Since I'm such an obsessive fan of both Radiohead and Sonic Youth, (I spend a lot of time outside of Mrs. Kim Moore and Colin "Mozgus" Greenwood's respectable windows) seeing Kim Gordon "slam" Radiohead for their "Pay What You Will Consumer Surplus Bonanza" felt like my parent's divorce all over again. Also, if that's too personal for you then, I just want to reinforce that it was meant more as a way of flavoring the SIMILE, and that anything else of that sort, be it personal or otherwise, should be taken as more ammunition for anyone who reads this to destroy me personally and critically.
Yes, I actually am a poor writer because of my parent's divorce! The reason behind that is because the divorce lead me to reading a lot of Fantasy novels in order to escape the awesomeness of seeing two grown, brain-matured adults accusing the other of failing to fulfill their part of the white parent's burden, and as a result, I came into contact with a lot of overly florid, poorly written prose of a most medieval style.
Anyways, back to Sonic Youth v. the Radioheads. Kim Youth's problem, as it seems, stems from the fact that she believes that Radiohead pioneered a movement where music listeners after downloading In Rainbows and paying nothing or a nominal fee, jumped off the "pay for recorded labor-music bandwagon", and onto the "music should be free it's art" band-faggin' ('faggin being what a bunch of heterosexual brosefs say to one another when they both follow the same trend). Now, I can't speak for the only female member of Sonic Youth currently in Sonic Youth, but her complaint (as what can be surmised from what amouts to 1.9 sentences) is one that a lot of artistes have been making, especially in regards to Radiohead. Their arguments include:
1) Radiohead is super popular and as a result, can basically give away music and Thom Yorke will still be able to fill his Paxil prescription.
2) The precedent set by the Radiohead model (Oh, and the fact that Trent Reznore is giving away everything these days (UNCITED, but please just go to Nineinchnails.com)) is now negatively impacting the record sales of various popular, respected, independent music groups, groups which are decidedly blue collar and not that wealthy. There is also the implication that the pay as you want downloading scheme (or the "take my music for the price of your bandwidth scheme!" which only benefits Big Internet) disproportionately affects all your favourite bands because they seem to have more fans who are tech savvy, into downloading, are also regular piraters compared to Joe Six-pack, who is still going to Best Buy to purchase with physical liquidity the new copy of Buckcherry's latest tour de shit. Joe Six-pack is generally not very tech savvy and the only downloading he will be doing is when Best Buy gives him three free download codes to get demo versions of Buckcherry's "We're an American Joe Six-Pack band." Or, Mr. Joe-Six Pack will be using iTunes and spend whole dollars to purchase master tracks of his favourite country artist. As a result, the indie musician is now reduced to eating the flies off of each other's starving carcasses, due to the increasing entitlement mentality of their fans.
3) Hey mannnn, why isn't "The Eternal" free with a What.CD Promotional code, mannnn. I've bought all your other albums, why should I keep giving you money for you music labor, mannnnnn?
4) Which really translates to finally, that the value of music labor, embodied in the "sold record and royalty payments made," is going extinct and it's thanks to Radiohead, Girl Talk, Saul Williams, et. al, who are making their own music labor mean nothing.
(When I refer to music labor, I refer to all the time spent and money consumed during the making of any given album. This could include studio time, or the Big Macs eaten while Ian Anderson was penning the lyrics to Jethro Tull. That is culturally anachronistic!)
Any old-school Sonic Youth bootlegger will tell you that the reason they got into bootlegging Sonic Youth live wasn't for the gold played Bentley's they'd later go on to drive when they'd sell out and become commodity traders. And that while bootlegs aren't equatable to albums, they represent the free trade of art and music, but especially act as promotion for those bands, especially groups like the DIY Sonic Youth. Any good band wanted bootlegs because any way for them to get their music heard was a victory, and so even if there were obvious compromises on the sound quality and deoderent useages of the bootlegger, if you've never heard Sonic Youth but your best friend is going to totally make you a Sonic Youth mix-tape with a fucking searing performance of "Shaking Hell" you get a great experience and you get it for free. All of a sudden, the utter visceral gut punch of the recorded form of the song might just shred your intestines if you hear it on a live bootleg. You've also just been given the ability to spend no money to hear another facet of a band you maybe only sort of like, or because of touring limitations never had a chance to see perform live.
So what's the point of all this? Bootlegs are not official releases, and they simply fill the market for live performances since most bands don't release live performances regularly (Unless you are a huge Umphrey's McGee fan then hurray, you won the live perfomance lottery!). But the point is, is that if you put up a barrier to listening, and that barrier is price, which is something that still deserves to exist because you should earn money for your hard labor in creating the music in the first place, people will try to surmount that barrier. However, that in itself is a different argument entirely. The main point is, music has to be heard, and that it is just impossible at this point to stop all the bootleggers, piraters, and downloaders from consorting with one another to get your music-labour for free. This mentality is the bootlegger mentality, and it has been around for decades. The relative lack of worth of the album is simply coming to terms now because people can now listen to a hundred fold more bands. If people are paying Sonic Youth less money now, be it by attending less concerts or buying less albums, I doubt that it has to do with long time diehards expecting their albums for free then it has to do with *gulp* this fucking shit economy (YEAH, IT'S BLAME THE ECONOMY TIME WITH YOUR HOST BARRY HUSSEIN. I love Obama! So chill out brosefs). Or also the fact that many of Sonic Youth's new fans aren't necessarily die hard fans but more casual fans who still want to spend money on music, but they don't have a lot of it to spend even though they still like Sonic Youth a bit more than a friend. And even though they're downloading your music, they still have to give their hard earned money to Thurston Moore just so the guitar gets hurt on stage.
In fact, it is the prime opportunity for many of the DIY bands to take a look at the causation, or at least correlation of how downloading over the long term has affected their concert size (And even if the concert size is the same, maybe the new kids are just replacing the old kids grown adults who just don't want to see Sonic Youth for time number 60). Yes, this is hard to track. This is so hard to track in fact, that even doing something to try to ask your shy, assymetrical hairdo fanbase may result in them calling you out on being the exact opposite of Queen of the Stone Age's hit single, "Little Sister." But, and getting back now to Radiohead, their "Pay as You Go" method did give them an idea of what sort of dedication some of their fans had, what sort of interest they can generate in officially giving music away and not letting it go straight to the Pirate Bay or Waffles.fm. They do get server stats, and get to see what portions of the world love them more (Democratic Congo, it's not you). But it also invokes this conversation: Ff music downloading is going to keep going on and on and on and on (Tony Gandolfini's swan song), how are we as listeners and musicians going to account for this while still placing a premium on the music-labor of an album? Or is the musician going to have to pay a steep price in living income as he can only generate profit by touring 7 hemispheres a year for at least a decade? I'm not suggesting that Sonic Youth starts to hold a focus group on whether or not people aren't going to buy the Eternal because they don't think Kim Gordon is hot anymore or because Lee Ronaldo's new avant-garde solo material is Jackson Pollard crap, but because knowing your audience and its habits, at the very least, might help you stay in the music business a tad bit longer. Or help you put your kids through college.
And if you're like me and you're a kid that was put through college, have a bit more disposable income so that I can spend the money I want to reward bands I love for making great music. And if I can't afford an album, I can at least listen to it and if I really like it, go check them out live.
And that also isn't to say that Kim Gordon isn't right, that there needs to be more premium placed by the "downloaders" on music-record labour. But that shouldn't come at the expense of the old DIY vanguard criticizing Radiohead for trying something new, and that fact that Radiohead offered an official venue for non-fans to try listening to their new album for free.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment