Law demonstrates itself to be Ass (again)

You may have read about this court case. Now go and read this excellent post about why the judgement is so wrong-headed.

This sort of thing is what happens when a stupidly narrow view of what constitutes originality, a technology (recording) that means pretty much every bit of music ever created is available for ever and none forgotten (as would be natural otherwise), and avarice collide.

Those thieving bastards The Beatles nicked the tune for "Seargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Cklub Band" from medievel song "L'homme armé". Mahler ran off with huge chunks of his friend Hans Rott's symphony and used them for his own First (and used them to vastly better efect by the way). Then there's that bit in Brahms's Third Symphony which is totally a rip-off of Dvořák's Seventh (or possibly Sixth, can't remember offhand) - or is it the other way around? Bastards, the lot of them.

Of course they didn't steal. Musical ideas crop up again and again, sometimes deliberately (Mahler, probably), sometimes by chance (Beatles, almost certainly). The idea that a combination of a few notes from a finite resource (a scale) is something to be set in stone and the basis to sue someone's arse off and get money off them is quite simply damaging to all music. I'm not arguing against creator rights here - of course musicians should have a right to protect their creations and make a living from them - for a limited time. But the reductionist view that copyright law takes of what constitutes originality, coupled with the ludicrous lengths of copyright terms, is an active obstacle to the natural growth and evolution of music as an artform.

Veneer

It's very easy, if you're white and middle-class like me, to assume that we live in a more tolerant world than the one of, say, 30 years ago. That prejudices once taken for granted are now equally taken for granted as unacceptable. And yet if you stop and listen, it's amazing how quickly you'll hear casual, unthinking prejudice raise its voice in the most adamantly liberal quarters. I count myself lucky to have friends who face this at first-hand, because it gives me a second-hand view, which is better than ignorance. Whether it's the funny voices of those funny foreign people with their funny foreign names and extra melanin, or the utter lack of awareness of the issues involved in day-to-day getting about if you're disabled, or the assumptions people make about people whose chromosomes developed rather differently to most of us, or those who fuck their own sex, don't assume that because we don't have advertising like the picture above (memorably featured in the film of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World) we're necessarily better than we once were. Just not quite as gob-smackingly awful, all of the time.

Other people have fought battles to bring us even the tiny step forward we've come, and one such man was Julius Eastman, whose remarkable music I've been listening to and will write about soon.

I'm just as bad as anyone else, of course, it's just that I have people in the immediate vicinity who keep me aware of the awful thoughts that lurk within. Everyone's a little bit racist, after all.

Cue music...

Dear London

You are a fucking idiot.

That is all.

Minister in ill-judged comment shock

My heart sinks every time a politician offers an opinion on the Arts, and today's no exception as I read Margaret Hodge's reported comments on the Proms. Whether she's talking about the whole season or just the Last Night is being debated in a surprisingly well mannered discussion on the Grauniad "blogs" ( normally a hotbed of hate and ignorance way off the image of Grauniad readers as woolly liberal mung bean munchers), and of course there are less literate discussions going on, as well as the odd person happy to hitch her remarks to their own Beeb-bashing.

Hodge's words are of course flimflam, that show no knowledge or love of the subject at hand but an addiction to meaningless soundbites (pretty much what you'd expect from this government). It's interesting how quickly Downing Street seems to have intervened to put the can on the story - Hodge was booked to appear on Radio 4's The World At One, but at the last minute "something came up", and so we had to put up with Nicholas Kenyon waffling away.

I'm certainly not going to suggest that there's nothing that needs to be improved about the Proms - there's plenty - but this sort of thing really isn't going to start a sensible or useful debate about that. Rather, it's a sop, the Proms being a lazy shorthand (because of course to most people, the Last Night is the Proms, and indeed all classical music) for a certain type of white middle class idea of "culture". The minister's ill-thought out half-ideas about "inclusivity" and this governments obsession with a "British national identity" is fuelled partly by the prime minister's determination to make us forget that he's Scottish, and partly by a hatred of anything that might emphasise individuality. Hodge's singling out of the Proms is meaningless; it's a lazy, convenient target rather than any cogent analysis of contemporary culture. The only thing more depressing is David "Dave" Cameron's equally fatuous response. Let us not forget that politicians of all hues are rarely genuinely interested in the Arts, and never, ever interested in anything other than the lowest common denominator.

Idiots attack other idiots

The Observer today features an attack by director Tony Palmer on the BBC after he received a rejection letter demonstrating some quite spectacularly slack-jawed meejaspeak drivel. This sort of thing should rightly be lambasted, but before the Observer gets on its high horse it might like to double check such things as what a symphony is, which isn't The Lark Ascending, or indeed the Fantasia on Greensleeves. The fact that the same paper goes on to feature this witless tribute to Stockhausen, which seems to think his greatest contribution to music was "realising that Wagner was rock 'n' roll", in a section featuring a large photo of Simon Cowell on the front, says quite a lot about the Observer's cultural priorities.

Access no areas

Missed Mark Ronson's critically acclaimed Electric Proms gig? Never mind, you can still catch it online at... oh, er, you can't, apparently.

"Music rights restrictions" suggests either a record company or a publisher's hand at work. Either way, it's another piece of heavy-handed idiocy. Who benefits from this gig being made unavailable? One more example of the way the music industry dinosaurs would rather go out of their way to stop their music being heard than attempt to engage in any way with the possibilities music has online. In a way, this is a good thing, because every clodding act like this brings the day when these vile organisations are consigned to history.

Reach for the facts

If it's on the internet, it must be true, mustn't it? Not necessarily... there's a lesson for anyone doing a research job here: actually do some research.

You know you've been on the internet too long when...

You fire up the browser to check something, get distracted by something else, eventually shut down your browser, and only then realise you haven't actually done the thing you set out to do.

Thanks for the ether

So, that is that. You can no longer light up in public without the full force of the law coming down on you like Two Ton Tony Tubbs and banging you up and throwing away the key. Or something.

I feel very uncomfortable about this. Let me lay my stall out: I smoked for many years until I gave up for the last time about 2 years ago. The last place I am likely to tempted to indulge was the pub. This means I will, as certainly as I can say, never smoke again. I will return from the pub not smelling of stale smoke. In terms of my own personal well-being, this ban is all to my benefit.

And yet... on Saturday I stood on platform 1 of London Bridge Station, looking at a large sign that informed me that as of July 1, smoking on this platform, or anywhere in this station (and all stations) would be AGAINST THE LAW.

Smoking is a vile habit, and if you smoke you ought to stop, really you should. But it's your choice to. Who benefits from this draconian law? Who is harmed if someone smokes on a platform, in the open air, other than the smoker?

I will doubtless find a smoke free pub a more comfortable place to sit. But I can't applaud a piece of legislation on the grounds that it suits me personally. That seems an attitude brimming with sanctimonious selfishness.

Most people I know don't smoke these days. But there are still some. Am I to cast them from my presence until they forego the perilous weed?

What happened to tolerance? What happened to taking responsibility for oneself? This law is attacking both these things. This comes from the same mindset that is slowly chipping away at our civil liberties, turning us into a nation of suspects.

The Classical Brits, or, Big Mac and Fries.

Do you think I enjoy this? Two and a quarter bloody hours of this? Of course not. But I must do this, because even if it is ultimately futile to make the gesture, a stand must be made. Because this will not do.

Here we begin, with Katheryn Jenkins looking pretty and blonde as she squeezes Holst into a 4/4 meter, with added bongos, male voice choir and a key change so unsubtle it could be in Eurovision. Here's Joshua Bell, who ought to know better, posing his way through Vivaldi in that "exciting", highly charged" fashion previously associated with Vanessa Mae. Why doesn't he stick a wet T-shirt on and be done with it?

Oh look, here comes Sting with his lute. Is there a bigger, smugger twat than Sting? (Well, yes there is, but we'll let that pass for now.) I should be glad he's bringing Dowland to a wider audience, I ought to applaud the fact that he does these songs straight, without the sort of knobby "crossover" bollocks you'd normally get with this sort of enterprise, but when I see his smug face all reason leaves me, and I want to punch him repeatedly in the mouth while shouting "You didn't invent Dowland, you fucking smug twat!" Oh look, he's bunged some close harmony singers in halfway through. Twat.

Ooh, here's Katie Derham presenting the Record of the Year award to Simon Rattle for the Planets, she must be annoyed at losing the presenting gig to Fearne Brittain. Some bunch of actresses calling themselves "All Angels" croon their way through "Nimrod", robbing it of all dignity and subtlety in the process. Still, they're fit, eh? So that's all right, then.
Mrs. Sting pops up to award George Fenton the award for soundtrack for Planet Earth (or was it Blue Planet? No, that was last time). I suppose I should be grateful that John Adams won the contemporary composer award rather than Karl Jenkyns and his dreary new age toss.

And on and on it goes, culminating in the award of Classical Album of the year to Paul McCartney's new "Classical" work, another bit of trite rubbish that soils the genuine legacy of his work with the Beatles. I have a horrible feeling he really believes that this insipid nonsense is better and more worthwhile than "Helter Skelter" or "Penny Lane".

It's not that it's bad as such, it's that it's relentlessly average. I can't report that it was badly presented or that there were any terrible howlers (although it was edited terribly, shoddily), but the whole thing reeks of mediocrity. Music can be exciting, dangerous, provocative, heady, all-embracing. But the Classical Brits, and the industry they celebrate reduce it to muzak. It's not bad because it pushes crossover and TV soundtracks over more serious work. It's bad because it neuters the music, it removes all ambition and reduces it to a cheap bauble. The Classical Brits have the same relation to music as pornography to sex, or MacDonald's to a restaurant. They tell their audience that they should limit their horizons, that they're too stupid to cope with anything more than the scraps they're thrown, that they shouldn't above all make any effort to try and understand. That they don't deserve anything better, and neither should they aspire to anything better.

They diminish us all. This is what will kill music: the insistence that mediocrity is not just acceptable, but desirable.

Now go and listen to someone who understands what music can be.

Sound vs. Noise (2)

Today's experiment: Is it possible to filter out the inane twittering surrounding one, or at least abstract it so it becomes an ignorable background noise? It's got to be worth a try, anyway. I suspect this will require either an heroic effort or an heroic passivity.

In other news, I see that new science minister Malcolm Wicks has been busy demonstrating what an ignorant fucking cock he is. I hope all you teachers are brushing up on the real-life science of sonic screwdrivers.

Hucknall the idiot

Ginger Charlie Drake lookalike, ageing lothario and all-round twat Mick Hucknall wrote this article in the Guardian the other day. It's worth reading for the comments posted after it comprehensively demolishing his "argument". Go on, read it. Read it and laugh at the stupid ginger tosser. And then tell him what a stupid smug wanker he is. Do it. Do it.