"She's got Greta Garbo sighs
She's got Bette Davis eyes"
Kim Carnes
In the cat et gory of great mines thinkin they like I notice that Pete Townsend is gettingsome flak on account of his inchoate suggestions regawding dese tech invocations. Ordinarily I'd leave him to the beavers but since I had the same idea recently - and since I din't have too clear an idea bout what sayin I was it seems appropo to further elaborate.
In other words, the sand in the oyster is the fact what while music is being increasingly distributed on ancillary hardware platforms the musicians aren't getting paid. And what is more, and more interesting to me, Pete suggests that it would be a good thing if some sort of framework could be brought into existence that could indentify and aide people on their roads to Parnassus.
In fact this suggestion has applications beyond the music industry and points to a flaw in the information revolution as a whole. People of courage have made the connection that although the information age has increased productivity and the amount of information we have access to - it hasn't really done a lot for our bankbooks and in some areas one could even suggest the quality of life has declined precipitously.
The irony is that while our ability to find information has increased multifold, our ability to find people has diminished. In days gone by when one wanted to know something or someone they went to an expert who could give a good recommendation based on many factors - but now this sort of judgement is left to, in effect, a primitive neural network. The reason for human;s propensity to live in hierarchical societies is , after all, that they worked. In the case of Mr Townsends field , pop music, the old wise men and women who started the companies have been replaced and they are not capable of doing the job. They farm it out to subordinates but that rarely works. This is a systematic observation.
Disregarding my own situation - my impression is that there's a lot of talent out there in a lot of fields but it isn't being utilized because of something no one was aware of would happen when we began restructuring society on the basis of money and not ability.
When you actually do stuff sometimes your descriptions and understandings of said stuff are not as concise and as distinct as they who merely sit back and observe. Nature is sloppy as well as profuse. The Taoists have notion of this which says "The more you have to say about something the less you probably know about it."
Any people who do stuff know theideas begin asfuzzy notionson thehorizon which get closer and closer and they either become realitiesor they don't. Suffice to say I'm gonna listen to Pete because he has actually done stuff. He got that Quadrophenia movie made which in some ways was groundbreaking and unique- no one cares about the railroads anymore and the same is true with musicals
Live concert shows are more watchable and coherent. Peppers and Tommy were song cycles inthat the central thread - the story line if you will was abstractificus.
The PFloyd movie the wall I neversaw because there were no tap dancers and I want tap dancers in my movies!
So anyway Peter says that he feels that it would be a nice idea if there were some organization to ipod world and the rest of theonline distributers. He and I are not fans - we are makers and hence we have to look at things from apractical point of view. Idealism sucks. A classical example is the free market is a good thing except in the case when a nation is just starting out - because they may possibly never get anywhere near the level of marketing that the big boys have - and so protectionism for them is the way to go. To explain, while self ssufficency is admirable and all that human beings have very long periods of dependency and if you place them in the big world too soon, a few will survive and by massive effort become nearly superhuman - but by far the vast majority will die.
God knows I've become familiar with watching rock bands and artist dreams die.
It'd a real teenage wasteland, to coin a phrase.
That distribution channels giving input into the system would be desirable is only a vague notion at present. Ordinarily artists want to limit said input so as to maintain continuity of theme. But one ought be able to see through the negatives that we currently ascribe to organizations to the positives - in fact if we don't we have no chance of winning this war. A firm, a company, whatever you call it, is at best an opportunity for people of ability to work together and explore the "more ethereal essences of being" without being bogged down having to do everything on our own.
And I think we can speak to this because we're both throwbacks in the sense of partially being one man band type artists eg composers, which has it's interesting aspects, but it's not rock and roll.
And BTW many people use you-tube et al as primary rock sources - but they pay the artists zilch. I regard myself as outside all present revenue streams . the record companies are like the euro empires of the 19th century - extant but obsolete and they would ordinarily be the place to look for innovations - but quite logically they are not going to create products that are going to put themselves out of business. They are not completely insane - they are just frightened.
It's a case where the urge to self preservation leads to doom.
One could think of other suggestions but I will trouble you with them on some other day
Tamlin
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