« "Sing! Fear is a man's best friend!" | Main | Getting our words' worth »

"We can't make it here"

Lucinda Williams' mysterious friend Dub Cornett used to tell young musicians that they should license their artistic properties "commercial." Which, now that I've typed it, sounded better when Dub said it than it reads, but...folk wisdom doesn't always translate.

I never thought Dub meant one should sell out, only that one should try to sell. (Although he was behind that aborted "Beverly Hillbillies" reality show, so maybe the jury's still out!)

And, since even fine art is a commercial art form (in the end; or a hobby, in which case...not a road I wish to travel this morning), it seemed decent counsel.

Among the many kind comments we have received these last couple days -- all a bit like attending one's funeral, but welcome, nevertheless -- have been a number of suggestions that magazines and/or criticism would inevitably move to the world wide tower of babel. Or has already done.

Perhaps so. Perhaps inevitably so.

But James McMurtry's best song occurred to me in the shower (and, no, I didn't sing along; no need to wake the dead). We don't make much in the U.S. anymore, but one of the things we do still export ferociously is intellectual property: music, film, and television content, software, pharmaceuticals (which complicates the number I found quickly online) to the tune of, in 1995, $27-billion.

If music is increasingly to be given away for free (one way or another); if books are to be digitized and inevitably to follow the same sad path (please, publishing industry, pay attention to the mistakes we in the music business have made), if film is to be made increasingly available online for download...all those businesses are suddenly going to have trouble monetizing themselves. One of the few places musicians can make money these days is placing songs in a film. If films suddenly ceased to have such ready pots of cash (or television, for that matter), what would that do to the rising stars of independent (or dependent; or trust fund) music?

If nobody is paying for this commercial art -- the art of writing and photographing and illustrating and making music and all of that, much less making film and such -- who will create work? Who will speak for us? The big companies? The trust funders? Nobody?

Not to mention the coming real damage to the U.S. trade deficit should all that intellectual property somehow become, um, unlicensed.

And then there's the residual damage of our increasingly know-nothing pop culture in which expertise and bare competence are no longer valued. The absurd arrogance that complicated, nuanced ideas can and should be limited to a few paragraphs of instant expression, and then abandoned for the next chain of snark.

But I'm feeling my age this week, and so I'll pause there. But not stop.

Posted by grant on February 21, 2008 9:17 AM | Permalink

TrackBack