The Real New World Order

I used to be a songwriter. Actually, I’m still a songwriter, but I’m a songwriter who’s not trying to sell my songs anymore. It’s not as if a song I’ve written has ever paid a bill over the last 4 decades, but in the definition of what I spent years working to achieve, I was a songwriter. I still keep in touch with the old gang of other failed songwriters, and we have our places where we check in to see what’s what and who we all hate now for being a success. I stopped by one of my favorite Internet hangouts this morning, and found this little notice posted in a thread on their Midwest rock forum.

“Comes with Music is a recognition that music has to be given away for free, or close to free, on the Internet,”

The music industry
From major to minor

I guess music is worthless now.

:~(

Go ahead and click the link above for whole depressing story, but I’ll see if I can encapsulate it all for you here. Apparently, the music industry is tanking to the point where they’ll be bundling thousands of songs into “Comes With Music” loss-leader offerings featured by Nokia and Motorola, and other giants of isolated hyper-connectivity battling it out for the shrinking dollars of our entitled youth culture. In essence, CDs will begin to fade out – along with “deep cuts” and “B-side” releases – and new singles will earn a living by being lumped in with Classic Hits and other formulaic dreck, as bulk offerings to kids who just want to be able to text all day long to other little fidgets tapping obsessively into tiny keypads as the real world flows by.

I guess Ryan Seacrest will have to find other work to fill that two hour lull on Sunday mornings now.

Y’know, to be honest, I’m okay with it. I mean, I already came to terms with the fact that the world doesn’t need my music. In fact, I came to the conclusion that I don’t want the world to have my music. To hell with letting the sons and daughters of American sloth absentmindedly slobber on with their flaccid lives to the soundtrack of my sweat and devotion. I’ll give my songs to my daughter, and she can keep them to show her kids and their kids so on. At least they’ll know who I was. The rest of the world can live without them.

I sure as hell don’t feel like some Birkenstock pseudo-hippy having the ability to download anything I took my time with, so that he can add it to the 60,000 other worthless songs he’s got crammed in that telephone he stares at all friggin’ day. Screw him and all his other 25 yr old buds that still live in those little “apartments” in the basements of their mom’s houses in the chalk-white subdivisions of Middleclass America.

I’d suggest that all songwriters and musicians go on strike and let the selfish, entitled pricks listen to the dull drone in their heads until it drives them insane, but I know that there’d be plenty of little wannabe whores out there who’d jump on the opportunity to give their mundane crap away when the rest of us pulled back on the me-my-mine slugs and their i-pods. Most musicians are just cheap encyclopedia salesmen who figured out how to mimic artists in search of an easier job anyway.

It’s not like there’s ever been any integrity associated with any of this since rock spun off the blues snake-oil circuits back in the day. In fact, given the history of rock and pop music, with all its shadiness and its legendary back stabbing business tradition, I guess I’m not surprised that it would have such an embarrassing collapse in the end. It’s like a drunk who refuses to stop drinking behind the wheel. No one is surprised when he is found wrapped around a pole, finally done in by his own idiocy.

Still, it’s not like creativity is flourishing anywhere else in this society – well, beyond Wall Street and the high rent district of Washington DC. Writers have stooped to accepting pay-per-click on Google Ads posted on the web pages of their articles – but only the ads contained within the borders of their articles, and not the 20 ads on the same page but outside the borders of the article itself. Apparently, they realize that their writing has no value if it doesn’t force someone to click on an small banner ad for car insurance or mortgage refinancing.

Did you know that if the sister-in-law of the immortal suicide, Vincent Van Gogh, hadn’t been offered a couple francs for one of the artist’s paintings by a neighbor, she would have finished burning all of his 400 or so paintings to free up the storage space her recently deceased husband, Theo, had allowed his genius brother? Imagine the treasures the old hag destroyed before learning that she could make a buck off the brother-in-law that she despised so deeply. Kind of makes you wonder what other brilliance has been destroyed over the centuries due to the reign of free-market businessmen, and their ignorance concerning that which constitutes value. It can make you physically ill just letting it all have a moment of your busy and important day.

If the writhing mass that animates this garbage dump survives another 400 years, maybe Geico commercials will be their version of classical music and art. Frankly, it’s only that kind of junk that will be considered valuable enough to keep from tossing into the incinerator. Preserved mainly as legacy data in some marketing super vault, to ensure collateral process integrity and responsible workflow efficiency – per senior management directive. The chorus in this pop song is that

If it don’t make money,
then it ain’t worth crap,
’cause if I get it for free,
then I’m the one
who won this one
and you’re the clown
and that’s all that counts.

I was wondering why so many newly released pop songs are being launched through TV commercials lately. Now I know why. They aren’t being launched this way with the intent of giving them a leg up on retail sale. They’re being introduced to us in this way to gradually soften up our resistance to the idea of all new music as worthless ad jingles. Garnish to make the entree of commercial mainstream business less offensive to our collective cultural tastes. These i-pod, Scion and Target commercials, popping off our surround sound speakers with their fresh new soundtracks, are the new Top Ten chart, and these pathetic bits of sonic wallpaper are the hits.

It won’t be long before the only way you can get one of these songs as a stand-alone offering is by paying to download the TV commercial you heard it in. Think that’s ridiculous? Forty years ago, they’d have thought that people paying for the privilege to advertise companies on their clothing would have been ridiculous too. Now, you can’t find clothes that don’t turn you into a human billboard for one corporation or another.

Yep, we worried about invading Russians for decades, and now we’re all worked up over a relative handful of shoddy desert madmen with scraggly beards taking away our freedoms, and forcing us to capitulate to their insane religious and societal demands. Stripping us of what it means to be American. Free and self-determining. Meanwhile, huge corporations are quietly herding all of us into a cultural slaughterhouse as we pay for the train ride ourselves. They even have us driving the trains, operating the meat grinders and selling the vision of it all to our friends and neighbors. George Orwell could never have dreamed up this fantasy, and if he did, no one in their right mind would have published it. They would have deemed it too implausible to ever be accepted by the reading public. And yet, here we are.

Welcome to the real New World Order. It couldn’t happened to a nicer bunch of folks

Nor’Easter

An Open Letter to John Edwards

Dear John,

I’m writing to you this afternoon as you wave goodbye to the campaign trail from sunny New Orleans. I know it had to be tough to always be the clean-up in a three way race. Especially in a world where “winner” is defined as finishing first, regardless of how it’s achieved. It’s an emotionally volatile society that you were seeking to lead, but frankly, we both know that the reign of King George (The Lesser) made it virtually impossible for a candidate like you – conventional in a prime time game show host sense of conventional – to have any real shot in the Democratic primary this time around. The sins of the last 7 years have pushed guys like you out of contention, due to the simple fact that you look like those other guys that were given a free hand to scuttle the ship that the rest of us will have to somehow limp back to port for major repairs.

john edwards
Originally uploaded by alexdecarvalho

Personally, I think you’re a lot more radical than either of the “changers” that are grabbing all the press, but like I said, this is an emotional society that we have here, and it’s not too good at peeking through the haze that emotion brings to perception. I can see through Hillary to the corporate lobbyists huddled behind her as she rails against them.  Barack doesn’t impress me with his vague assurances that he’s got the spine to bring the huge multi-national conglomerates to heel. I can’t even imagine a young guy like him being allowed the floor at a regional gathering of those beasts of industry, where soaring speeches are quickly shut down for a fast-gavel vote to adjourn to the bottom line.

You, on the other hand, are a guy who’s made his fortune running those sniveling bastards down in open court, and this is why you’re my man. A flat out ambulance chasing trial lawyer, throwing legal departments into fits of apoplexy over their lack of a workable defense for official malfeasance. In a time when we’re being destroyed by unbridled corporate blood lust, you’re just the guy that I wanted in a position to crack some skulls.

Yep, at this time when the vaunted business friendly environment has put us deep in the mud, I’m looking for a skunk to send into that little garden party they’ve replaced with a full-blown Wesson orgy over the last half decade.

 

The bitch is that the Dems are looking for the next JFK, not a preening, metrosexual hair model like you. The only history you’d have made is being the prettiest guy to sit behind that desk that we both know you’ll never sit behind. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have that tender handholding moment with Liz, reminiscent of the closing scene in “Fight Club” where the bastions of corporate usury crater as the credits roll. I have that scene on a YouTube clip and I run it every now and then when I need to feel good. I can totally see you in that scene, your wonderful wife looking up at you with naked adoration as the empire falls to a responsible new world of order.

You see, it’s not the president that gets to send the tanks in when the negotiations fail. That job belongs to the Attorney General.

John, I want you to be my Attorney General.  I want you to be the Bobby Kennedy of the Camelot for this new millennium. I don’t care whether it ends up being Barack Obama as a neo-JFK, or it’s Hillary as a rampaging Betty Davis in “Clinton II – Billary’s Revenge”, with Bill running like a mad plague through the entire West Wing and two thirds of Page 6 in the Times. I don’t see much difference between either version of the coming pendulum swing. The only real player I see in what’s on the horizon is you, but only if you land in the AG’s office.

Now, I know that there’s been talk floating out of the Obama camp about you being considered for the AG’s spot, but I’m not a man who likes to take chances on anything with this kind of ramification potential. Floating talk is even cheaper than on-the-record, under-oath talk, and we’ve all seen how cheap that is in recent years. Hi Scooter, you perverted twinkle-toes midget, you.

No, this can’t be left up to chance, or worse yet, horse-trading with a surly pack of Blue Dogs in return for a nod-wink-let-’em-pass from the Old South in November. This one’s gotta be a dead certain or nothing’s going to change at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue besides the drapes. But, this is where your years as a bottom-feeding ER ghoul will pay off in triple digits.

No one can find the dirt like a mall lawyer digging for a contingency fee. I know it, and you know it. Hell, we all know it. As the King of Torte, you’re the best there is at nailing folks with their pants around their ankles. C’mon, don’t be modest. You know it’s true. That bazillion acre house of yours didn’t buy itself. Dirty little secrets bought that house and it’ll be dirty little secrets that’ll get you the AG’s office, and we both know it.

Barack and Hillary are both skilled political professionals, and as such, both have human remains – in various stages of decay – tucked off from the mainstream view, safely hidden from the prying eyes of both the myopic chart-gazing consultancy of their opponents’ campaigns, and the bloated, pass-me-that-AP-feed mainstream punditry, each star whose only skill is being louder, and more abrasive, in a TV talking head box than the flatulent gas-bag bleating in the box next to it. You, on the other hand, are the shiny-kneed keyhole peeper equivalent of Darwin’s last stage of evolution. You’ve got what it takes to get the deep stuff on either one of them, as well as the grimmest of the vile crud caked on the catacomb walls of whoever rises to the surface of the GOP’s hunter’s stew this time around. Hell, may as well get it all while you’re down there.

Then, you can calmly present your treasures to the eventual nominee as knowledge that you’ll take to your grave in exchange for the AG nod – the caveat, of course, that your personal attorney….blah, blah, blah….should anything happen to you……blah, blah, blah. The usual boilerplate. I’d even go for the GOP nominee with the pearls of revelation from his long and sordid past. Why not? It’s not like those guys are strangers to dirty business. They wrote the book on it.

The bottom line is that we need you in a position to kick ass and take names regardless of who gets to be Commander in Chief. It’s been pretty clear for a while that you’re not going to be living in the East Wing this time around, but it’s also pretty clear that a hell of a lot of people believe that your message of putting a yoke back on the oxen that have been allowed to run through our living rooms for the last 16 years or so is one that is a long time overdue.

Basically, no one wants to have to watch stock footage of you dicking with your hair as you get off a helicopter on the back lawn every time someone sees fit to mention the Oval Office on TV, but we do love the idea of knowing that you’re somewhere dark and foreboding, sending corporate shills through a woodchipper while we work to get things back to some semblance of ‘We The People’ after all the inanity of the Clinton/Bush/Cheney years.

Think about it, John, and be sure to get back to me about it. We’ve made the decision that the stockyards of lower Manhattan need a serious herd thinning, and we’re even willing to give you a few Mulligans if need be. I mean, there are bound to be some oopsies here and there, but we trust that your heart is in the right place on this, and if we’ve proven anything about ourselves in the last decade or two, it’s that we’re a forgiving and forgetting kind of people. Mostly a forgetting kind of people, but that’s a whole other issue.

Thanks for your time, and I’ll check back with you again after Super Tuesday.

Nor’Easter