“Sharing is Caring?”
Sorry for the absence in my posts. For those of you who know exactly what I do for a living, you understand why I haven’t posted an article in awhile. For those of you that have no idea what my job entails, don’t be concerned with it.
Here is my newest post:
When I was a kid, there used to be this television commercial that I would constantly get bombarded with. I think it was one of those feel-good Latter-Day Saints public service announcements that reminded us to get along. It had a sing-songy little jingle that what, “That’s the way it is. Truly-uly-uly is, so what’cha gonna do today?” And some little kid would say at the very end, “I think I’ll share,” as a three-note chorus of kid kazoos finished the spot.
Sharing. Who doesn’t like to do that? A friend letting you make mix-discs from his voluminous music library, a love feeding you pasta off his/her plate by the forkful at the upscale restaurant, hitching a ride to some show with some buddies so you can make some oil company executive .00000000000000000000001 percent poorer, pointing your popcorn bag at a friend during a movie. Come on, sharing is alright.
But what about those times when sharing goes bad? That could be as dangerous as offering your friends food past its expiration date or getting on Facebook and explaining why your boss needs to have red ants poured in his ears and nostrils-after you have added him as a friend. Or how about sharing as narcissism, where you can’t help but tell the world about how you are feeling or what you are hating about anything in the known universe? What good ever comes out of that? You are going to bring down a politician? Make Tarantino look at your script? Get Sofia Vergara to come over for chocolate martinis and Scrabble, under the provision she doesn’t wake up your sleeping mother in the other room.
Is there a downside to this cultural-technical sharing utopia that allows up to convey ideas, thoughts, feelings, along with albums, and movies that have yet to be officially released? Me? I just get numb. Looks at a guy who works for a music company, website or whatever. By virtue of their job, they would get access to plenty of music before its release date-it’s both a perk and part of the process. So who would they compromise their employment by leaking a high profile record onto the internet so they could ‘share’ it with a bunch of people they don’t know? What do they get out of it? I’m sure they would be alright with you going over to their house with a case of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Ale and some sushi. They will probably supply the wet-naps and spin the new Chiodos album while you are there. I’m sure they will tell you where the bathroom is, but they probably won’t burn a copy of the disc for you.
Digital/virtual sharing is overrated. The guy that has nine leaked records on his hard drive that I haven’t heard yet? Don’t care. Girls fighting with their friends on Twitter? You’re blocked, Angie and Dana. Twenty-year old guy submitting his two-star opinion of The White Album in his very own Amazon review? Not clicking on it. Middle-aged subscriber who now thinks AP is garbage, but has a website solely dedicated to his 1988 Toyota Camry with 46 photos of the car taken at various angles? Maximum eye roll. I haven’t listened to the actual radio in almost two years, but I still find metric tons of static every time I fire up the web browser.
So, let’s make a deal: After Easter, let’s go into personal lockdown mode for one week. No Facebook status updates, Tweeting, message-board posting (about anything from the perfect guacamole recipe to how allegedly awesome your favorite band is), writing reviews on Amazon of books and records that came out 30 years ago and assorted Tumblr look-at-me-world self-aggrandizing. Even if you do have a copy of the new My Chemical Romance album, nude jpegs of celebrities, the name of the guy your best friends wife is sleeping with or some burning commentary about on of the many trades going on in the world or professional sports, keep it to your-fucking-self. Take a week off and bask in the personal, unshared arrogance in exclusively having information that’s so crucial to civilization as we know it. Why, just thinking about it makes you start to feel empowered! Look down at folks who don’t know what you know. Try it.
And if somebody starts a Facebook group of “Screaming Blue Messiahs Fans Unhealthily Obsessed With Christina Hendricks,” I will swear on my life that I won’t sign up or visit, even with the lure of previously unheard demos and/or footage from covert closet-cams in dressing rooms. Trust.
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Where Is This Generations Nirvana?
In 1991, Geffen Records shipped a little over 46,000 units of Nirvana’s Nevermind. The label ultimately hoped to get the album certified gold by September 1992, but was only really expecting to sell 250,000 albums total, which was considered relatively measly at the time. Nevermind, as we all know, went on to sell over 30 million copies worldwide, Nirvana came to symbolize early-’90s alternative culture as a whole, and Kurt Cobain became the ultimate figurehead of the grunge genre. Think about the gaping hole that would be left in music history if Geffen had never taken a chance on Nirvana.
Also, consider this: When EMI put out Radiohead’s debut album, Pablo Honey, it was met with dismal reviews and the record was considered a commercial failure. Subsequently, Radiohead was almost dropped from their label. Fortunately, EMI had the funds to take another chance on them. The band’s second album, The Bends, wasn’t a huge hit in the U.S. either, but it sold well enough in the U.K. for EMI to see the band’s vast potential. It took their third full-length, OK Computer, to truly propel the English quartet to international stardom. Imagine what we’d be lacking now had Radiohead never had the chance to develop.
And let’s not forget about Smashing Pumpkins’ first album, Gish. It debuted at 195 on the Billboard charts and took a year to sell 100,000 copies, during a time when bands were expected to routinely sell millions. Still, Virgin Records signed them and granted them a quarter of a million dollar budget to record Siamese Dream.
The truth of the matter is, if Nirvana, Radiohead or Smashing Pumpkins were starting out in today’s musical climate, there is a good chance they would be struggling to be heard and struggling to survive. There’s a chance that only a fraction of us would even be listening to them. Today’s generation is the first to not have an all-defining band, a true marker of the place and the time. And the reason is simple: Record companies no longer have any money to find them.
Major labels used to be able to take a chance on developing bands like Nirvana, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins and countless others, because even when niche artists were working to find their place, the labels could rely on more mainstream pop artists to bring in the big bucks. And make no mistake, the revenues used to be huge: When N’Sync released 1998’s Home For Christmas, it had sold over three million copies by the time 1999 had rolled around. Today, Under The Mistletoe—an album from Justin Bieber, who’s undoubtedly one of the world’s biggest pop acts today—is only expected to sell a fraction of that. What a difference a decade makes.
Today’s big pop artists have perfumes and clothing lines and endorsement deals to make their money, but who’s supporting the smaller acts now that the record labels aren’t making the big bucks from even their mainstream acts anymore? There is simply zero room for risk-taking in this environment. This is why today’s most popular rock artists play little more than cleverly crafted pop songs; arguably, the only difference between Kings Of Leon and Rihanna is a little distortion and a lot of facial hair. The formulaic, easy-listening song structure is painfully obvious to even the most novice musician.
To make matters worse, up until the last decade, labels could offer their emerging artists tour support—a means for the band to pay expenses on the road and a guarantee that they could feed themselves well at least every now and again. Today, labels are simply unable to do this, which means many of your favorite artists are crammed into hotel rooms, five or six to a room, and eating off the dollar menu every day. I have spent the better part of the last ten years on the road and I have watched, first-hand, the transition from “Everyone gets a bed” to “Can we crash on your floor?” creeping in at an alarming rate. A lot of very promising musicians are calling it quits before they’ve even had a chance to show the world what they’re made of, because it has become so impossible for them to survive day to day, let alone pay their bills.
The truth of the matter is, illegal downloading and piracy is destroying any chance we have of supporting emerging artists on a scale that can enable them to truly thrive. Arguing that you’ll download something and buy it later if you like it is, let’s face it, bullshit. It’s the same as going to see a movie and only paying on the way out if you enjoyed it. It’s the same as going to a restaurant and only paying for your food afterwards, if the meal blew your mind.
On top of that, most of the people who say they’ll buy a record if they like it after they’ve downloaded it are lying. For every five albums paid for, 100 are illegally downloaded. If music consumers behaved like this in every aspect of their lives, there’s a good chance that your favorite coffee shop and movie theater and restaurant would be long gone—probably like your favorite record store is.
There is new legislation currently being passed around called the Stop Online Piracy Act which, in short, forces ISPs to block piracy sites and can also stop sites like PayPal from delivering funds to these rogue sites. Critics of this bill complain that this could stifle innovation and could prevent the next YouTube or Napster from being created, but personally, we should all support this legislation. The tech industry has stifled innovation in the entertainment industry for far too long—and this simply must stop if musicians are going to get the financial support they need to keep making the music that we love. Truly, you get what you pay for.
The next Nirvana is definitely out there somewhere. Unfortunately, in this current environment, we will probably never hear them. And, if you’re one of the millions of people who no longer pay for music, you are directly—at least partially—to blame.
How Much Is Unknown?
The killing of 16 Afghan civilians last Sunday is now one of the greatest points of tension between the United States and Afghanistan. U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly killed the civilians in cold blood; those close to him say they were shocked by the news.
Gen. Peter Chiarelli spent the last couple years of his military career working to help troops returning from combat with invisible wounds of war like post-traumatic stress.
He says what the incident “proves more than anything … is just how much we don’t know.” As vice chief, Chiarelli says he was frustrated by not having reliable diagnostic tools to screen for behavioral health issues.
Not too long ago I saw the movie Jarhead. I was bored through the entire thing as it was not a typical war movie – it had no action, no blood, no running under heavy fire, none of that – and then, as the credits rolled, it hit me; that’s what made the movie so great. It wasn’t a sensationalized “paint a war hero” movie, it was reality. It was a cold, hard, bitter depiction of the reality of what many soldiers have had to deal with. It was a depiction of the human psychology under warlike circumstances – a film of the mind – and when I saw it from that perspective, I was intrigued.
Though I frown upon the soldier’s actions here in this slaughtering and also the actions of other soldiers – the Qur’an burnings and corpse pissings – I think it necessary to keep this in mind; that their actions are the results of a psych that has crumbled under the pressure of circumstances that most civilians have not the slightest clue about, of circumstances that we could never fathom in our wildest nightmares.
To condemn this soldier – or any, for that matter – would be to condemn something that you know nothing of; an ill-founded judgement. There is no right way to condemn, then; only the handling of this present circumstance and the preventing of future similarities.
Chiarelli, however, argues that we have no reliable way to, with integrity, gauge the psychs of our soldiers, which dents our ability to prevent future similarities. And I agree; the human mind is far too complex to determine through written tests or oral evaluations or even, if we’re being honest here, at all.
Perhaps, then, a different approach should be taken. Some would argue that the end to war is a viable solution, but those are the hippies talking and it must be realized that we do not live on a utopia and that, though perhaps not this particular war, that war is an inevitability, a sort of necessary evil. But we’re still at square one; the issue of the psychological integrity of our soldiers remains.
My proposal: start at the root. Instead of squeakily testing the psychs of soldiers during duty, instead of relying on evaluations, perhaps the founding of a humane, strong, resilient-to-snapping psych should take priority in training. Hell, give it its own program, perhaps even a separate training if you will. What good is brute force when the mind is crippled?
That’s my idea. Yours?
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Presidential Comparrison
There appears to be a great division within our society. One driven by a need to place the sum of all our woes upon the shoulders of just one man. The accused man I speak of, depends upon who you ask. In one faction we have those who place all this blame on former President George W. Bush, and in the other, those who place it all upon our current President Barack Obama. This division runs so deep that some families are in a state of turmoil due to the strong views being placed upon this idea: that just one man is to blame for every problem we face in society.
I believe that it has been the many actions of many people, that have incrementally lead us here.
If we are to compare…
George Washington was very much unlike any president that has served in my lifetime. He was our first President and is the face of our nation, from our money to the name of our capital. It is for this reason, it is my opinion, that if we are to compare our Presidents to any other, then it is to this man that we should make our comparison.
A man of honor and dignity, a businessman and farmer, and an entrepreneur. A man who understood that character was a trait that one must develop. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit,” was a lesson taught by Aristotle and one Washington understood well. Most importantly, he understood, perhaps better than any other president since, that we are all free citizens, and that the government is established to protect the individual’s right to life, liberty, and property. After all, it was he who led us in the fight to gain them in the first place.
He served as Commander-in-Chief over what was initially an army of rebels, and turned them into a commendable fighting force. For this he asked only his expenses be reimbursed him, and took no pay for his services. He kept a record of every penny spent in the commission of his duties. Indeed, it seems that accountability for his expenditures were an important aspect of his leadership qualities even before he became president.
An honorable and honest man who courageously led the rebellious Continental Army to victory over the most powerful military force on Earth. After the revolution and upon hearing of a meeting where his officers were plotting to take control of the newly established and independent nation, he boldly entered the gathering and stated that any man who would carry out such a plan was no friend of his or to America. With this, the would-be coup was halted.
Washington himself had the power and support to become king, but when King George III of England was informed that the victorious American leader would surrender all of his authority and return to being a common citizen the English monarch stated, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
To say he was beloved by the people of his day and garners so much respect even today is perhaps an understatement. Who else should we measure our leaders up to?
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Body Modification
I recently came across a post on Facebook for a petition requesting that people with tattoos and piercings be given equal opportunity protection, making ink and metal equal to gender, race, religion, disability, national origin, etc.
No, just no. Please just take this ridiculous claim to EEOC and shove it.
Equal opportunity employment exists to protect people from discrimination against choices they could not make. Let me repeat that, in all caps, because maybe those of you who think this petition is the one for you are a little too self-involved, privileged, and entitled to have missed it when it was just written in front of you. EEOC exists to protect people from discrimination against choices THEY COULD NOT MAKE.
I will never argue that employers should be able to discriminate against tattooed and pierced candidates. I myself have tattoos and prefer to be able to show them off whenever possible. I am proud of my ink, and I love it. I would like to be able to walk into any office and not have to worry about them being a factor in the hiring decision.
But I also recognize that every bit of ink on my skin was my choice, unlike my gender, race, and national origin.
If you want to be recognized as a viable candidate despite the ink and hole you have put on or in your own flesh, then lobby for a separate law, one that forces employers to turn a blind eye to you body modification and just look and your on-paper qualification. The Supreme Court is not going to turn people with body modifications into a suspect class any time soon, so stop pretending you are one. Take your ridiculous entitlement and privilege and do something valuable with it.
