Writer’s Block
Just so you all know, I aten’t dead. Just not been able to write for a couple of weeks, for some reason (I think the release of pressure after a lot of stuff at work ended made my brain turn off). Will be back ASAP.
Linkblogging for 12/10/09
Just a few quick links today:
An app for (ptui!) iPhone that splits the universe for you.
Terence Eden suggests we should mutualise the post office.
Rick Veitch draws Harvey Pekar as Darkseid.
Peter Watts wonders what the drug companies are going to do about the apparent increased effectiveness of placebos.
Pillock saw Yoko Ono in a Corolla.
And Marc looks at his favourite solo Lennon.
New Spotify Playlist – XTC, Laurie Biagini, Neil Innes, Wild Man Fisher
Before I start, I’d just like to apologise for the lack of content for a week – work’s finally calmed down, but I’ve essentially spent the last week asleep as a reaction to the lifting of four months’ constant stress.
Anyway, I’ve decided that to start posting again I’m going to do another hyperpost like series, this one starting off with thoughts on authorship rather than canon. I’m going to talk about Cerebus, Smile, Wednesday Comics and Strange Adventures, Darkseid and Jack Kirby, and copyright law, among other things. I’ll also try, next week, to get more Beatles stuff posted.
But in the meantime, here’s a playlist I’ve put together…
Hand 19 by Andy Partridge And Harold Budd is from an album I only discovered existed through Spotify, a collection of somewhat new-agey jazzy stuff. I almost wondered at first if it was a different Andy Partridge, but it has his melodic fingerprints…
How Sweet To Be An Idiot by Neil Innes is probably Innes’ most famous solo song, thanks to appearing on a couple of Monty Python things (and being ripped off by Oasis for Whatever). It’s deserved though – Innes is a *shockingly* underrated songwriter, easily as major a talent as someone like Ray Davies, who gets overlooked because so much of his material is hilariously funny, so the craft (an the often very poignany emotions) underlying it gets lost.
Buttons Of Your Mind by The Scaffold is a rather lovely B-side to their novelty hit Lily The Pink. It sounds like a poor man’s Bonzo Dog Band – which is, of course, what The Scaffold essentially were – but they have their moments. (For those who don’t know, The Scaffold were a comedy group which featured the poet Roger McGough and Paul McCartney’s brother).
Stagger Lee by Mississippi John Hurt is still my favourite version of this – a completely different song to the more well-known one performed by everyone from Lloyd Price to Nick Cave, but containing many of the same lines.
Season Cycle by XTC is, amazingly, from the same album as Dear God. Rather amazing that the band capable of such a terrible song about atheism could also be capable of such a wonderful song about religious awe at nature. Rather obviously ripped off from Sagittarius’ version of My World Fell Down, but none the worse for that.
Mr Guru by Laurie Biagini is a fun piece of 60s pastiche from someone who does a lot of that sort of thing. It actually sounds rather like Bananarama, but in a good way, if you can believe that.
Good Sounds by Linus Of Hollywood is one of the best pure pop tracks of the last decade – an absolutely gorgeous, fun chorus with some rather disturbing lyrics – “I was just thinking/We were both drinking/So we should fool around/Things would be much easier if you’d just stay the night”, along with a promise to ‘play your favourite record if you promise that you’ll stay’ is rather too creepy to be an effective pickup line, or at least so I hope…
Cross Hatched World by Chewy Marble is by far my favourite song from last year’s Modulations, their first album in several years, a Beach Boysy track about drawing.
Loveland by The Mello Cads is a fantastic piece of lounge music pastiche, based around Come On In by The Association (which if I remember rightly was the theme music for lead Cad David Ponak’s radio show for a few years) but with some rather incongruous Indian stylings and backwards guitar on top. The Mello Cads are one of about a million bands with Probyn Gregory and Nelson Bragg in, always a sign of excellence.
I’ve Loved Her So Long by Neil Young is from his eponymous first solo album, which I still consider the best thing he ever did. Jack Nitzsche’s arrangements, and the more melodic stuff Young was doing then, place this firmly in ‘interesting LA pop’ territory with The Monkees, Love and Jimmy Webb, rather than the hippie singer-songwriter or proto-grunge furrows he spent much of the rest of his career in.
Flaming Carrot Theme Song by Wild Man Fisher is a theme for the great surrealistic 80s indie comic.
Don’t Make Me Over by The Swinging Blue Jeans is one of the great late-Merseybeat singles, obviously no match for Dionne Warwick’s original, sung as it is by a slightly flat Scouser, but that in itself is its charm – when Ray Ennis sings “Accept me for what I am”, it’s a flawed human doing so, rather than a vocal goddess.
Killing Floor by Howlin’ Wolf is the song which Led Zeppelin… er… homaged in The Lemon Song. However, good as Led Zep are, Howlin’ Wolf is roughly ten quadrillion times better – he sounds like he could bite Robert Plant’s head off between phrases.
And Long Black Limousine by Elvis Presley is a masterpiece of resentment and nastiness. She went off and said she’d be in a fancy car – well look at her now, she’s in a limousine all right – a hearse. That’ll teach her for wanting to do something with her life, won’t it, the stuck-up bitch? She’s dead now and everyone can see her funeral. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant song, as so many of those in this playlist are, but dear god Elvis’ voice in the last verse after the key change… what a singer…
Quick Question
On Saturday, should I go to the No2ID street stall or to the Hope Not Hate anti-Nazi counter-demonstration against the EDL? There’s another No2ID thing the next week, *but* I missed last month’s No2ID because of stuff…
The Beatles Mono Reviews 4 – A Hard Day’s Night (Part One)
An edited version of this essay is now included in my book The Beatles In Mono. Hardback paperback
BLAAANG!
The opening G11sus4 – probably the most famous opening chord since Wagner’s Tristan chord, opens what is the first Beatles album to really feel like a Beatles album. This is the album you would imagine all the other early Beatles albums to be if you hadn’t heard them – full of pop classics, all originals (the only pre-Rubber Soul Beatles album not to contain any cover versions), all Lennon/McCartney (the only Beatles album for which this is the case), with the cheeky moptopped foursome pulling funny faces on the front cover.
In fact, despite the clear attempts to package this as more of the same (another black & white Robert Freeman cover with them wearing black pullovers), this is the album that shows the maturation of McCartney and (especially) Lennon (who dominates the album) as songwriters.
The title track (which also opens) in particular is an example of Lennon’s growing confidence as a songwriter. The song is the first of Lennon’s lyrics to be based around a lazy egotism, where the ostensible object of the song only exists as just that – an object, viewed in relation only to the singer’s desires. He’s having a hard time, and the only reason she matters is because ‘the things that you do will make me feel all right’.
This attitude toward women in Lennon’s songs would continue in various forms up until LSD made Lennon re-evaluate his own personality, and Yoko Ono gave him a woman he considered his superior. However, it’s not, as many have suggested, purely misogynistic – rather it’s rooted in his essentially solipsistic worldview – something that remained in his songs throughout his career. Lennon is probably the only songwriter to have made navel-gazing into truly high art, thanks to his “I just believe in me/Yoko and me/That’s reality” position.
This self-obsession pervades the album. While McCartney had, a few months earlier, had the epiphany that you could make songs be about third parties (She Loves You, which while a joint composition, was the first indicator of McCartney’s tendency to write songs about characters, and was suggested by him), here Lennon is having none of that nonsense – with songs like I Should Have Known Better, If I Fell, I‘m Happy Just To Dance With You, Tell Me Why, I‘ll Cry Instead, When I Get Home and I‘ll Be Back, Lennon lets it be known who he considers to be the important one around here. (To be fair, two of McCartney’s three offerings on the album, And I Love Her and Can’t Buy Me Love also fall into this pattern, but at least his Things We Said Today puts another human being on the same level as him).
This egocentricity of Lennon’s, though, took odd forms – in particular, at this point at least, he clearly needed the other Beatles. Even though Lennon was the first to use the phrase ‘a hard day’s night’ (in his book In His Own Write) he always credited its use as the title of the film, album and song to a malapropism from Ringo Starr. Similarly, while he apparently wrote A Hard Day’s Night in a rush as soon as he knew the film’s title, to avoid McCartney getting another A-side (McCartney’s Can’t Buy Me Love had been their previous single, and was the first Beatles single to feature only a single vocalist), he still gave McCartney the middle eight to sing.
The song itself sounds hugely improved in the mono remastered version, and should really be much more highly regarded as one of the Beatles’ earliest experimental productions. Starr’s drumming is astonishing (even accounting for the fact that there are certainly overdubs – the cowbell, for example, sounds overdubbed to my ears), George Martin doubles Harrison’s guitar part *very* subtly throughout the track (and not so subtly on the guitar solo, which is also almost certainly the first use of varispeed on a Beatles record).
It has the brassiness and density of much of With The Beatles, but with far more awareness of itself as a record. It’s also far more mature, lyrically – talking for the first time of the concerns of an adult, rather than a teenager.
And there I must leave this for the present. My stereo has packed up, deciding to turn itself off when I try to play a CD, while the USB connection to my DVD drive has a loose wire that keeps making it turn itself off. I will deal with the other twelve tracks tomorrow, but didn’t want the effort so far to be wasted.
Copyright, Copywrong and Copyleft Part 2 – “Let The Artist Decide?”
I’ve got several other posts planned out – one on Darkseid, one on the Beatles, a new playlist, and so forth, but I’ve spent most of today reading the new Pratchett (not a masterpiece like Nation, but solidly entertaining and summing up a lot of my conflicted thoughts about football – and at this point, the fact that Terry Pratchett is capable of producing ‘an average Terry Pratchett book’ is well worth celebrating). They will be coming over the next few days – having four days off work has made me far less ill.
But I’m going to deal here, briefly, with one of the comments from my last post – LemmusLemmus saying “Revolutionary idea: Let the artists decide whether they want to give their work away or not.”
Which brings me to a point I was going to make anyway – why should it be the artist’s decision, at all?
Essentially, saying the artist has a right to prevent someone who has purchased their work from copying it, is to privilege (literally – ‘private law’) the artist as opposed to the rest of society. When anyone else sells you a product, they don’t actually get to prescribe how you must use it, and proscribe uses that offend them. When I bought my banjo and mandolin, they didn’t come with special songbooks and a rule that I can’t play any other songs on them. When I buy my computer, it doesn’t come with a rule as to which software I can run on it (it might if you run Windows, but I don’t do that).
So why, precisely, should artists and authors be given a right to control what is done with their work once it’s paid for?
Currently they are given such a right, but what I’m questioning is why they should be given such a right. As a more reasonable analogy than the ones above, if I buy an apple and plant the seeds from it, I can grow many apples, which I can give to my friends who can then grow their own apples. We could put greengrocers out of business! Yet nobody has yet attempted to criminalise the growing of trees in one’s garden.
To my mind, the issue of copyright in fact breaks down into several totally different – and possibly incompatible – ‘rights’ for the purchaser and the artist.
1) The moral right of the artist. The artist should have the right to be identified as the creator of the work, and should also have the right to control some minimal set of uses of it. Paul McCartney, a famous vegetarian, should be able to stop people using recordings of his voice to sell sausages, as that would give the impression that he in some way endorses those sausages himself, which he might well consider defamatory.
2) The right of the artist to be compensated for commercial exploitation – I don’t think anyone disagrees that if someone is going to make money from the work then the artist should get some of that money. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with sharing recordings of Please Please Me by The Beatles – I think Messrs McCartney and Starr have probably been paid enough for their ten hours of work done when my mum was four years old. But if someone’s going to put that album out in a CD box set and charge people two hundred quid for it, it’s only fair that they should get a bit of that two hundred quid.
3) The right to share. This isn’t a legal right in the same way the above two are, and I think this is a problem. I think pretty much every decent human being will, if they have something they like, that they think their friend will also like, want to share that thing with their friend – especially if they can do so at no cost or inconvenience to themselves. I think that this is such a general instinct in humanity that trying to legislate against it is pointless, even were it a negative thing, which I don’t believe on the whole that it is.
4) The ‘right’ of artists to get paid. This is the one that most people focus on, even though the world doesn’t actually owe anyone a living for writing or singing or acting. A recording, book or whatever is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it.
So what we need to have for copyright (and please note I am here only talking about copyright, not ‘intellectual property’, which lumps a load of different, incompatible laws about trademarks and patents into one category) to function well – and whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of the current law, I think we can all accept that it simply doesn’t function – is some system that protects rights one through three, while at the same time providing some form of compensation for artists for ‘right’ four.
I’m going to talk about some of the ways we can do this in future posts, but for now I’ll just say that ‘letting the artist decide’ is not only simply not working – and prohibition of anything where tens of millions of people both engage in that activity and consider themselves justified in doing so is never going to work, no matter how much you may wish it – but also on shakier moral ground than it at first appears.
Copyright, Copywrong And Copyleft Part 1 – Is Filesharing Stealing?
There’s been a lot of debate recently about the morality, ethics and legality of filesharing – between the success of the Pirate Party in the European elections, the formation of a similar party here, the proposals to cut off internet access for ‘offenders’ and the comments made by that towering intellect Lily Allen.
As someone who makes music myself (MP3s of which can be purchased here (along with CDs by my friend and collaborator Blake Jones) for a very low price, or you can listen on Spotify here), and would very much like to get some money from doing it some day, I obviously have very strong opinions about this. But before I get to what I think we should *do*, I’ll just use a few anecdotes (anecdotal data – the best kind!)
In 1999, I was a student. I read in Mojo magazine about the Nuggets box set, which sounded like just my sort of thing. However, it cost sixty quid, which to a student is a lot of money. I couldn’t justify spending that on a box set of CDs without having heard any of the songs. However, my then-flatmate had this thing called Napster on his computer, so I downloaded a few songs from it – Psychotic Reaction by The Count Five, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night by The Electric Prunes, and a few others. As a result of this I bought the box set, because I loved those tracks. As a result of *that* I bought albums by The Knickerbockers, Sagittarius, Love, The Thirteenth Floor Elevators and many more, as well as the Nuggets 2 box set and various other albums branded ‘Nuggets’, ‘Pebbles’ or ‘Ripples’. As a result of *those* I also bought albums by Curt Boettcher, Sandy Salisbury, The Millennium, Gary Usher, Roky Erickson & The Aliens and more than I care to think.
I also went to see both Love and The Electric Prunes live. As a result of the Love gig I bought albums by the backing band Baby Lemonade, and I also became a fan of the support act, Stew, which led to me buying albums by Stew, The Negro Problem, The Passing Strange Original Broadway Cast, Candypants, Carolyn Edwards, Kristian Hoffman and The Stool Pigeons, as well as spending several hundred quid commissioning Stew to write and record a customised song for my wedding (a really fantastically good song, incidentally – I doubt he’ll ever do that again now he’s a Tony award-winning Broadway composer whose musical has just been released as a Spike Lee film, but if he does it’s more than worth the money).
At a very conservative estimate, me downloading that handful of songs ten years ago has led to me spending at the very least a couple of thousand pounds on obscure music – and most of that spent during times when I was a student, unemployed, or on minimum wage (which I was until about a year ago).
In 2002 I bought Neil Gaiman’s book Adventures In The Dream Trade, a collection of miscellany which included forewords for a lot of comic collections. I had been a comic fan in my teens, but had more or less dropped the hobby, but thought ‘some of these sound good’, so I downloaded a few random issues of Cerebus, Brat Pack and Astro City from Soulseek. I now have two bookcases groaning under the weight of trade paperbacks (one has literally broken under the strain this week), a few longboxes full of individual issues (I would have more but I regularly clear out less-good comics and give them to my niece), and spend about fifteen quid a week on comics – because of that handful of downloads.
Around the same time I remembered how much I’d liked Doctor Who as a kid – I’d been a HUGE fan while the show was on, and for a couple of years afterwards, but living in a small town and being very young had no access to fandom so once the local newsagent stopped stocking DWM, I’d dropped away. But I thought “I wonder if it was as good as I remember? I’ll download one of the ones Douglas Adams did – that should be good”. I now have fifty-nine stories on DVD alone (depending on how you count the Lost In Time and Trial Of A Timelord sets), along with books (both novels and reference books), audio dramas (spent twenty quid on those *yesterday alone*), toys (a little mini K9 my wife bought me), posters and the occasional conference visit. (I have many of the rest of the stories as downloads, incidentally, but will be buying the DVDs in due course). I definitely spend several hundred quid a year on Doctor Who, largely as a result of that single download.
So when I read all these ‘home taping is killing music’ type articles, I just find it ludicrous. When I have downloaded stuff via filesharing programs (as opposed to legal downloads via emusic) in the past, it has been literally impossible for it to have been taking any revenue from the artists who worked on it, because every single penny of disposable income I have had – and to be honest quite a lot of money that should have been spent on things like clothing, rent and utility bills – has gone directly to those very same artists. Short of getting another job, or robbing a bank, there is no way I could have given any more money to those people – and most of them would have not got a penny without my initial exposure via filesharing.
So I hope that disposes of the ‘filesharing is stealing!!!!’ part of the argument against filesharing. Sharing is, in and of itself, about as far from stealing as one can get – sharing information, especially, is in my view a wholly good thing, because nobody has been deprived, and someone has gained.
However, there are other arguments that are tied up in the filesharing issue, and the issue of copyright in a digital age, and I would like to deal with them in separate posts, simply because this one is already far longer than I planned on it being. Those other posts, which I’ll do over the next few days, will deal with the issues of ‘moral rights’, of compensation of artists, of new artists gaining recognition, and what I hope will be the solutions to this.
There are some huge problems with the current models for artistic compensation and copyright, and these are particularly hitting people like me, who are capable of making (I believe) very good recorded music but who are not able to perform live for whatever reason. I hope to point out some ways that these problems can be overcome in the next few essays (next part probably on Tuesday).
Linkblogging For 03/10/09
Sorry for my absence from the online world for the last few days. I have been extremely ill, and physically exhausted. However, I’ve got a couple of days off, so tomorrow you can expect my next Beatles review and also a post about Jack Kirby’s original Darkseid (it’s taking me a lot of time to ensure that what I’m seeing there isn’t what other writers and artists have put there after him – although I do think that Grant Morrison’s Darkseid and Kirby’s one are the same, while all the other takes have been embarrassing).
The day after I hope to do a post on copyright law and maybe one on Doctor Who.
Newsarse have “Labour And Tories Accused Of Illegal Electorate-Sitting Arrangement” (hat tip here to Jennie for pointing me in the direction of this site.
Bob Temuka doesn’t like the Green Goblin very much.
Al Ewing continues his look at Beatles Rock Band.
Gavin Burrows looks at 70s girls’ comic Misty.
And Paul Pope does Dune in the style of his Wednesday Comics contributions (another series I need to talk about soon, I think…)
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