Category: Music

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Bill’s Top 10 Albums

I don’t believe in top 10 lists, generally. If a song or movie or book is great, you should hear it or see it or read it, regardless of whether or not it is anyone’s top 10 list.

Still, it is useful sometimes to have a list of “essentials”. These are works of art that almost certainly will prove rewarding, if you haven’t yet experienced them. You could argue all day and all night about whether “Citizen Kane” is #1 or #10 on your list of all-time great movies, but few people would dispute that it is very worth seeing.

So granted that valuations and rankings have very limited value, they do have that one particular virtue.

A few years ago, in 1992, the London Free Press published a list of the top 1,000 popular songs of the rock era. These songs were chose by a bunch of DJ’s, I believe, and reflect some bizarre criteria. What on earth is Bryan Adams doing anywhere near the top 100? And Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway” at #12? Weird!

Here’s my own list. I don’t put much significance in actual position. Do you think I care if “Like a Rolling Stone” should be first, or “Satisfaction”? The point is that both of them are great songs.

One thing I do care about: you will notice that not a single twisted, pompous, over-blown, mannerist “magnum opus”– like “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” or “Hotel California” or even “Stairway to Heaven” is on my list. Sure, these songs do have their virtues, and I can enjoy them once in a while. But great artists are economical with their material. Sometimes the greatest talent is that of knowing what to leave out. That’s the difference between the Beatles’ White Album– a disaster in many respects– and Abbey Road, a masterpiece. That’s difference between the brilliant Blonde on Blonde and the abysmal Self Portrait, both by Bob Dylan.

There’s great music in both, somewhere, but only one of each pair is a great album.

Anyway, let’s start with a list of best singles, of all time:

 

1. I Fought the Law Bobby Fuller Four The greatest most complete compact piece of music ever created.  The Clash’s version is pretty impressive too, but Bobby Fuller’s lean and mean Fender strat takes the cake.
2. Like a Rolling Stone Bob Dylan Lyrically and musically, a masterpiece of it’s time– a vitriolic indictment of everything superficial and phony and materialistic about our society.
3. Suzanne Leonard Cohen A beautiful, moody, and mystical tribute to the essence of feminine grace.
4. (I can get no) Satisfaction Rolling Stones The greatest riff in rock’n’roll.
5. Good Vibrations Beach Boys I am not a fan of Brian Wilson and company, but there is more invention and musical imagination in these three minutes than there are blondes in Malibu.
6. Eleanor Rigby Beatles Inspired by Bob Dylan, the Beatles raised their music to a new level with the albums Rubber Soul and Revolver.
7. Sultans of Swing Dire Straits Mark Knopfler’s amazing lead guitar punctuates this crisp, driving paean to musician’s musicians.
8. All Along the Watchtower Bob Dylan Or Jimi Hendrix.  Both versions are excellent, but Dylan’s is more compact and efficient.
9. Anchorage Michelle Shocked Weirdly evocative punk-country tune that never ceases to tickle.
10. Runaway Del Shannon During the lean years between Elvis and the British Invasion, this was one of the few marvels.
 

Honorable Mentions

    
11. Sweet Jane Lou Reed  
12. Twist and Shout Beatles  
13. Reelin’ in the Years Steely Dan  
14. Layla Derek and the Dominos Okay– so it’s a bit pompous and self-indulgent.  It’s also one of the greatest guitarists ever at his best.
15. Won’t Get Fooled Again Who  
16. Go Your Own Way Fleetwood Mac  
17. Thunder Road Bruce Springsteen  
18. London Calling Clash  
19. Norwegian Wood Beatles  
20. Hallelujah Leonard Cohen  
21. Psycho Killer Talking Heads  
22. Money Pink Floyd  
23. Me Myself I Joan Armatrading  
24. Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend T-Bone Burnett  
25. Heart of Gold Neil Young  
26. Stage Fright The Band  
27. Down by the River Neil Young  
28. Rip in Heaven Til Tuesday  
29. Don’t Fear the Reaper Blue Oyster Cult One of the most chilling songs ever recorded.
30. Frederick Patti Smith  
31. Lucy Al Stewart  
32. Joey Concrete Blonde Hmmm.  Maybe.
33. Criminal Under My Own Hat T-Bone Burnett  
34. Tokyo Bruce Cockburn  
35. This Wheel’s on Fire Band  

 

Bill’s Top Ten Albums

Whenever I do this sort of thing, I almost unconsciously start thinking, well, gotta have a woman in there, and a black, and, geez, you can’t leave out this band or that band or whatever. That’s not the right way to choose your favourite albums of all time. So I tried to simply stick to the best 40 minutes of music, period. I have also excluded collections and greatest hits albums. If I did include them, Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II would be the winner, hands down.

1. Highway 61 Revisited Bob Dylan
2. Rubber Soul Beatles
3. Brothers in Arms Dire Straits
4. New Skin for the Old Ceremony Leonard Cohen
5. Harvest Neil Young
6. Born to Run Bruce Springsteen
7. Exile on Main Street Rolling Stones
8. Rumours Fleetwood Mac
9. Déjà vu Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
10. Music From the Big Pink Band

Honorable Mentions:

11. Songs of Leonard Cohen Leonard Cohen
12. Bookends Simon and Garfunkel
13. After the Gold Rush Neil Young
14. Blood on the Tracks Bob Dylan
15. Blonde on Blonde Bob Dylan
16. Aja Steely Dan
17. Ghosts that Haunt Me Crash Test Dummies
18. Trinity Sessions Cowboy Junkies
19. Songs of Love and Hate Leonard Cohen
20. Everything’s Different Now Til Tuesday (Aimee Mann)

Disagree? So do I. Lists are stupid. But they get you thinking about great songs and about what makes a song great.  More importantly, they help you decide on what to load up onto your music player.

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Napster Hamster

Is Napster the Death of the Music Industry?

If you are not familiar with a program called the Napster, these are the salient facts:

The Napster creates a sub-network of users on the internet. Anyone who is logged on and running the program can become part of the network. When you join, the Napster scans a directory on your hard drive for MP3 files (you specify this directory when you set the program up). It then makes a catalog of these files available to all the other users of Napster on-line at that moment. While it’s doing that, you can use the search function of Napster to scan the MP3 files on every other user’s hard drive. When you find something you like, you click on it and download it to your machine.

The music industry is dead.

As I ran the Napster and did a search for some Tom Waits, I remembered something I read a while ago about the music industry going after some university servers that were carrying a lot of “illegal” MP3 files. The representatives of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America –or Vampires Anonymous) went to the administrators of these universities and forced them to delete the MP3 files and take action against the students who posted the files.

The “action” consisted, generally, of a very stern warning.

The RIAA had some mild recourse in this situation: there was a physical server upon which the files resided and from which they could be deleted.

But there are no servers for Napster. Or rather— there are thousands of servers. They appear, and then they disappear, when the user logs off. They could be in Anchorage or Vancouver or Minsk or London or Bogota or Moscow.

At the time I logged on, there were 1500 servers and 200,000 songs on line.

There is no way that the RIAA is ever going to be able to shut down such a network. There is no way the police can possibly track down and arrest all of those users. There is no way the government is going to impose protocols or software encryption programs on the internet to prevent the distribution of music. No one will accept it. No one even accepts that the government can tax the internet. There is a deep consensus out there– in government and academia and business– that the internet cannot be regulated and no one should even attempt it. Even if you could try to shut down all the servers in the U.S., traffic can be simply routed overseas.

There is no way that anyone will be able to prevent people from rapidly distributing “illegal” copies of any recorded work whatsoever, and that will soon include video. There is no way to convince these people that they should not do it. For one thing, many of them don’t care about right or wrong when it comes to copyright. For another thing, many of these people are mighty sick and tired of the music industry gouging them on the price of CDs and Hollywood gouging them on the price of movie tickets.

And, finally, some of these people are aware of how the music industry and Hollywood gouges and cheats their own artists.

It’s all good free enterprise, you know. For all the talk about morality and values and ethics, the United States promotes the idea of free enterprise capitalism above all else. Is it really such a large step from Microsoft’s or AOL’s marketing practices to stealing music and video? Come on…. Microsoft has been robbing people for years by negotiating deals with vendors that require them to pay for a copy of Windows for every computer they sell regardless of whether or not the purchaser wants it. That is “theft” by any other name. What has the Department of Justice done? So far, a big fat nothing.

It might be possible, in the future, for the music industry to encode CD’s in such a way that they cannot be copied. Well, no they can’t. First of all, that would only last a few weeks, at best, because the hacker community would quickly find a way to defeat the encryption that is used. Secondly, people will not want to buy CD’s that cannot be copied. Thirdly, no form of encryption will actually prevent someone from playing the CD– of course–and as long as it can be played, it will never be too difficult to convert it to an MP3 file.

Consider that the music industry has already won a major concession from the government. In the future (if not already), all blank tapes and CD’s are going to be “taxed” to return some of the “lost” royalties to the music industry. Think about this. Blank tapes and CD’s. Precisely at the moment when the media has become irrelevant, the government proposes to tax it!

The Napster doesn’t require a tape or a CD. All it requires is some hard drive space.

I’ve been saying for years that the music industry will never be able to sustain it’s current marketing strategy in the face of new computer technologies. The Napster, and similar programs that are sure to come along, might well be the last nail in the coffin.

Good bye Sony. Good bye Warner Brothers. Good bye EMI and Deutsch Gramophone.

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Two Great Movie Ideas: You’re Welcome, Hollywood!

All right, these ideas are copyrighted– okay? So you can’t steal them. They are going to make me a lot of money.

There are two absolutely magnificent, wonderful movies out there just waiting to be made.

First of all, a movie biography of Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan grew up in Minnesota and wanted to be a rock’n’roll singer like Elvis. He didn’t see the fact that he sounded like a chorus of drowning weasels as an obstacle. He hitch-hiked to New York, found out that folk music was what was happening, man, and began playing at open mic shows at several local folk clubs, sounding more like Woody Guthrie than Elvis Presley. In fact, people used to say he sounded more like Woody Guthrie than Woody Guthrie did. (You can check this out by downloading some Guthrie tunes through Napster– the resemblance to early Dylan is uncanny.)

He wrote some of the greatest folk songs of the century. He was noticed by New York Times folk critic Robert Shelton. Bingo– Columbia (now Sony) signed him to a recording contract. For a while he was known as “Hammond’s Folly”, after John Hammond, the A&R man who signed him. But Joan Baez took him along on tour. Peter, Paul, and Mary covered his best songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All right”. He became big. Very big. Even the Beatles were listening to Bob Dylan. (But Elvis wasn’t– he was in the army, and then he was making crummy “B” movies in Hollywood.) He became the “spokesman of generation”. He didn’t want to be the spokesman of a generation. He shifted to rock’n’roll in 1965, with a bunch of Canadians known as “The Hawks” (later known simply as “the Band”) backing him. He wrote more great songs. Then, in 1967, he was almost killed in a motorcycle accident. In the meantime, the Beatles and Rolling Stones released several massively over-produced behemoths of albums, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Her Satanic Majesties Request. Everyone eagerly awaited Dylan’s response. Would he top them?

Dylan shocked the music world by releasing a very folky, very laid-back album called “John Wesley Harding”, featuring drums, bass, guitar, and harmonica. He retreated into a simpler, more introspective style.

It’s a great story. It covers the most fascinating period of American history this century: the 1960’s. It’s got everything. Everything except… the rights to Dylan’s songs.

Bob Dylan– unlike most musical artists today– actually owns the rights to his songs. If someone were to make a movie of Bob Dylan’s life, he would have to get Bob Dylan’s permission, or make a movie about the greatest song-writer of our century without using any of his songs.

Bob– if you’re listening– I have a great idea for you. Call Martin Scorsese and tell him that he can make a movie about you and you will give him the rights to use any of your songs in the movie. Tell him that you won’t even look at the movie or the script or anything until after it’s all done. Tell him he can do whatever he thinks is best with the story.

Come on, Bob. You gave “The Times They Are A’Changin'” to the Bank of Montreal. It’s the least you could do for your fans. You owe it to them.

The results would be a great movie. It would not always be flattering to Bob Dylan, who sometimes acted like a jerk, and who was known to stand aloof from his friends. But the most flattering thing about it would be that Bob Dylan was big enough and brave enough to do the right thing and let someone else make this movie and to let the director have all the control over the material, the way Bob has full control over his own recordings.

Are you listening, Bob? I ask a measly 1% of the gross in exchange for permission to use this idea, and the right to meet Uma Thurman, if she could be given a bit part, perhaps as Nico.

Okay– my second great movie idea: a remake of the 3 Stooges. This time, they are computer programmers working for Microsoft. While they’re not coding new applets for Office 2003 1/2, they are off creating mayhem at the Department of Justice Hearings, or directing U.S. negotiations at the WTO.

I’m serious. People are ready for unsophisticated, trashy, vaudeville-type humour. The baby-boomers will love it. Young people always find obscure retro-acts hip and amusing. Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Windows will immediately appreciate the humour of Curly trying to figure out how “plug’n’play” works, or writing little Java applets for the Microsoft Web Page or finding ways to make Word Perfect crash.

Well that’s it. Are you listening, Hollywood Moguls? Call me and make me rich.

Who should star in a Bob Dylan Movie:

Sean Penn as Bob Dylan
Robert Deniro as Albert Grossman
Anne Hathaway as Joan Baez (yes, Anne can sing).
Ronnie Hawkins as the ghost of Elvis
Tom Waits as Woody Guthrie
Uma Thurman as Nico
Al Pacino as Leonard Cohen
Winona Ryder as Sarah Lowndes

10 years after I wrote this, Bob Dylan did exactly what I suggested– except, he gave it to Todd Haynes instead of Martin Scorcese. The result was the exquisite “I’m Not There”.   You’re welcome, Bob.  Call me sometime and we’ll work out a gratuity.  [2011-03]

Correction: Todd Haynes was the director, not P. T. Anderson as stated earlier. [2014-09-16]

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Go Your Own Way

For a few years in the mid-1970’s, the album “Rumors” by Fleetwood Mac was ranked the best-selling album of all time. One listen and it’s not hard to see why. Rumors has something for everyone, the romantic, the rocker, the thoughtful sentimentalist. I didn’t usually buy pop albums back then– Tom Petty and Jackson Browne were about as mainstream as I got– but I bought a copy of Rumors. My favorite song was Lindsey Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way”, but the most haunting was a group effort: “The Chain”.

fleetwood.jpg (16168 bytes)

fleetwood.jpg (16168 bytes)

There was considerable attention paid to the fact that the members of Fleetwood Mac appeared to be documenting personal experience in their songs. Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were married to each other, as were John and Christine McVie. During the life of the band, both relationships floundered. “Go Your Own Way” is poignant, though you wouldn’t know it from the lyrics alone:

You can go your own way
You can call it another lonely day…

I don’t know the details, but a few years later, Nicks and Buckingham went their own ways and got divorced, and so did the McVie’s.

A couple of years ago, the band reunited for a concert and a new album. As a rule, I am not fond of rock band reunions. The Beach Boys flogged themselves around for years and years and it was downright embarrassing, especially when they tried to drag Brian Wilson along. The Eagles set a record for ticket prices — and greed– on their last tour. What are they selling? Nostalgia. It’s kind of pathetic. They couldn’t stay on top of the charts with new material, so they disbanded. The members all had disastrous solo careers. They all squandered their money on fast cars, drugs, and loose women. Now they’re broke. But all those baby boomers are rich and conspicuous and just looking for something fake and ostentatious to squander their money on and here we are– still singing “California Girls” and “Hotel California” and reliving our misspent youths. Sponsored by Schlitz.

Yes, “Hotel California”– that epic diatribe against shallow, grasping materialism– is now performed by shallow, grasping, aging former rock stars. You may now call them “entertainers”.

There are exceptions. Yes, the Rolling Stones continue to tour, and yes, they have corporate sponsors, but at least they continue to put out original music on a regular basis. So does Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Neil Young even has the integrity to refuse corporate sponsors– one of the very few 60’s icons who hasn’t sold out.

Anyway, back to Fleetwood Mac and “The Chain”. The chorus is

if you don’t love me now
you will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
you must never break the chain

This was not my favorite song when the album came out. I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t think it was very meaningful. And there wasn’t much to the lyrics– about four lines worth.

Now I have a better understanding of what it means. If you have been in a relationship for a long time, you know each other in a way that young lovers never do. There is no mystery, no promise, no exciting possibilities. Instead of seeing someone who represents a whole world of new experiences and ideas and feelings and relationships– you see someone with whom you have exhausted opportunities together, and whom you realize is not likely to ever change or grow or improve. Your relationship is established in concrete. Your social circle is congealed. Your potential has been realized. Even your income is probably relatively fixed.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If the relationship is still good, there are other bonds, and familiarity, and understanding, and the thing we refer to vaguely as “home”. The world can be a demanding, stressful place– there should be one place where you are unconditionally accepted and loved. When a relationship works, that’s what you get.

But if you fall out of love with that person– if you lose the daily acts of affection and intimacy and consideration– it will be, I think, almost impossible to rebuild that relationship later. “If you don’t love me now”– right now, this very moment– it will be impossible to fall in love with me again. What we have left is the baggage of your life, your children, your mortgage.

You could still go on for forty or fifty years, without ever feeling passion for each other again. Some people think that is magnificent. Family values. You should hang in there and try to work it out.

Or you could dissolve the relationship. But that’s pretty depressing too.

You get the feeling, from the content of Rumors, that Lindsey Buckingham wanted out of his relationship with Stevie Nicks, and that Stevie Nicks didn’t want him to leave:

It’s only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat… drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost… [songwriter: Stevie Nicks]

But these are just songs. People write from the heart, but they also have an ear for rhythm and an eye for strong imagery. Maybe it was the other way around.

Ian and Sylvia, the folk duo who had their best years in the 1960’s, (“Four Strong Winds” is probably their best-known song), also did a reunion concert a while ago. Like Buckingham and Nicks, they were a married couple writing and performing music together. Sylvia Fricker ran away from home in Chatham, Ontario, (“River Road”) and joined the older Ian Tyson in Toronto, and they had a pretty good career together, mostly covering songs by Dylan, Lightfoot, and others. And like Buckingham/Nicks, they eventually split up. Sylvia left Ian because she felt somewhat stifled by the relationship, and felt a need to develop her own potential away from his dominating influence. In all of their recorded music, Sylvia rarely solos.  [I later read that there were affairs…]

ian and sylvia.jpg (44347 bytes)

At the reunion concert, they sang a lot of love songs, about relationships starting and relationships dying. I had the feeling that Ian was inviting her back, in song, pleading with her, promising that it would be different this time. Sylvia looked more like, hey, it’s just a damn song. Let’s get the nostalgia thing over with so I can get back to my life. The chain was broken. She works in Toronto for the CBC. He has a ranch out in Alberta.

Why are so many pop singers so physically attractive? At the most superficial level, you would think that what we’re really after here is a voice. But of course, that is nonsense. In fact, the music industry will quite often take someone who can’t sing at all, but has a great body, and turn her or him into a singer.  Or someone who is attractive and can act:  the Monkees.  They never do that with someone who is overweight and has a bad complexion. No, singers have to be beautiful because part of the experience of listening to their music is a powerful sense of identification and fantasy. All around the world, men imagine that Stevie Nicks and Sylvia Fricker and Shania Twain and even Madonna are thinking about them when they sing songs about passion and surrender and desire. And women feel the same way about Donny Osmond.

Well…

If you have Rumours in your collection (if you’re a baby boomer, the odds are pretty good), give “The Chain” a fresh listen. Then turn up “Go Your Own Way” really loud and dance with the kids.

Note 1: Nicks and Buckingham actually split up as the album was being recorded, not afterwards.

Note 2: Nicks’ wrote a song called “Silver Springs” which was left off the album for management reasons. Nicks reportedly went ballistic when she found out and never forgave whoever it was she thought was responsible for the decision, which might have been Fleetwood and McVie.

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Yamahaha

You can play a complete Mozart concerto with one finger. It’s true. All you need is the Yamaha “Disklavier GrandTouch” electronic piano.

This keyboard instrument is programmed with actual great performances by famous musicians and orchestras. The keyboard “prompts” you for each key that you are supposed to play, and automatically provides the amazing accompaniment.

My question is, why would anyone want such a device? Why why why?

If you were to buy this keyboard primarily for the pleasure of hearing the music already programmed into it—the “great performances” by well-known musicians– why wouldn’t you just buy a CD of the same music and play it on your stereo? Or an MP3 file and play it on your computer? Or, if you wanted the thrill of seeing the music itself scroll by, how about a midi file? This has got to be the world’s largest, clunkiest, clumsiest, stereo system.

If you already know how to play music, why would you want to buy a piano that is programmed to play music performed by other musicians? What kind of satisfaction would there be in having the computer “accompany” you? Is it possible to be moved or inspired by an algorithm? Would you be proud of your performance?

And if you don’t know how to play music, why would you want to deceive yourself into thinking that you can, by sitting behind this keyboard?

Who would you think you were fooling?

As technology advances, the dreamers and schemers at the big and not-so-big high-tech corporations keep coming up with idiotic ways for you to spend your money. At $10K a pop, this keyboard is a particularly bad value. What kind of a society invests so much money into deceiving itself? This instrument represents the cosmetic surgery of creative talent. If your breasts are too small, you have them augmented. If your penis is too small, you buy a gun. If your brain is too small, you buy a Disklavier GrandTouch.

* * *

Consider some other deviant hybrids from ages past:

  • the programmable typewriter (with the tiny LCD screen). It cost as much as a computer, for less than 1/10th the functionality.
  • the moped
  • the umbrella hat

and of course, one of the real winners for instant technological obsolescence:

  • the winmodem

Personally, I think those big camper trucks—Winnebagos– are the same thing, but obviously people have yet to be convinced. You see them everywhere. They’re too big to travel around with in cities, and too small to provide a comfortable home on the go. They cost $45,000+. Think about that. How many days a year do you use it? Ten? Twenty? It would cost about $2,000 to stay in a good motel for twenty days. It would take about twenty years for the Winnebago to pay for itself. And that’s only if you don’t include insurance or gas.

Get a car and a trailer, I say, or, better yet, go to a motel. And if you really want to play the piano, take lessons. And if you can play the piano, buy a piano. And if you want to program music into a keyboard, buy a midi-compatible keyboard and a computer. That will only set you back $3,500. And you get a computer out of the deal as well.

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Banning MP3

It’s been quite a while since the Recording Industry Association of America tried to have MP3 players banned but I am still so steamed about this issue that I have to give it another rant.

Think about this. The Diamond company created a little portable device called the Rio that allows you to listen to music that has been recorded and compressed into MP3 files. That’s all it does.

Anyone with the right software and hardware can create an MP3 file on a computer. You can record yourself, or you could take the Windows sound effects, or you could take a CD or tape you already own and record it onto the computer and convert it to MP3 format.

What’s the big deal? How could anyone have thought this should be illegal?

Well, the record industry says that you could take a commercial, copyrighted recording and convert it to MP3 and play it on your portable MP3 player. Again, what’s the big deal? You paid for the CD. You are perfectly entitled to convert it into different formats so you can listen to it on different devices.

Ah—but the music industry thinks that we will all shortly start copying our Celine Dion and Back Street Boys albums onto our computers and giving copies away to our friends! Then your friends won’t want to buy the albums (especially after hearing the Back Street Boys).

Well, well. So it appears that you could do something illegal with an MP3. Well well. The truth is, you could also take your Rio and bang someone on the head and kill them, but you don’t see the government trying to ban them for that reason.

Now you have to remember here that the government of the U.S. allows almost anyone to buy a handgun at any time, on the assumption that just because a person buys a powerful, easily-concealed weapon that can blow a hole the size of an orange through somebody’s head does not necessarily mean that this person is likely to commit a crime with it.

This government also allows people to buy alcohol, gasoline, rope, fertilizer, and Barry Manilow records. All without the slightest restriction.

What we have here is a classic case of the rich and powerful throwing their weight around and abusing the legislative and judicial processes in order to exploit the hapless consumer. They have already succeeded in preventing DAT tape drives from getting a foothold in America. And the Disney corporation has succeeded in extending the copyright of the Mickey Mouse character. How? Easy. You simply pour money into the re-election campaigns of influential senators and congressman.

It is shameful and disgusting. At the next election, ask your congressman how he feels about this issue. If he supports the RIAA initiative, jam your Diamond Rio up his nose.

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The MP3

How complex are the moral and ethical issues surrounding copyright nowadays, with all the advances in computer technology? Consider MP3.

MP3 (Media Player 3) is a new format for digital music recording. The MP3 system allows you to make very good digital copies from any CD or “wav” file and copy the file onto your computer, a personal MP3 “player” (similar to a walkman), or… the Internet. A typical three minute pop song, which would take up to 20 megabytes of disk space as a “wav” file, can be condensed into a 3 megabyte MP3 file. There are already thousands of sites on the Internet offering MP3 files for downloading, most of them illegal copies of copyrighted material. There are also a growing number of sites offering original MP3 files, with the consent of the artist.

Many of the users of MP3 offer a thin rationalization for their activities: they would have more respect for copyright if CDs were priced more fairly. They are aware of the fact that CDs are cheaper to produce than vinyl records, yet they cost twice as much. Very little of the difference in cost, if any, actually goes to the artist.

The music industry is absolutely frantic about MP3 and has tried their best to stamp it out. Having failed to convince the courts that it should be banned, they are now attempting to hi-jack it by presenting their own variation of the technology, but with built-in protocols to prevent successive or second generation copies from being made. If history is an indicator, their efforts are not likely to succeed. IBM, Microsoft, Compuserve, and AOL have all fought these battles before and lost.

One is tempted to sympathize with the music industry. After all, don’t they have a right to protect their music? What about the poor musicians, struggling to make a living in his noble profession? Music industry representatives are careful to present themselves as defenders of the poor artists and composers who will be denied their just royalties because of this new form of piracy. Aren’t these workers entitled to a just wage?

To be absolutely blunt about it, I don’t believe that the music industry cares very much about their “poor” artists and composers at all. The truth is that music industry exploits artists and consumers alike. What the music industry is really frightened of is the possibility that artists and composers will no longer need them at all.

Consider the rap group Public Enemy (you’ve probably heard their biggest hit, “Fight the Power”, somewhere). Public Enemy recently attempted to post their own songs in MP3 format on their website. However, lawyers for their record company, DefJam, obtained injunctions and shut them down immediately. So much for the rights of the “poor” composer.

Why did Public Enemy defy their own record company?

The dispute centres on the bookkeeping procedures commonly used by large record companies in their management of artists and repertoire. When an artist is signed, he (or they) is given a large advance, and access to a recording studio. The artist is thrilled. He probably doesn’t understand much of the language in the contracts he signs. He probably doesn’t even have a lawyer, or an agent. He thinks that if he has a hit record, he is going to be rich.

The record company, on behalf of the artist, hires public relations consultants, photographers, legal representatives, arrangers, session musicians, and so on. All of these people may in fact work for the record company, but their services are billed separately to the artist, as if they were independent consultants. Many of these charges can quickly become grossly inflated. A manicurist earning $8.95 an hour suddenly becomes an “image consultant” for a shadow company at rates of $125.00 an hour. The manicurist doesn’t see that money, of course. On paper, it looks like the record company has incurred horrendous expenses, and may even be taking a loss on the artist. In reality, if the artist is successful, everybody except the artist—and the real manicurist—will make piles of money.

This system is so pervasive that, according to Billboard Magazine, the average artist who sells 500,000 CDs will realize a net profit of about $20,000, after all the “expenses” have been deducted from his royalties!

Back to Public Enemy, this rap group woke up one day and found out that, after selling $72 million in merchandise, they were completely broke. Like any reasonable person, they wondered how that was possible. Well, their record company, Defjam, explained that, according to their accounting methods, it cost them well over $71 million to sell that $72 million worth of merchandise.

It is not surprising, then, to discover that many successful musicians follow a strategy first employed by Tom Petty and declare bankruptcy after a few short years of “success”. The reason they do so is because it is the only legal way they can extricate themselves from the preposterous contracts they naively signed. And it will be no surprise to learn that the music industry is lobbying hard for Congress to pass a new law making it even more difficult for musicians to escape their contracts by declaring bankruptcy. [update: they succeeded, the law was passed]

So, what the music industry really fears is that more and more artists will do what Ani DiFranco did and bypass the music industry entirely. DiFranco records, prints, and markets all of her own CDs, and is doing quite well, artistically and financially, thank you. Once she achieved notable success on her own, including a major story in Time Magazine, the record companies came calling, but she was not foolish enough to succumb to their offers of glittering promotional pieces in Vanity Fair and guest slots on David Letterman.

With MP3, and the explosion of inexpensive recording equipment, it has become quite practical for a new artist to create his own music in the comfort of his own home, put samples out on the Internet, and sell CDs for less than half what the music chains charge, and still make a reasonable profit. You can understand why the music industry is deeply concerned about this new technology, and why the film industry has also taken notice. Without a chokehold on the distribution of music, the major labels would quickly be forced to compete with more and more independent artists and labels.

Where does this leave the ethical listener? Certainly, the basic principle of copyright should be respected. But I believe we should oppose the attempts by the music industry to outlaw or restrict new technologies that threaten their control of music recording and distribution. We should also support balancing legislation that begins to reassert the rights of the consumer, to make copies of music for personal use, to freely copy and distribute non-copyrighted material, and to make “fair use” of copyrighted material in the classroom, library, and for research and study. Above all, artists need far greater protection from the sometimes devious and dishonest practices of the recording industry.

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The Vinyl Record

Do you have any vinyl records? Threw them all out after you’d amassed a serious collection of CD’s, did you? Vinyl records are analog. CDs are digital. Bad, bad vinyl. Throw it away.

Too bad. Big, big mistake. Let me tell you why.

Everybody knows about MP3 by now. Just in case, I’ll refresh your memory about the salient details.

Since computers started becoming bigger, faster, and more powerful, the average user has had the capability of recording music or any other sound into a computer file that could be played back through an amplifier. The format most computers used for this was called “wav”. It wasn’t a very efficient format. To record a three-minute song at good fidelity required about 25 – 40 megabytes of space. Even with today’s 10 GIG hard drives, that’s a big file. Too big to circulate on the internet, for example.

MP3 is nothing more than a file compression format. It takes that humungous 25 MB wav file and converts it into a sleek little 3 MB MP3 file. Best of all, when you copy an MP3 file, you don’t lose one megahertz of audio quality. Think of it: the 50th copy is just as good as the 1st.

This, of course, has tremendous implications. It could mean the death of the popular music industry. And some of the smarter people at Sony and Warner Brothers know that. And they are having fits. If music can be downloaded off the internet and copied endlessly, who will buy CDs?

Well, they aren’t taking this lying down of course. Various music companies have combined– isn’t that illegal (yes it is)– to work out a new standard for digital media that will allow them to prevent people from making copies of their music. They want to this by putting a secret code in the computerized music file. This code will tell a recording device not to make copies of the music.

What nobody seems to realize is that this, at long last, will mark the definitive end of the vinyl record. Vinyl records cannot be encoded to prevent copying. Why would they issue music on CD’s designed to prevent copies, and then issue vinyl LPs which would allow anyone with a decent turntable to copy the music onto a computer and generate the numerous illicit copies they so dread?

Of course, why issue music on vinyl at all? The most amazing thing about the success of the CD format is that it was accomplished by persuading people to buy a new copy of music they already own. And that is why the “industry” is very, very excited about DVD or whatever else is going to succeed the CD as the standard format of musical recordings. Once again, everyone who dearly loves music will have to go out and buy new copies of their favorite CDs. And you can take your old, obsolete CD’s and stack them right next to your obsolete vinyl LPs.

Sony just announced the release of their own proprietary digital format. They say that you will be able to download Sony’s copyrighted music off the internet. After you pay, of course. Sony thinks you should just rush out and buy the new portable player for Sony’s new copyrighted format, which cost over $400, because, after all, don’t you want to be able to play Celine Dionne on your computer?

Think about this friends: you have a choice. MP3 allows you to make as many copies of a piece of music as you want. You can download music in MP3 format from all over the world, for free. So you probably want to rush right out and buy the new Sony player instead, for $400, so we can all put an end to this free music and start paying again!

If Sony was really smart—and I don’t think they are, on this issue—they would be giving their player away. I’m not kidding. Sony—if you’re listening—I want $1 million for this copyrighted idea (Copyright 1999, all rights reserved, Bill Van Dyk). Here it is again: give your portable player away, for free, and give away as many as possible as quickly as possible. Give it away at concerts, with free cuts by the artist. Give it away at record shops, with free samples by your leading stars. Give it away at trade shows and press conferences. Give it away in breakfast cereals.

Think, Sony. If you give your player away, people will want music to play on it. Where will they get that music? They will get it from your web site. How much will they pay? Well, don’t be stupid and try to charge them $1 a track. That would mean that a CD-length work would cost $20. That’s what we currently pay for a physical product that is pressed, labeled, packaged, and distributed. You just have to upload these files to your web site and set up people’s accounts. How about 25 cents each? You’ll win the digital music war!

My guess is that Sony is not as stupid as you might think and that the $400 is a ploy. My guess is that Sony wants you to think that the player is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 so that when they start giving it away for about $99 near Christmas time, you’ll think you’re getting something really valuable, even though each device will only cost Sony about $5 to manufacture (no moving parts, no belts, no drives, just cheap silicone chips, an LCD, and a “play” button). My guess is that Sony is going to try to charge people $2.50 a cut for music for their machine. My guess is that their market research will show that people are pretty stupid and will pay two and a half times as much for a recording that cost Sony 1/5th as much, to produce and distribute, as a CD copy. People will pay this because they will want to be “cutting edge” and show off to their friends.

Will this fool a lot of people?

Yes.

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Bob Dylan’s Voice

Bob Dylan performed a concert in Montreal on July 8th, 1988. He was so bad the audience booed him off the stage. Humiliated and disgraced, he retired from all public performances, though he continued to write brilliant, searing songs like “The Man in the Long Black Coat” for other artists who knew how to sing, like Joan Osborne.

Yeah. Right. Never happened.

It almost happened, once. In 1965, in New York, an audience expecting an acoustic, folkie Dylan, rebelled when he brought the Hawks, an eclectic electric band, on stage with him, and drilled into “Like a Rolling Stone”. He survived the heckling and came back for an encore, with his acoustic guitar, and played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. On a subsequent tour of England, he encountered more booing and heckling. Still, the majority of the audiences sat back and listened and applauded at the end of each number. More importantly, they paid for their tickets. Dylan sold out every venue.

There is something bizarre about the 1988 concert in Montreal. He is not as bad as you sometimes think he is—his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is fascinating and passionate—but he certainly is not “singing”. He shouts and honks and garbles and inhales and mumbles and wails and barks. Is he really good at shouting and honking and garbling and inhaling and mumbling and wailing and barking? It wouldn’t be hard to find someone who is way better at it than he is.

If Dylan is so bad, why does he continue, in 1999, to sell out every venue? Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I’m completely wrong about singing. Maybe this shrieking from the bowels of hell really is quite beautiful and interesting.

It is interesting that he is currently touring with Paul Simon, who wrote this cute little tribute in 1966:

I knew a man whose brain’s so small
Couldn’t think of nothing at all
Not the same as you and me
Doesn’t dig poetry
He’s so un-hip that when you say “Dylan”
He thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was. Why the man aint got no culture!
But it’s all right ma, everybody must get stoned….
… I lost my harmonica, Albert….

“Albert” is probably a reference to Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman (who also managed Peter, Paul, and Mary). The song, “A Simple Desultory Philippic”, was one of those petty, vindictive little pieces that result when an artist is jealous of the recognition given to a rival. Simon also once commented that he wanted to earn more respect from critics but couldn’t train his voice to scream with the proper intensity. Artful sarcasm from a man accustomed to accompanying Art Garfunkel, one of the truly gorgeous voices of pop music.

Dylan responded a few years later with a hilarious parody of “The Boxer”, doing both Simon and Garfunkel’s voices, equally preposterously. For the record, I should inform you that some critics believe the Dylan version, released on the disastrous double-album Self Portrait, was a “tribute” to his “good friend” Simon. Hmmm. It might well have been both.

It was the Beatles who first noticed that the audience no longer cared about the musical quality of the live performance. It came to them at the height of their career, when they were selling out Shea Stadium and other acoustic hellholes. They discovered that the audience screamed and howled during their entire sets. If you are screaming and howling you aren’t listening. You certainly aren’t trying to notice pitch or rhythm or harmony. You aren’t thinking: “hmmm, seems to me Ringo’s lost a fraction of a second on his timing there…” In other words, they discovered that audiences did not actually come to the concert to hear the music. They were there to see their idols live, on stage, and scream, and get hysterical, and experience the phenomenon of super-stardom up close and personal. Well, as up close and personal as you get when the nearest seat that is available to the general public is about 100 feet away from the stage.

Thank you pop fans. It is because of your mindless devotion that many musicians feel quite comfortable ambling out on stage an hour or two late. You can tell when the concert is about to begin: the rich and privileged take their seats, at last, directly in front of the stage. The seats that you can’t get even if you camp in front of the primary ticket outlet for three days and buy the very first tickets (and pay an exorbitant “handling” fee). You will find that the very first tickets are for seats x and y in row 66. Where did all the other tickets go? The parasites and vampires who run the ticket agencies have them. You think they’re actually going to sell them to you? No way! Not even after charging you preposterous “service” fees to take your money and make you wait. (Kudos to Pearl Jam who has been fighting this system, without much success, for years).

Dylan discovered that he could be rude and snarly and arrogant, and people would still be wild for him and the critics would still worship him. He discovered that he could treat his friends like dirt and still be admired and respected. He discovered that he could be selfish and annoying and hypocritical, and it didn’t matter: his fans would line up on schedule and fork over their $25 or $35 or $45 or $65 to see him live. He discovered that he could paint! No kidding. He did a cover for “The Band”, and for his own “Self-Portrait”. It’s this kind of cubist pastiche that you are supposed to think is the product of genius because it breaks so many rules of conventional art. Actually, his paintings are crummy. He must have realized that eventually– you don’t see many Bob Dylan art shows lately.

And he discovered that he could sing like a howling weasel and it still didn’t matter.

Of course the critics were not fooled….

Well, of course they were.

You see, at one time, Dylan could sing. Quite well, in fact.

But in the 1960’s, people who admired Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett thought that Dylan couldn’t sing. But these people didn’t know a thing about the blues or folk, so they could be readily dismissed as narrow-minded and ignorant. But more sophisticated jazz and folk critics like Robert Shelton, Nat Hentoff, and Greil Marcus lauded Dylan for his originality and brilliance. And they were right, about the Dylan of the 1960’s. Listen to him on his early albums, on “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All right”, or “Motopsycho Nightmare” or “Visions of Johanna”. He is not merely good. He is often brilliant, astonishing, breath-taking. He was the most original talent of his time. He could even be tender and melodious—listen to all of Nashville Skyline and “Tangled up in Blue”.

So let’s not get confused here—I’m not one of those people who believe that Dylan never could sing.

In the 1980’s, critics who admired Nat Hentoff and Greil Marcus and didn’t understand the difference between audaciousness and audacity, took up the torch and praised Dylan’s art. The more obscure and obtuse and incoherent, the better—the less likely the common man was going to mistake their admiration for mere pretentiousness.

Now, I’m going to tell you a very shocking and amazing fact: Bob Dylan, today, sounds like garbage. No, it’s not your ears fooling you–he really does sound like garbage. He sings with the melodic artfulness of a blast furnace. He sings with the rhythmic inventiveness of a stuffed fish. He sings with banality and monotony. He’s not even clever with his phrasing anymore.

What happened? Dylan has always lived an insular life and has never had the self-respect to associate with people as smart or smarter than himself. Think of the enormous stress the adulation he received in the early 1960’s put on his personal relationships. He cast aside Joan Baez. He ridiculed Phil Ochs. He dumped loyal friends and associates who dared to imply anything less than full-hearted worship and admiration. He surrounded himself with people of unquestioning loyalty and mindless devotion. So when he finished a concert or a new album or some particularly weird movie performance and asked these people, “how’d I do?” I doubt very much he heard anything but comments like the following:

“Great, Bob.”

“Brilliant again, Bob!”

“Had ‘em eating out of your hand, Bob.”

And Dylan sits there thinking, “Man, I thought I stunk, but I guess I was really great. Must have been great—sold out again, in 40 cities.”

Dylan now plays Vegas. Dylan now belongs in Vegas.

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Shania Twain

What I want to know about Shania Twain is, can she cook?

She is very pretty. She has a very nice voice. But there are lots of models out there and lots of girls can sing. Why is she so successful? Is it because she exposes her belly button every time she is in a video? What’s so great about belly buttons?

So all these men are out there watching Shania Twain sing and wiggle her hips and they are thinking, “boy, she’s pretty. I’d like to buy her records.” No. What they’re really thinking is, “I’ll bet that if Shania would just get to know me, she would fall in love with me and want to marry me and live in my house and clean and cook and sew, and look just great in a frilly apron.” Do these same men look at Courtney Love and say, “I’ll bet she can cook.”?

Shania’s married. She married her manager or something. Don’t they always? I think Celine Dion married her manager too. And didn’t Sarah McLachlan marry her drummer? What probably happens is that six zillion men send her deeply personal, anguished, explicit letters, and they all sound a bit scary to a young artistic woman. So she retreats to the safety of someone she thinks she can trust. This is never another famous musician: they always fool around, don’t they? So it’s a drummer or road manager or agent or someone like that.

Shania’s husband probably looks like Rodney Dangerfield. Bad career move. Still, most men probably think, “I’ll bet he’d leave him in a moment if she ever gave me a chance.” Then they buy her CD’s and look at her pretty face and dream.

She does have an appealing face. In this one video, she’s dancing around with all these other people, and they keep trying to take the microphone away from her. She’s laughing and having a good time. It’s a remarkable video. Whoever thought of it was a genius. It makes her appear accessible and good-natured and kind and funny. You start thinking that if you walked right up to her out of the blue, she’d smile and give you a hug.

I’ve never understood popular culture. On my 13th birthday, my mother bought me a copy of the Archies, featuring their classic “Sugar Sugar”. I went “vomit vomit”. I was into Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and the Beatles. Marie Osmond? Olivia Newton-John? I thought they were juvenile.

Today, it’s Shania Twain. Well, she’s better looking than Marie Osmond, but just as boring, as far as her music goes. She’s never going to do a really interesting song, like Sheryl Crowe or Ani DiFranco or Joan Osborne. She’s going to be the Danish Curling Team of women’s music: cheerful and sporting and far more successful than she ever expected to be.