Studio - Day 10

Charting the winds of change can be a tricky course. For the most part, music has become a very disposable thing. Well, perhaps not disposable but definitely interchangeable. It is much more of a background noise now that a forefront experience as it has been in the past and while sad, even I am not immune to it. Making music portable was probably its death knell. First came the 8 track and then the walkman; which would allow people to do something, anything else while they listened to music. Understand I am not a Luddite, but when is the last time you sat in a room with no tv, no computer, no other input but an album and really listened?

We went through this in the eighties and people say it’s cyclical, it will come back. But those people are wrong. In the eighties everything went electronic and to drum machines. Musicians were losing gigs left and right to keyboard players and good drummers were learning how to program shitty sounding drum machines in order to feed their family and still stay in the game. It did come back around. But by then MTV had it’s claws in deep and f---ed everything up again. Music is an auditory art, it’s not visual. If you think I am exaggerating about the importance of this take any novel that you have ever read and re-read and loved; and then watch the movie. If you never loved a book enough to read it again and again, then you probably don’t understand what I am talking about. In fact you are probably listening to an iPod right now, as you read this. Regardless, chances are the movie didn’t even come close to the grandeur in your head while you read the book. MTV has raped music more than any movie has ever destroyed any great novel. The most insidious part is, once you have the visual in your head, it’s not coming out. It’s there with you. Every time I hear 'Lust For Life', I think of a giant white cruise ship carting around a payload of attractive upper middle classers. I don’t want this image, I want to celebrate the hedonism that the song promotes. But it’s gone, forever snuffed by a 30 second blip on the radar of good taste. Mind you I don’t begrudge Mr. Pop for making money, he’s earned it I guess and I have written a few jingles in my day, when money was short and my “need” was high. It’s just a tricky course to sail. I mention this because there has been a fight brewing with the label for some time. My refusal to release any of the current batch of songs for licensing has put us on somewhat of a collision course.

Yesterday, we hit the rocks.