snuh (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} snuh) wrote,@ 2007-08-20 23:09:00 |
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give it away now
Brian at Moistworks posted about something I've been thinking about since the Internet became the primary means of distributing of music. Here's some quotes from his post:
This link from Harper's was posted in comments by a reader named Ethan, I've cut and pasted excerpts from it:
The ecstasy of influence
A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem
This site gets over a thousand unique hits a day - I wonder what you readers think. Discuss.
Brian at Moistworks posted about something I've been thinking about since the Internet became the primary means of distributing of music. Here's some quotes from his post:
This week, Moistworks takes up the theme of "conversion." As the week's posts will show, this theme is subject to broad interpretation. But being the first up to bat, I decided to write a little about the concept of "conversion" as it most closely relates to Moistworks and mp3 blogs in general.
Here at Moistworks, we give away other people's songs. That's what mp3 blogs do. I feel fine about this. If people want music for free, they can find it. We aren't giving people anything that can't get themselves. We never post songs that aren't already available commercially or as Internet leaks on filesharing services. By presenting it in context, I believe we actually improve an artist's chance of making money. The more people know your band, the more potential customers you have.
I know what I believe to be right and wrong. Draconian copyright law is the real theft. It deprives us, as a culture, of a healthy and organic artistic climate. It reduces the wild spaces of art to the brute baseline of money. We build our little picket fences around the things we make and litigate against one another when these boundaries are crossed. I hate this. It's soul-sucking. What can I say? I'm pretty anarcho. Art is a space for freedom! What could be less artistic than subjecting one's will to the criminal justice system? We need to learn to take responsibility for our own communities.
But the current paradigm, where commercial gatekeepers control access to music, is on the way out whether we like or not. We need to be thinking about what comes next, and how it might be better for us as a culture than what we have now.
This link from Harper's was posted in comments by a reader named Ethan, I've cut and pasted excerpts from it:
The ecstasy of influence
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated — John Donne
Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator — marked by her forever — remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.
The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called "higher cribbing." Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?
"When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty." The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth — to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience — in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into "Absolutely Sweet Marie"? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?
In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled "Country Blues," Waters described how he came to write it. "I made it on about the eighth of October '38," Waters said. "I was fixin' a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing." Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called "Walkin' Blues," asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. "There's been some blues played like that," Waters replied. "This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out — Robert Johnson. He put it out as named 'Walkin' Blues.' I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House." In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he "made it" on a specific date. Then the "passive" explanation: "it come to me just like that." After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that "this song comes from the cotton field."
Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of "open source" culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called "versions." The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.
Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors.
As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.
This site gets over a thousand unique hits a day - I wonder what you readers think. Discuss.
Robert Johnson: Walking Blues - 2.31MB
Muddy Waters: Walkin' Blues - 2.72MB
Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bootleg - 4.86
Jane's Addiction: Been Caught Stealing - 5.71MB
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Give It Away Now - 4.29MB
