"Listen to me. Don’t listen to me.”—David Bowie, from "Fashion"
Adding more sound to the current fury surrounding David Bowie’s aborted 2001 Toy album which leaked unceremoniously onto the Internet recently, Torrent Freak poses, well, a torrent of provocative questions in its article Unreleased Bowie on BitTorrent: Pirate Sabotage Turned Cultural Blessing:
“The end result though is that many tens of thousands of Bowie fans are in line for an absolute treat, a delicious forbidden fruit of an album which, if not for the Internet, may have been permanently deleted from our musical culture due to label politics.
So the question remains. What is the most important – the pure enjoyment of the fans and ultimately the preservation of culture by any means, or the wishes of a record label and the rule of law that, in many instances, they helped to create?”
Ah, so those nasty pirates are cultural preservationists in disguise. It was either that or anarcho-Marxists. The article goes on to observe that, despite its illegitimate debut, the album has elicited no shortage of legitimate delight as “many Bowie fans are describing the leak as ‘magical’, ‘heavenly’ and ‘a dream.’” In the throes of youthful exuberance perhaps, it was once posited by one of the principals (or at least his Martian alter-ego) that music comes out better on a stolen guitar, as opposed to, say, a store-bought one. Perhaps it was always the utterance of a persona, never a personal conviction. Artists, no less than people, are entitled to cha-change their views especially where ka-ching is involved.
Frankly there are some who speculate Bowie himself may have either approved of the leak or is so engaged in his post-iconic, house-husbandly duties that he hasn’t had a chance to look up from piles of dirty dishes to comment. In a recent Mojo article, David Buckley offers the possibility that Bowie’s “then record label, Virgin, had a listen and didn’t consider an album featuring 11 retreads of obscure tracks to be the right sort of new product at a time when Bowie was still having hit singles.“ Obviously the silence is open to myriad interpretations. However now that, in the words of Torrent Freak, “Toy is out of the box and never going back,“ should officialdom’s imprimatur matter?
Once upon a time a forbidden fruit ethos comported the dark heart of rock ‘n roll. This should be no less true in the case of spilt milk. Who then are the interlopers and who are the unabashed music-lovers? Those who amass the coinage need not love the music (or as the former are wont to call it, ‘the product’—a jangly giveaway revealing the heart of a storekeeper.) Ownership and/or authorship confer only the right to profit (or to forego profit should the former embargo the product.) The greatest affections may belong to fans. Their completist compulsions also happen to champion the cultural record.
For decades now the marketplace has been boxing the ears of listeners, and to great effect. Today those very ears are burning, thanks in large part to the Internet, and they’re not going to take it anymore. A Great Unraveling is underway. Of course the road to aural freedom is paved with RIAA felons and single moms gone bad. The culture-versus-capital debate is a Gordian knot of ingrained behaviors and consumer ear-worms. By habit and like good little munchkins we defer to the chutes and ladders of distribution channels; though digital fluidity is gnawing at these rote behaviors. If something lands in our backyard we don’t instinctually reach for our iPods because it’s almost always a meteor, rarely a melody.
Thank God for promotional campaigns (or the bootlegger’s equivalent, official silence) as they help settle the question of how we are to enjoy the product—i.e. as delighted children, accidental tourists or cat burglars. You might say our ears have devolved into pathetic little buggers that require contextual cues from some officious body (How ever did we manage millennia of singing around campfires?) Some listeners have fully succumbed to the consumer paradigm. For them, conforming to the industry’s directives is a prerequisite to having the ‘spontaneous‘ pleasure of music wash over them. Our predilections are permissioned and installed far more than we care to admit. Taste is an implant.
But don’t dither Colonel Parker or we might bypass Graceland altogether. If too much time and space is allowed between the notes, a decade in this instance, the enterprise assumes the ambient features of life’s featureless soundtrack. Paying the piper becomes much akin to paying a former landlord. What’s wanted is a sonic escape from life that transports us over the rainbow. Should stardust spill from our pockets during the transportation, well, more power to the sea-level accountants. There is also the hopelessly romantic notion that our Monumental Artists should man their lyres full-bore and never slather over life’s commercial pie.
At the very least cultural import suffers, one imagines, when the prodigiously gifted cock their best ear towards the coffers. Circumvent the till altogether and it seems headquarters cops the sound of one hand clapping. In these instances money has subdued music. The latter becomes an instrumentality, merely ‘saleable product’. The soul, nobody’s fool, detects the shift to meretricious key.
Toy does not exist in saleable form. This raises the existential conundrum of whether product can be pilfered from an empty shelf. On another level the borrowed Toy, blue Toy, pirated Toy, sequestered Toy debate is a droningly human one, really a soap opera wrapped in a detergent jingle. All the warehouse-talk of shunting music around like it’s powder in a box tends to relegate the emanating energy of the sound-wave to ancillary sideman. It’s time to speak up for sound, give it a long-overlooked Grammy as for too long the personality cultists have been hogging the mike. Feel free to read this screed aloud. Just please, no recording devices or I will pepper you with injunctions and assail your whiter-whites with an acid tongue.
Music’s retail paradigm can at times seem inescapable. There are people, I swear, who cannot hear until they are commanded to listen. The black-iron kiosk attempts to cow the soul with wagging societal fingers and stiff penalties for shoplifting. Bear with me though. We can return all stolen fire later. Music, at least before the world fell down about a half-century ago, was conducted via orphic intermediaries from here to there, that is, it ascended like déjà vu from the peak of an inverted mountain. The lost gods are chained in the belly of the earth where they murmur their distress (Lorca’s duende) into the soles of barefoot, receptive emissaries. The latter are thus blessed with a gift that the moneychangers only later pervert into a cash-flow. I am posing a subterranean repudiation of the surface dwellers’ penchant for ribbon-cutting ceremonies and ink-stained deals. For those wanting to freight the Titans’ seismic tremors with record deals, release dates, etc. this discussion will no doubt fall on cauliflower ears.
Let’s be fair. Some brave lost souls quit their day jobs to chase the bitch-muse full-time. Maybe they had dyslexia so law school was never an option. Play a mean enough guitar and you can hire roomfuls of legal beagles to sue larcenous valedictorians. Hey remuneration is allowed! Just don’t trammel time signatures affixed by elemental forces. Hubris and greed can distort man’s essential emissary role. We monetize the gods’ beneficence at great peril.
Then came distributed processing and regimes of all stripes fell, propelling Julian Assange to rock star status. Jagger is now a white-knuckled CEO. Rebellion is a deftly cultivated brand. Crappy potentates are tin-eared pariahs. Strange proletarian beast, this Internet–or is it the billion-eyed Everyman God? In the musical realm the Internet is an insurgency hell-bent on delivering music back to the future. Yes, the energy is Promethean, but in a manner of extricating music from petty human commerce. As music reacquaints with the pleroma (or as techno-nerds prefer, the ether) on the backs of fleeting electrons, the fence-work paradigm betrays an ever-more fraying construct. This essay skirts the legitimate-enough (in its own limited sphere) shekel-and-attorney shuffle to posit a more expansive and sublime ownership paradigm that would have John Locke and Fair Use fairly blushing at the gaps in the fence. Maybe it’s the EQ, but I hear echoes of Bohr lecturing Newton: “Isaac, the fence isn’t there.” Why should music, a fortuitous collection of propagating waves, escape the current crisis that afflicts the even the terra firma notion of solidity?
Lash a wave to a store-counter and it risks becoming a flat-line. Music will always out. Sound-waves, even of the mixed and mastered variety, comport the mathematical language of the universe. Just as physics will not be sequestered, barcodes were not present at the moment of the Big Bang. We affix those penitentiary bars post facto to something ephemeral and primordially sacred.
Geometric misperceptions beset even the world of solid forms. Here’s a spanning parallel: The Golden Gate Bridge takes seven years to paint after which, well, it’s time to get your head out of your ass and paint the bridge again. Thus to the casual observer (or easy listener) the bridge appears to be a linear construct. In fact it’s a circle–an oroborus. Sisyphus Paint Inc. has had the contract for years. This is another way of saying that that Big Orange Lug is forever wet and alive, and we haven’t even delved Mother Nature lapping lasciviously at the girdered refrain–which takes us in a sense to the bridge beneath the bridge.
Caveat emptor. If someone offers to sell you a bridge, make sure you check the delivery charges because they can swamp even the best pontoons. It pays to be leery of moats, turrets and toll booths especially when they pretend at seawalls buffering ungovernable waves. Wave-ear-brain–that’s personal space right there Bub. What’s next, intentionality? Then there’s the social dialectic. I bought my third copy of Exile on Main Street recently because thirty-five years ago I first got laid to “Loving Cup”. At the risk of getting a little groaty, my seed is on track nine–metaphorically speaking (Or is that why I bought copy two? I can’t recall.) At any rate I refuse to be exiled by some bean-counter from the main street of my budding affections. No, I didn’t write “Loving Cup” silly. However “Loving Cup”, in a partial sense, wrote me. Invite a song along for the first dance at your wedding and you’ve minted the backdoor man his very own key. Now he has a corner of the bed. The encroachment of jealous parapets casts a pall over any sacred union. However if you insist on taking my wife, I’ll muddle through with Stones Inc.
When the Pied Piper embargoed the children’s laughter you could hear the same pin drop. Album sales plummeted. Sensing the exterminator’s departure, the Boomtown Rats threatened to regroup. So there’s an enduring tyrannical wound in the sonic record that Metallica’s Lars Ulrich succeeded only in reopening. (Note: At the height of my Metallica fixation I was burying three terriers a week and wondering what the hell was going on until I figured out "Enter Sandman" had a ‘shoot Fido’ backwarded directive. I’d always preferred the three-headed hell-hound breed anyway. Seeking a talisman I bought a subliminal dog-whistle but the woofer almost blew my fucking head off. Soul-possession doesn’t always play well at full volume. Sometimes a cool cat called Cerberus must do.)
So…
Listeners have a fiduciary responsibility to keep their souls on the discretionary side of the turnstile. Should we get hit in the face with a stiff westerly wind, we needn’t rush to apologize for our mugs ‘being in the way’ of nature’s fury. Every dog has his frequency. My last one preferred three craps a day. You could set a metronome to his regularity. The midnight shits were killing me so I shot him and buried him out back of my neighbor’s apartment. Let the guy-next-door own the stench. His taste in music is abominable and the walls are paper-thin.
I don’t want to sound flippant. I want to be flippant. These are murky issues. But hey music bleeds. It doesn’t sit still. You might say if the artist is master of his own artistic effect, then he should be able to time his brush-strokes–or shred the canvas on a whim. No doubt there’s a vibrant, dialectical tension here that’s probably worth a song or two. The trouble is who’d own the songs? Nor should we minimize the great time and effort required of numerous parties to bring music to a point where it entices thievery. This endeavor is deserving of remuneration. So no, I’m not in favor of stealing. What I do favor is a cultural accommodation. Culture needs to digest the mistakes and the triumphs in order to better explain to itself what the hell it’s doing at 1 a.m. with a shovel and a severed blood-stained leash at its feet. Even Justin Bieber must be masticated by the great maw of culture. Should artistic vanity, commercial reticence or Embargo Records Inc. be allowed to hinder the inexorable process of a culture’s self-comprehension? Even in a pantheon of rock gods, the gestalt should be king.
The original fable has the Piper leaving three children behind because they lacked the faculties for either sound or vision. Okay one was lame and couldn’t dance. Unfazed by sensory shortfall these stragglers went on to form the early core of Menudo. You never know when what’s left on the cutting-room floor will morph into the next boy band. Ricky Martin is glad to have survived puberty and the seedy advances of some fey impresario. But if your neighbor persists in wearing out, even now, "Livin La Vida Loca" the universe endorses your decision to move. No one owns the porous wall. Sound is its own silent master.
Once upon a time we were invited by Abbie Hoffman to steal his book. Only the most delusional Bowie fan would infer a similar entreaty from the un-rock-godly silence surrounding Toy. This has been a plebian pep talk, not an apologia for larceny. As T. S. Eliot said, “You are the music while the music lasts.” Eliot was real smart so it pays for us to listen, even in those instances when we must pay to listen.
By now you must realize that Toy, and its envelope of pregnant silence, was merely a vehicle, call it a toy train, that I used to seize the gap in order to sing our praises. Thus to all my fellow proles within earshot, I say, don’t buy the RIAA’s press releases. We are more than mere douche-bags armed with buying power. We are douche-bags armed with ears. It’s written in the liner notes of the anthropic principle: listeners make the beauty of the notes possible. Now go forth and amplify with a renewed sense of the listening gift. And if I ever catch your woofer on top of my tweeter again, I’m calling Lars Ulrich.
Norman Ball is a British-born, Virginia-raised writer and musician. His latest books How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable (Del Sol Press, 2010) and The Frantic Force (Petroglyph Press, 2011) can be had for a song. His first poetry book A Signature Advance from Hoof and Paw will be out later this year from Diminuendo Press. His Youtube ID is desertrun.
