Some people are blaming the poor stupid cattle who literally triggered a stampede and killed a dude so they could get a $300 dollar HDTV for Christmas. Some people are blaming Wal-Mart and the corporate culture that encourages such dumbassery – stores open at 5! Supplies are limited! We've grown up watching that commercial with the middle aged woman pressing her face against the ground chanting "open open open", and maybe in some deep dark place they don't like to talk about, they think this is a really cool thing to do. It's everything we love in America and so rarely get inside of our personal lives – a party atmosphere, the thrill of competition, actual interaction with other human beings. Say what you want about the 50's (and you could say a lot), but this didn't happen back then.
Maybe we've been trained for such ugliness.
But blaming the people on the ground is probably too simple-minded. Human beings are pack animals, and that's all there is to it. And blaming the corporate Powers That Be feels satisfying, but that's just as wrong. Market forces killed this guy. Math killed him. The laws of supply and demand got him in that crappy Wal-Mart job early in the morning, popped open the door, gushed in the screeching human traffic, knocked him down and compressed his chest into itty bitty pieces until he gave up the ghost, just as sure and simple as if someone had walked into that store and fed him an Uzi clip for breakfast. Dumb, random chance. Whoops, my bad. Nothing personal, right?
And you may tell yourself that its a crass way of looking at things, that this was a human being and they had hopes and dreams and family and this and that, but when market forces and humanity compete, the market usually wins. What separates a Wal-Mart worker who gets trampled to death for a cheap TV from a union worker who gets trampled to debt for cheap foreign labor? Not fucking much. We're in a post-union world, a world of cheap labor and expendable value, and cheap things, as we know -
Have we mentioned the dead guy they sent to open the door was a temp?
Aren't treated like human beings, or much of anything special. They're statistics. The end.
And it relates to the way we listen to music, too. You can rail against American Idol killing off the music industry all you want, but let's be fair to corporate America – this is a natural reaction to piracy or "file sharing" or whatever you want to call it. You almost have to sell to the lowest common denominator if smart people are too smart to pay for music anymore.
The work of a recording artist is the new cheap labor. We're in a post-musical world, just as sure as time is numbered for the part time guy at Wal-Mart or that hardworking auto-man in Michigan. And so of course, the hipsters and free market fundamentalists have joined forces to tell us we should embrace this brave new world. You've heard it before. We're all our own label now! Our buddies are our A&R! Fucking whatever. It's lies. It's bullshit. It's spin. Ask those poor fuckers in the UAW what the brave new world tastes like (cheap ass toys coated in lead paint), what subtle texture it gives when it makes contact with the skin (notice of termination in triplicate) what it sounds like (a jordin sparks cd). I'm amazed to no end how these motherfucking iPod loving hippies can blog it out on the political website of their choice about the evils of globalization while bobbing their heads along to a hard drive that is in all honesty bigger than 90% of MUSIC STORES were ten years ago with a collection that probably would have cost about 40 grand to stock legally. WAKETH TEH FUCK UP. YOUR TUNES. ARE. RED. CHINA.
And every night we're bobbing our head along to a symphony that would make Grover Norquist ejaculate in his panties.
What's wrong with the music industry is what's wrong with America. Enlightened self interest doesn't have any countervailing forces anymore – supplies are a cheap commodity and the people asking for money have got to stare down a glorified version of the honor system.
Nobody plays by the honor system.
Music can be obtained for free, therefore, its free. Morality has no more to play in the question for a broke ramen muncher who sees a leak for his 3rd favorite band online and says "fuck it" than it does when their label ships in shitty blank CD's for an extra %0.000000 of profit off a 20 dollar record. Isn't the free market a sonuvabitch?
Music is free now, but the problem is (and some of you might have been asleep in Econ 101, so allow me to enlighten you.) that free things are fucking worthless. Something that can be obtained in 30 seconds and deleted in 2 doesn't have any real value. I'm not trying to Haggert anybody on this – I loves me some free music, and I'm not going to soften that up with that "oh, but I buy so much more music now because blah blah blah" everybody feels compelled to write in articles like this. I'm poor. My standards are higher, plus there are other, practical reasons that are a whole 'nother rant. BUT I don't feel the nerdgasmic fit of joy and entitlement that the guy who comes behind bragging that they stuffed Fripp's life work onto their harddrive in 45 minutes then promptly forgot about it does either.
Some people pay for music because it's the right thing to do, and thy understand the artist wasn't the only person to work on the record. Some people buy American cars, too. God bless 'em, but they are a rapidly dwindling minority.
I mean… this is not an emphasize with the artist thing. This is an "enlightened self interest" thing, a "what am I losing out of this" thing and the more I think about it, the more I realize that actually… it's a lot. Music isn't music anymore like an assembly line worker isn't a person. They're both… commodities. I remember people buying vinyl and being excited because their allowances went into that shit, and they saved up for weeks in advance. And the covers were big and you'd flip through them after opening it up, like a package on Christmas morning, cutting the CD's open with a knife trying to get to it. And whether it was good or bad, you listened to it 50 times to squeeze value out of it. You'd debate it with your friends, you'd argue over whether this track is better than that one. But if music isn't dead, it's at least Old Economy, and maybe talking or thinking about music is, too. If the new Metallica sucks (Spoiler: It does), just delete it and download something else and move on with your life.
Hm. Maybe the free market isn't so great after all. Maybe we need a little protectionism. Maybe in earlier times we went in the wrong direction to get heard over the din. If you're pointing people to downloads of anything at all on the internet, you're doing valueless work.
See how we flipped it? Maybe in the real world, the insane world where everything is a ringtone and hard work doesn't have material value anymore (I hope not, follow me and we'll find out together) certain things aren't important, but in the sense of an online community, maybe it has all the value in the world. Content is king and all that. If you're stable and consistent (bahaha) the right people will come to you. So, let's try that. A glimmer of authenticity in a post-ringtone world might be enough to trigger a rush to the exits.
test!