I Hear A New World

Once when I was a child, I went over to my friend's house sometime in December. His father was what my mother would call a "chnyuck," a word for which there is no exact English equivalent, but which means something like an "overbearingly pompous religious person who is constantly trying to one-up all of his other coreligionists with his superior knowledge of the arcana of religious ritual and law." Really, Judaism is the only religion that would need such a word. Anyways, my friend's dad decided that he would no longer say "Christmas," because even mouthing the words "Christ" might seem to indicate that he secretly believed that Jesus was the reason for the season. So, he pronounced the name of the yuletide holiday "Eccccchhhhhhssss"-mas, taking care to inflect the guttural "ch" sound with extra hostility and bile.

Here are some Japanese music videos. Happy "Ecccchhhhhssss"-mas, everybody!

Hey I just recovered all of these great comments that have been lingering in some to-be-moderated file... Apologies to dbr, mzn, and johnny too bad, who I hope will keep reading even though their comments have only just published. Check the Lessig piece especially for dbr and mzn's very thoughtful comments to my mostly ranty critique of LL.

Johnny Too Bad asked me what I think of John Zorn and Masada re: elitism and their musical construction of jewish identity four months ago, and I guess a response is better late than never.

I feel really conflicted about Zorn. "Spillane" was the first out record I ever got, in junior high, and it permanently rearranged my brain cells. Seeing him on "Night Music" with the kneehigh striped socks and leather jacket doing the whole squeaking/skronking/muting against the inner thigh alto thing was a revelation when I was a freshman in high school. Between interviews with him in music magazines and his curating at the Knitting Factory and Tonic and Victoriaville and the records he put out on Tzadik and Avant, he is probably the individual through whom I learned about most of the music I like. I also remember the Zorn concerts I have seen very fondly, partially because his personal charisma is so strong.



But musically, I must say that I hate just about all of his music. I hate the quick-change cross-genre stuff, hate the game pieces (although mostly because the groups that recorded them in the post-parachute period were so awful... all of that digital reverb and gutless han bennink-lite drumming, and macho berklee horn playing), hate the quasi-Ligeti string music (more than all the other stuff combined), and really hate the whole way that "radical jewish music" is correlated with minor scales and modal ostinatos in Masada.

Also, what's with the seeming need for every male American "eccentric musician" to embrace hyperoverdocumentation and egomania? It's really creepy and Ayn Randy. Like, knock it off.

But, that said, I saw Masada in Jerusalem with my mom when I was 19 and it was really nice. As I think about it, the big problem at a technical level really is that he does the whole Duke Ellington/ICP thing of writing for the voices and talents of particular musicians, and at the end of the day, the musicians he likes don't appeal to me... I just never want to hear Joey Baron or Wayne Horvitz or Dave Douglas or Bill Frisell-with-electronic-effects or most of the other people Zorn seems to love. With the exception of Marc Ribot and Otomo Yosihide and Zorn himself in his extreme duck call solo improv persona, the whole Tzadik stable seems kind of really bad. But Zorn blowing his crazy noise? I still think it's a good sound.

Right now, I am: 1) finishing up a paper on music and intellectual property for my policy history seminar; and 2) quietly delighting in the death of evil fuckwad Augusto Pinochet. The connection? Among my researches, I have forced myself to sit down with some books by Lawrence Lessig, which I always thought I would enjoy, but find instead that I want to chuck violently at the wall.

As it turns out, this putative champion of freedom speaks from one of the most antidemocratic and repressive world-views ever. Lessig's jeremiads, as welcome as they may be for those of us who also hate the FCC and Hillary Rosen, derive from a free-market evangelism indistinguishable from that of the Milton Friedman-trained "Chicago Boys" who helped Pinochet and others wage their prolonged and deadly class war against the Chilean people. No thanks, Larry.

So, to backtrack: the goal I set for myself for this paper was to write about music and intellectual property and not mention napster, digital copyright issues, or "piracy." Instead, I am trying to look at attribution and exploitation, issues related to popular music as a form of collective work. My long-range interest is tracing the development of the idea of the employer's "shop right" in the creative output of session and studio musicians, which contradicts in many ways the abstract legal rationale that gives composers copyright in the first place.



This project represents, in one way, an attempt to bring my own personal history as a musician to my scholarly work. It is only very recently that I have come to realize that most of my life as a musician has been as a guitar-playing "sideman," not an "author" or "songwriter." I like coming up with parts for songs, writing little riffs, sometimes playing solos. Even in my forays into musical territory both more "out" (free improv) and more "in" (learning country pedal steel), I have been atttracted to a more or less homologous role. I like playing guitar in bands. I like hanging out with people who play music in bands. Incidentally, I tend to hate gesamtkuntswerk-crafting "geniuses" (which, amazingly, is what the Supreme Court of the United States has tended to require if you want to argue that your work is worthy of a copyright monopoly). That is probably neither here than there.

Whenever I have mentioned my philosophical opposition to the very idea of intellectual property to the lawyers in my extended family, they have typically responded: "but don't you feel bad if someone steals your music and you don't get paid?" In the past, I have found this something of a conundrum; in retrospect I can't imagine why. I never get paid for my music anyways. I am not an author or composer. On the other hand, most pop music (including, I think, that to which I have contributed guitar parts) gains its quality and substance from the collective contributions of many different performers, none of whom get any royalties or compensation (even when the parts they play are totally integral to the song, as is the case with Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale," whose keyboard player is finally suing for a cut of the royalties). My view of whether anyone can "own" permutations of musical materials held in common (such as "my" guitar parts, or "Elton John's" melody line) is simple: nope.

So, my concern is not to start a campaign to get royalties for session players, but to link the observation that the real authors of pop music don't get paid to the fact of widespread popular resistance to copyright to a larger agenda of capitalist critique. To wit: private property is stupid, let's make a better society not ruled by the whims of the market and the values of accumulation, acquisitive inidividualism, and liberal "equality." This is where Lessig's politics seem to jibe so weirdly with his "free culture" agenda. Besides the fact that his bio proudly trumpets his having clerked for heinous conservatives like Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia, Lessig's writing is rife with alarmingly wrong free market nonsense. Additionally, his books are written in that distinctively icky management literature Hudson News paperback style that tips you off that you are in the intellectual universe of Good To Great and Who Moved My Cheese?

I will have more damning evidence soon, but here is a soupcon of Lessig to tide you over. The background details are unimportant, except that you should note that the "farmers" discussed by Lessig had both ancient common law and nineteenth-century legal precedent on their side, and that they were, seemingly with a lot of justification, protesting airplanes that were flying over their land and driving their chickens crazy; notice the embarassing business jargon, the atrocious mixed metaphors, the pragmatist "common-sense" justification of technological change as an autonomous force demanding unquestioning obeisance, and the portentous cape-twirl at the passage's end:

"The Wright brothers spat airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like a virus in a chicken coop; farmers... found themselves surrounded by 'what seemed reasonable' given the technology that the Wrights had produced. They could stand on their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists at these newfangled technologies all they wanted... But in the end, the force of what seems 'obvious' to everyone else-- the power of 'common sense'--would prevail. Their 'private interest' would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public gain."

Holy fuck that is dumb thinking and bad writing.