, and awards shows that spotlight their artists only, etc. Etc. AND they will not grant that permission unless you'll make them $$$$$ You notice that nowhere do I say that the head of Sony must like your music (he couldn't care less) or that the BMG overlord likes your book (they own Doubleday the biggest publisher in the US), they only care about satisfying the needs of the board of directors.
And while I'm here let me say how this can all be changed: Here's what Musea advocates to make things right: Make it clear that these companies can EITHER make the art OR distribute the art ( I'm talking film, TV, cable TV, music, publishing, media, theater, etc. Etc.) BUT THEY CAN'T CONTROL BOTH and THE MEDIA THAT SUPPOSEDLY IS THE WATCHDOG FOR ANTI TRADE PRACTICES. If this was the case, you would see an incredible golden age of art NOT hiding on the perimeter but in the limelight, and art would once again be judged on quality not promo dollars.
ROBF: I know they say revolutions don't happen overnight but, I mean, 8 years?? You must be smashing the state VERY slowly.
MUSEA: It isn't easy that's for sure. BUT I'm doing good art work: music, painting, writing, AND I'm promoting a lot of zines, artists, etc. on my sight that are doing good work. Corporate Art has no legacy to hold on to, while me and my friends are enjoying a golden age of creativity and quality art. Also I'm far from alone. Virtually all the press outside of corporate art is raising questions about so much control in so few hands, even Corporate art owned media raises that question with every merger (yet they always end up saying its no problem ) plus a constant fear on the part of these 8 conglomerates that the Government will refuse to allow these recent mergers. Though it hasn't done much yet.
ANDREW: Why? I don't really buy much music released on either EMI or Warner brothers. And why are you getting your knickers in a twist here about it? This isn't really the forum for EMI worship.
MUSEAI see your point. Why doesn't the US just buy your whole country and kick you out. You wouldn't care would you? If this isn't the forum then what is? There is NO FORUM TO TALK AGAINST THE 8 COMPANIES THAT CONTROL CORPORATE ART. They refuse to be criticised, they refuse to talk about opposition to their practices from the thousands and thousands of people that are alarmed, they treat the world as a Disney Theme Park for Stepford Wives - and if you don't obey Goofy's rules you're out. And you seem so brainwashed you don't even see it. I assure you the more you know about music and the music industry the more alarmed you'd be. I encourage you to talk to anybody that has actually had some contact with Corporate Art 8. You'll hear what I'm saying reinforced a 100 times They are: Disney, WB, Sony, Seagrams, Viacom, Fox, BMG, GE/NBC
ANDREW NORMAN: (on Hunk music) It's the sort of thing my granny would think was middle-of-the-road pap. I was at least expecting some sort of deranged lo-fi eccentricity, but most of it sounds like one of those "learn to play the keyboards" tapes.
MUSEA: The site is a no format music site. That means the one or two songs you heard where part of a variety of formats. Another listener said it was Van Morrison or skiffle like. He heard totally different music. Here's where I think my work is good. It is NOT psychotic rhythm only tracks, it is NOT sappy, it is rhythm with melody in no format whatsoever. Where there are lyrics, the lyrics are well written and actually communicate something (ex. listen to Stories or Dallas or the History of Rock And Roll) And if that isn't revolutionary enough go to Hunkasaurus's resume. And by the way, Yes I play in a theater box office. Anyone else in the world doing that? If not, then that is another way my work is original - something music has not been in a long time.
ANDREW NORMAN; There is no monopoly. BBC radio plays plenty of music on independent labels. I don't think anyone is desperate enough to make a TV program about your Texas skiffle revival, unless you redecorate people's sitting rooms or rearrange their gardens while you play.
MUSEA: You heard the guitar music but none of the keyboard bagatelles, or the recitation, or the jazz, or the Spanish sounding stuff, or the full band stuff. No format means a lot of different formats. Doing just one format is what these 4 (Corp. Art) market best.
MUSEA: In the end if you support Indies then you'll want them to get a fair deal. And the only way they'll get a fair deal is if you and others oppose the monopolistic control of these 4 conglomerates. ASK ANY INDIE or anybody in the business.
JOHN DAGLISH: Hmm playing in a theatre box office, I'm sure over here that's called busking, which can be a hugely successful way of life if you do it right. Do you have a dog on a string, and what do you collect the coppers in?
MUSEA: I have a string on a dog: Hunkasaurus and His PET DOG GUITAR a 1964 Silvertone standard guitar, a very special old guitar. Come hear it at http://Musea.digitalchainsaw.com/newdex.html (and strangely enough IT believes in freedom of speech too, even if its from someone that isn't from Texas.)
Web Publisher's 2 Cents: My belief is that the development of the Internet has greatly helped level the playing field for the indies and has taken money out of the pockets of the big four. I believe the Internet will eventually drive culture in the same way TV has done in the past. It will be interesting to watch it unfold.