Where The Rubber Meets The Road

I’m still writing, of course. You’d think one kind would naturally dovetail into the other, and if you were me, you would be wrong. I present this as the sort of waste of time I engage in: a fake song (that will most likely never be put to music) about a fake couple (who will mostly likely implode) for a fake band (that isn’t as good as I want them to be) in a story (that has a .01% chance of ever being published). I think I write almost twice as much material about the story as I do in the story.

The War

She puffs out her lip like a hitchhiker’s bruise.
He catches the heart on his sleeve on her dress.
They slip off their shoes for their ruse of a cruise.
The roadside they litter with such bitterness.

The wrong turns they take and the stops that they make
In the lots where the ghosts of their best shots lay dead.
She puts on her blacks as they stay for the wake;
They sigh while his blues clash with lips ruby red.

And this is the war
If not the heart’s wish.
It’s love at the core
That hates in the flesh.

In decency lost and complacency found,
The particulars are in need of redress;
They pick at the bones as they drive the world ’round,
And make their love with razor sharp tenderness.

And this is the war
If not the heart’s wish.
It’s love at the core
That hates in the flesh.

In the dark that falls in the hours made small,
When push comes to pull and the knife to it’s rest,
They’re twining their grip as they cling to their fall,
And lay themselves down by the sweat of their breast.

And this is the war.
Their war.
This is the war.
Their war.

I give Green Day their due. Corny, post-punk pop rock they may be, but they stuck their necks out when they didn’t have to. An already successful band with millions of fans and dollars, they released American Idiot, an album that took several serious (if lukewarm) shots at the Bush/Cheney Administration. Mind you, they were sandwiched into an obtuse, silly, and amateurish storyline, but they were there.
Green Day was a band with nothing to gain by taking these shots, and everything to lose. In fact, fans of their earlier material (largely a safe catharsis for the angsty teen crowd, a loud, angry, pointless exercise in self-serving nihilism – if that sounds redundant, so was the music) were turned off by the political material. Probably because the material was about someone besides themselves.

Well.

Apparently, success has a downside. And for Green Day, that downside is production. Also, not understanding what resonated so well with American Idiot. 21st Century Breakdown, their follow-up to American Idiot, is a muddled, gutless, overproduced mish-mash of Styx-style theater-rock.
To be fair, I should point out that apart from this blog, 21st Century Breakdown has received rave reviews. I humbly submit that they are wrong. It is a piece of chrome-plated, Drakkar Noir-scented shit. Shiny, perfumed, and stripped of anything remotely resembling passion. Taking all the wrong lessons from the previous effort, they decided to take the concept/storyline album and run right off a cliff with it. To do this, they tapped Butch Vig of Garbage fame, with disastrous results. Garbage is known for their slick, modern, syth/metal/dance sound, and Green Day is known for their simplistic, reductionist, raw, three-piece sound. When the two collide, it is an epic turd of Blink 182 proportions.

Don’t believe the hype. It’s terrible. 21st Century Breakdown is Green Day’s Kilroy Was Here; a botched boob job intended to make the band sexier, but ultimately making them a none-too-funny joke. Don’t bother with this shit.

A long time ago in a thieving, soulless, bastard’s wet dream, there was the Recording Industry. Specifically, the music recording industry. Musicians, bands, composers, and singers who wanted to make money while doing what they loved would work hard, eat their Flutie Flakes, and pray that some tin-eared talent scout in a cheap suit would spot them. From there, artists would fall all over themselves to sign a draconian contract that virtually guaranteed that if they were unbelievably successful, they might pay the bills, and then (and only then) they might be able to re-sign with the record company for brass-ring money. In the meantime, their likeness, music, and integrity would be sold to the highest bidder, with profits going largely to the company, and with little or no control over the rampant commercial group grope.

But along came technology – or more accurately, the internet, digital audio encoding, high-speed communication, web culture, and file sharing – and the recording industry beheld the beginnings of a reckoning.

It started small enough, but even in it’s infancy, file sharing far outstripped “home taping” as a means to distribute music far and wide, and perhaps most importantly, beyond the greedy clutches of the industry. Perhaps you might have seen one end of this, when the “news” was filled with stories of nasty, dishonest non-consumers downloading music instead of going out and buying it. Record company execs wailed and gnashed their teeth, claiming (and you can still hear the echoing clang of their giant, brass balls) that they were trying to protect the artists. Just like they’ve always protected them by inflating concert prices, forcing them into merchandising, charging twice as much for Compact Discs as for cassettes despite costing a tenth as much to produce, forcing “producers” on them (who worked tirelessly to commercialize the music, distorting and perverting the artist’s vision), dumping artists who spoke out of turn – you get the picture.
Of course, the most recognizable public display was the great Metallica Vs Napster brouhaha. This particular case proved that maybe some headbangers were just stupid thugs after all. Convinced that downloading/file-sharing (and not, say, waning interest in their increasingly stale and dated music) were costing them profits, Lars Ulrich (drummer and head ego for Metallica) stormed Capitol Hill on behalf of his corporate masters and testified against Napster while Metallica sued Napster for racketeering and copyright infringement. The result was a victory of sorts for the industry, as it crushed Napster, but the chilling effect that was supposed to follow never came to be.

To be clear: the litigious destruction of Napster, and the DMCA were little more than attempts by the industry to stomp out the little guy. Artists who shared their music via the internet were (and are) gaining in popularity, threatening to bypass the industry by bringing the music directly to the people. The industry responded as all corporations will: by trying to tighten their grip and obliterate the alternatives. To be fair to Lars Ulrich and Metallica, Ulrich has since come to regret his behavior.

Artists like The Dresden Dolls and Esmée Denters have used the massive communications power of the internet to launch themselves out of obscurity and into stardom – without the traditional intervention of record companies.

At this point, the recording industry is attempting to subvert the internet phenomena, with some small success. However, as fantastically talented (yet unheard of, largely due to being seen by corporations as lacking in marketability) artists have made themselves more known, already famous artists are beginning to shrug off the industry entirely. There is hope that one day, the industry itself may disappear, and we can all get back to liking music for our own reasons, and not having it presented to us (complete with “official” interpretation in the form of marketing, or – even worse – the MTV-style music video).

In the meantime, here’s what I mean. I’d like to see marginally talented pop-jailbait-masturabational-fantasy twits like Miley Cyrus do this. I give you Theresa Andersson: