It was time to order tickets again, for yet another last Dylan show I’d ever go to. I usually do that, and probably will for as long as he stays on the road. Thinking that it’s the last time, adds a certain nostalgic undertone to the experience.
After the past few years of mediocrity, the expectations were low. I can’t say I was overly prepared either, but at least I knew that the band was the same as the one I’d seen a year and a half ago, and that didn’t bode well.
Then there was the new album… A good one, for sure — must be, since it could bring the old bard to the top of all the charts in the world. Some people had voiced misgivings about the legitimacy of the phrase “All songs written by Bob Dylan”, but hey, he’s a genius, right, so he must be right, right?
Author: Eyolf Østrem
LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer
I’ve earlier performed a little test, comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change the default settings of Times New Roman/Arial and ragged right margin, and they apply formatting manually for each new element, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies.
Now it’s time for the next round of tests, this time including another application in the comparison: the “typesetting environment” LaTeX. I will also go more in detail with the points of comparison, not just considering the crude parameters such as font size and page margins, but also taking into account the finer typographical details. In the former test, I had deliberately turned off hyphenation. That led to a discussion about various hyphenation algorithms, and this time, I have decided to turn on automatic hyphenation in all three programs, using the default settings.
Dylan the Postmodernist?
I had originally thought that I wasn’t going to write much about Modern Times. I was wrong. What started out as a short, indignant review of the musical borrowings on the album, was then followed up by a somewhat longer discussion of the lyrical borrowings from H. Timrod, which I have now wrapped up in a longish piece which traverses the death of the author, copyright laws, various connections between ethics and aesthetics, oh yes, and Dylan’s later work. The last piece has so much significant use of italics that I don’t dare to let it out in a plain-html version, so you will have to download a pdf file. I’ve made it available in two versions: one with only the article itself, the other bundled with the two previous texts (both links go to pdf files).
Dylan dazzles, but . . .
Dylan dazzles | The San Diego Union-Tribune
From the article:
When questioned how Dylan could take credit for a song first recorded in the late 1920s, Dylan’s publicist responded that “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” is in the public domain. While this may be true, for Dylan to not give just due here is spurious.
How true.
The many ways of stealing
I’ve mentioned it before: I don’t mind Dylan lifting lines from Timrod. I do mind his uncredited appropriations of entire pieces of music, but little snippets of text here and there — that’s a completely different matter.
In all the many discussions and opinions about this matter, two areas have been mentioned with some frequency, either in order to emphasise the offense, or to diminish it. In each their way, they add some interesting twists to the case, although they don’t change my verdict concerning the musical theft.
Academic borrowing
One of the references is to the academic world. The argument goes that if something like this had happened there, Dylan would have been sent home with an F and a relegation.
I would argue against this, although in some cases he comes close.
It’s Modern to Steal
The question is not so much: “Is this a good Dylan album?” – which it is – as “Is this a Dylan album?” – which it isn’t.
First the lyrics: as Scott Warmuth has discovered, through an ingenious google investigation, several lines of lyrics are lifted from the works of the “Poet Laureate of the Confederacy” Henry Timrod in much the same way as Yunichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza unwittingly contributed to “Love and Theft”. This has caused considerable reactions, in far wider circles than usual.
So, is Dylan a thieving scoundrel and a plagiarist, or a genius who transforms what he reads into new gems?
Identity, sortof
I’ve been living abroad since I was 20 — the very term ‘abroad’ doesn’t even make much sense anymore; I consider myself a Swede from Norway, being truly at home in Denmark (and spending most of my days in an international world of the Internet, TV, and music). Without going into detail, there may be reasons other than the practical and circumstantial (and, as some Swedes will doubtlessly say: the obvious) why I’ve left Norway and have no immediate plans of returning.
When I watch Norwegian TV, most of the names don’t mean anything to me, some of the faces are apparently world-famous celebrities. So they say. It’s mostly a channel I flip past on the way to BBC World or EuroSport.
I don’t know why it lasted for more than five seconds today, but for some reason it did. Doubly bad: it was a stupid reality show. The kind where some farmers who had spent so much time making ends meet or shovelling dung from over-subsidized cows that they hadn’t had time to find one of those two-legged companions, got a chance to pick six of the kind out of ten candidates to go with them to a hotel where one by one they will be sent home until one is left, and the two will live happily ever after. That kind of show.
In sum, it’s stupid, it wasn’t particularly excitingly produced, and I wasn’t supposed to sit there and watch it, but I did. And as I watched, I suddenly realized: I know these people. I know that guy at about my own age who sits there with an awkward grin and uncomfortable clothes; who for the first time since his school days is in the same room as ten women, and for the first time in his life is in the same room as ten women who show an interest in him and among whom he can pick and choose as he wishes. I know that girl who lives close to the mountains, who goes hiking and jogging because she can, and that girl with the dark, intense eyes and the slightly angular face, whose attractiveness does not stem from any resemblance with Sharon Stone but it’s there anyhow. I know them.
Not personally. I’ve never met them. But I’ve met people like them. I grew up with them. I know from their dialects exactly where they come from, I have loads of prejudice and fact-based opinions about people from their districts, and I can see through their TV make-up and Sunday costumes which, as is clear for all to see, they don’t wear every day; I know what they look like when they’re not in front of the camera. I know who they liked in high-school, I know what they heard on the radio in 85, I drove through their villages on my family vacations the summer when I was ten (summer? it was raining that whole summer and we were stuffed in a car, five people, and it was glorious), and I know how they reacted to the changing school book reforms which their older teachers sniggered at and the young, idealistic ones eagerly tried to implement — to no avail because they had no respect, especially from the fattish boy at the back over by the windows with the sly grin and the bad grades, who is now more than semi-alcoholic and semi-violent and spends his days in the diner, looking up the eighteen-year-old girls who could have been his daughters had he ever had a relationship. I know them all.
And I felt at home.
I’d be very surprised if any of the genuine Norwegian viewers shared my experience. If it’s true that it’s the newcomer who knows most about a place (because he notices the things that everybody else takes for granted), then I was the newcomer, but I had the upper hand even on the newcomer because I knew so intimately well that which I now, once again, saw for the first time.
It wasn’t a time machine — I wasn’t taken twenty years back in time, thank god. It was more like one of those DimensionWarpTM devices that can take you to parallel existences and skip forty years, twenty in each direction. It’s a very handy device. After forty years, you’re naturally a foreigner and see with untainted eyes, but you’re also back almost to where you started and thus see with the preciseness that only familiarity gives.
But most remarkable is that the same process takes place in the other direction: when you’re back again in your home dimension, after another forty years and a nick of time, that too appears more clearly, untaintedly.
What I saw there, was myself, my own identity, on prime-time display, disguised as awkward-looking, romantically unsuccessful but hard-working people wilfully making a fool of themselves, most likely to get the pay-check from the TV company and some exposure, but possibly, just possibly, in pursuit of that dream which had laid dormant ever since the girl two desks in front of them married the jerk from the class above. It wasn’t my dream, but they let me borrow it for a while, and an objectively horrible TV show subjectively made my day.
I guess I’ll have to watch it next week too.
Things Twice – The Book
For various reasons, I’ve put my Dylan-oriented writings together to a book. It is available for download at http://www.dylanchords.com/tt.pdf (2 Mb).
The main reason I have done this has nothing to do with Dylan, but more with Seal: it’s an experiment in LaTeX, inspired by the wonders of this typesetting environment, gradually revealed to me through Seal, which gave me the urge to try it out myself.
Another reason is the long period of inactivity here. I guess I felt that something needed to happen.
The third reason, and the most direct one, is the Lonnie series, which I thought I had brought to a conclusion. As it happened, I still had more to say. I have extended it with a practical demonstration in a concrete analysis of three versions of Mr Tambourine Man, which I consider prime examples of the method. This is included as a new chapter in the book.
Other than that, the book contains most of the articles that are already available in the Professors section of the site, but I have also added some stuff which is not there (teaser…). The new stuff is: the rewritten Lonnie chapter, the follow-up about the Three Tambourine Men, an article I wrote for Judas! a while back, about Dylan’s concept of beauty (yes, he has one…!), and a short piece about In The Garden. I have also rewritten and updated several of the other articles. Eventually, I may re-incorporate the changes into the webpages, but from now on, I consider the book the main source.
The music examples to the analysis of the T-Men can be downloaded separately, both as midi-files and as pdf-files. Get them here.
All the music examples in the book have been produced with Lilypond, a free, open-source music typesetter which is quite similar to LaTeX: plain-text input, steep learning curve, but superb output, once one gets to know the machinery. Highly recommended.
As this is a learning experiment, there are still some things that are not perfect — some figures that are missing, some hyphens which ought to be en dashes, etc. Bear with me — I will clean it up, eventually.
Happy reading!
Ninety miles . . .
… and it wasn’t even a dead-end street.
Happy anniversary!
Theme Time
I just heard some of the Theme Time radio shows. Damn, this is almost better than Chronicles! I’m delighted to see that he’s actually doing what I suggested a few posts back – play the stuff that he likes…
Theme Time is exactly that: a selection of favorite songs, interspersed with hilarious, deadpan comments, interesting insights, floating in and out of quotation and commentary, the way he does it on the sleeve notes to World Gone Wrong and, in a different way, all through `Love and Theft’. Way to go, Bobby!
I explicitly suggested Charles Aznavour, and, well… here’s what Dylan says about Charles: “He’s written over a thousand songs. I only know half of them.”
“What I Learned from Lonnie” pt. V: three times 2, and 7 and 4
[This post concludes the series about Dylan’s idea of “mathematical music” in Chronicles]
When Dylan talks freely, he can be very eloquent, and one feels one is snapping at the heels of pure genius. But once he starts giving examples, it all sounds quote mundane, and very banal, and one is left thinking “Was that it?!”
And of course it wasn’t — one realizes that some people are better poets than teachers.
Let this be the introduction to this last installment in the Lonnie-series, where the shroud of doubt is lifted and everything is explained:
* * *
Today’s lesson is from I Chronicles, Ch. 4
In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in a pentatonic there are five. If you’re using the first scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms. Or you can use 2 three times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 twice. It’s indefinite what you can do, and each time would create a different melody.
Now, what is he talking about?!
In a way, it’s very simple. In a scale there are certain tones, and if you pick some of them and put them together in a sequence, “a melody forms”.
I doubt it, however, that his point is as trivial as that. He’s not describing just any melody, but rather a way of creating counter-melodies that — for some mysterious reason, which in Dylan’s version of it is connected with the symbolic force of numbers (or with the force of numbers tout court) — will always yield good results.
2, 5, 7, 4, 2, 7, … whaat?!
And this melody – just what is it? First of all, I severely doubt that the exact tones he mentions has anything to do with it; most likely, they are whatever numbers popped into his mind at the time of writing it (the passage in the book resembles the kind of vague ramblings that he occasionally gets himself into during interviews). But for the sake of completeness, let’s take his example at face value and see what the result becomes. In the key of G, we get the following:
Chord Scale alternatively:
||--3--||-----------------0--2--3--|| --1--3---||
||--0--||--------0--1--3-----------|| ---------||
||--0--||--0--2--------------------|| ---------||
||--0--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--2--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--3--||--------------------------|| ---------||
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 7 8
||--------2--------2--||-----------||-----2--2--||
||-----3--------3-----||-----------||--1--------||
||--2--------2--------||--2--2--2--||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
2 5 7 2 5 7 2 2 2 4 7 7
The first thing we notice is that the steps 2, 5, and 7 incidentally form a chord: D major (or D minor, if we use the minor seventh for the ‘7’). This might be a clue to a solution, but I don’t think it is, for several reasons. The main reason is that the tones and the melodic fragment that is mentioned here, a broken D major chord against (or even ‘in’) the key of G, is not something I recognize from Dylan’s music making. The dominant is not very important in Dylan’s music — one might say: other than by being absent (in which capacity it draws some attention to itself).
The other reason is that the D major chord emerges out of the numbers 2, 5, 7 only on the assumption that Dylan uses the traditional numbering of the tones in the scale, but this is not necessarily so. We know from the terminology of blues musicians that there are many ways to refer to chords and scales. I don’t know if Lonnie Johnson is known to have used any particular terminology in this respect, but at least one alternative is worth mentioning before we abandon the search for a meaning in those particular numbers: If we shift the relation between numbers and scale one step, so that ‘1’ denotes the first step up from the keynote, we get the following:
Chord Scale alternatively:
||--3--||-----------------0--2--3--|| --1--3---||
||--0--||--------0--1--3-----------|| ---------||
||--0--||--0--2--------------------|| ---------||
||--0--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--2--||--------------------------|| ---------||
||--3--||--------------------------|| ---------||
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 7
||-----0--3-----0--3--||-----------||-----3--3--||
||--0--------0--------||--0--0--0--||--3--------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
||--------------------||-----------||-----------||
2 5 7 2 5 7 2 2 2 4 7 7
This makes far more sense: a playing around with the main steps in the chord, with a sixth thrown in for good measure. This accomodates both the ‘sing-song’ style of singing that we all love so well, and many of Dylan’s trademark licks.
Another take
In a more thorough study than this, I would have gone through a number of tapes and searched out examples to corroborate this interpretation. Here, I’ll let it remain as a vague suggestion. The main reason for this is not laziness (although that is part of it), but the strong suspicion that the search would be futile; one might find such examples, but they would not prove anything. A more fruitful path is, I believe, to take Dylan’s statement more as an indication of a general principle than as an exact example.
This principle would consist in
- a selection of some scale steps, either within the chord or, for that matter, outside of it,
- which are combined to simple patterns
- which are repeated or combined as building blocks.
This not only makes sense in relation to Dylan’s music making since 1988, it also makes sense as a description of an improvisational system. In order to be usable in practice — not the least as a ‘learned’ system — such a system should be simple, and it should be based on or related to a wider musical system (in this case, e.g. the musical grammar of the blues and its descendents).
A little music theory (has never hurt anyone)
A tonal system means a system out of which meaning can be gleaned from conjunctions of tones. Fundamentally, musical meaning does not lie in the connection between certain tones and something in the outside world (i.e. a piece of music cannot in itself mean love, rain, brick walls, etc.), but is founded on connections between certain combinations of sounds and certain experiences and expectations, and this must be learned, through repeated exposure to the connection and to the regularity by which the sound is accompanied by the experience. This is what we know when we know a musical style: we know that in a blues tune an E is followed by an A, and we expect a turnaround at the end. In this way, and only in this way, can the tones of “Another Brick In The Wall” mean meat grinder, inhumanity, and bricks.
Musical meaning thus lies in a habitual fulfillment of the expectation of this kind of connection to take place — and the constant adjustment of expectations against the experienced fulfillments.
A complex system at the base allows for a wide array of possible meanings within the system. In the classical music tradition, harmony has been the central field of development since the fourteenth century, culminating in the invention of the twelve-tone technique in the early twentieth century. Thereby, the range of possible connections between tones was stretched to the extreme (some would say: beyond that): everything is accounted for (or accountable) within the system.
But that is not the only option. Expectations can be established temporarily. Play an ever-changing series of tones, and nobody knows what to expect for the next tone — play 2, 5, 7, 2, 5, 7, and you have already established a pattern with certain inherent rules, and play that against a song which follows another set of rules, and you already have a quite complex field of potential meaning, created with very simple means.
Against this background, Dylan’s description can be rephrased in more general terms:
-
Make patterns out of any selection of tones, and repeat and combine them;
by repeating the patterns, you thereby temporarily establish a new tonal system, exploiting the field of tension between the musical backbone of the song and the new pattern; - this meaning is brought out in the interplay between expectations and experience — between the cultural knowledge that the listeners and the musicians have, and the newly established tonal system;
- in order for this to be recognized as a new tonal system, however ephemeral, in the short time that is at the musician’s disposal, the patterns must be simple;
- but if they are, and a balance is struck betw een redundancy and inventiveness (there is a limit to how long you can play 2,5,7,2,5,7), it will always work, with these very simple means.
A translation
This is, I believe, the core of Dylan’s technique, which he has explored — with varying degrees of success, but mostly ending up with a huge surplus in the balance — during the 90s and the 00s. It also explains some of his other statements where he explains his system in more general terms:
A song executes itself on several fronts and you can ignore musical customs. All you need is a drummer and a bass player, and all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system.
. . .
The method works on higher or lower degrees depending on different patterns and the syncopation of a piece.
Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players.
This can be translated fairly exactly, if not word for word, then at least concept by concept, into the following:
A song can exploit several different meaning systems at the same time, and you are not limited to the rules set by one such set of musical customs. Since I play rock, I need a drummer and a bass player, but all shortcomings become irrelevant as long as you stick to the system, since this system is based on a conscious play with ‘inventive redundancy’ and not on the intricacy of the base system and the technical prowess of the musician.
. . .
Since the system works in the interplay beween the song and the newly established fields of meaning, the concrete way of playing or singing will have to be adjusted to the different patterns already present in the song. Very few would be converted to it because it had nothing to do with technique and musicians work their whole lives to be technically superior players.
Seals and deals
As I mention on the front page, whatever efforts I have made to make a deal with someone in the position to do so, and to find a legitimate and permanent solution to the copyright issues surrounding a tab site like this, have failed, and dylanchords has now gone officially and openly underground.
As I also say, that doesn’t mean that all is over – on the contrary: this is where it begins, sort of. dylanchords.nfshost.com and dylanchords.brokenbricks.com are now available, as officially approved underground-mirror sites. They are not mirrors in the technical sense, and may thus not be completely identical, but we will try our best to keep them both updated. My sincerest thanks to the webmasters! Give them a big hand (and if you choose brokenbricks, surf over to brokenbricks.com itself – Jack White is worth checking out).
So much about the Deal. Then there is Seal. It’s a program, written by Heinrich Küttler, which transforms dylanchords.com into a professionally typeset songbook, fully linked and indexed, too, so you can use it while you’re offline, as an alternative to the zip file of the website. It uses the programming language Ruby and the typesetting environment LaTeX, which you will need to have installed. This may seem like a daunting task (especially if you’re on Windows), but don’t let that scare you away: it’s hardly more complicated than downloading two files, installing them, and you’re in business.
I will provide more detailed instructions later on, so for the time being, here’s the preface to the book:
Preface
A while ago, I got a mail from a guy down in Germany. It said:
Should you be interested, I have converted some of your html tabs to LaTeX, because I created my own Dylan songbook and wanted it to look as good as could be.
There were also some pdf files of a couple of songs. To be honest, I didn’t think much about it — I didn’t really see how a LaTeX version of ‘some of the tabs’ would ever be useful for me. LaTeX — that wildly complicated markup language which claimed to produce the most beautiful output, typographically, but at the cost of a steep learning curve, and a default output which makes everything look like something from a mathematical journal (because they are all made in LaTeX).
I answered back, politely, I think (I hope). The reply I got in return mentioned something about making a whole book that one could take to the local copyshop and get bound.
I still wasn’t too impressed; I already had such a file — Adobe Acrobat could make the whole site into a big PDF file in a whiz, so why should I consider this anything special?
Well, in the end, I did, and I do, with ever greater thrill, joy, and inspiration, and the project, from which you are now reading this, has not only turned dylanchords.com into a beautiful book, it has also become a story of friendship, intellectual stimulation, and inspiration to learn, which has — among other things — led me (slowly, slowly) to pick up my programming attempts where I left them in college, after I had made a semi-functional version of Minesweeper with 8×12 squares in Basic (remember? the programming language which the school authorities in the eighties thought that everyone needed to learn, now that the computer age was coming); in the end, it also led me to finally ditching Windows in favour of Linux, something I should have done a long time ago.
What Seal can do
But first things first.
This book — I quickly learned that it was not simply a matter of stuffing all the tab files into a PDF file and that was that. For instance, print out some pages from the tab files on the net and try to play from that, and you will sooner or later — sooner, I’d guess — run into tab systems which are divided in the middle, or verses which have the chords on one page and the lyrics on the next.
Then turn to page . . . — no, wait: any page — in this book, and you will find everything to be where it should be. Page breaks break pages, not songs.
If you’re reading this directly from a PDF file, you will also be able to use the index and the table of contents as a link page — quite handy for a 1500+ pages book, and nothing that my Adobe-generated PDF dump could ever dream of.
And new additions to the site? Changes, revisions? No problem — they are incorporated directly the next time you run the program (as long as you have the updated files, of course).
You want just a booklet with the songs from Empire Burlesque instead of the whole book? Sure, make some small changes to one file, and you have your ‘Love Songs from the Eighties’ hit parade collection in your hand.
And last but not least: it looks good. There are details which distinguish a professionally printed page from what you dump from Your Average Word Processor to your printer. Some of them are considerable (such as fonts: if Your Average Word Processor is called MS Word, your font will by default be Times New Roman or Arial — bad choices, whichever way you look at it), other are more subtle and will most likely not be noticed by anyone without a special interest or a trained eye. Yet, I happen to think that they are important, not only for the typography freaks who delight in the perfect curve of a Garamond ‘n’ and who take it as a personal insult if page margins aren’t proportioned according to the Golden Section. But in an age when most reading is done either from computer screens or from printouts from browsers or MS Word, where not a thought has been given to the visual appearance, I see it as the responsibility of anyone who produces text to make sure they are appealing; to counteract the print world’s equivalent to elevator muzak. It is my firm belief that good typography will not save the world, but that bad typography ruins it just a little. Seal counteracts this — not bad for a piece of guitar-strummer’s helper software, eh?
All this and more is done magically by HeinerKüttler’s creation, Seal. Here’s what it does, as seen from a layman’s perspective: it takes all the files from whatever version of Dylanchords you have got; turns it all into LaTeX files, where hyphenations, page breaks, fonts, layout, and what not is taken care of; generates an index from this; and outputs it to PDF or postscript. And voilà — you have a book in your hands, which rivals any chord book you can buy, both in terms of layout quality, and of usability and versatility.
In order for it to work, there was a whole lot that had to be done with the files on the site. When I started making the site in 1997, I didn’t know much about html, and I used software which knew even less. Over the years, this had resulted in a jumble of files, some of which were ok, many of which were horrible, and none of which were valid files, in any definition of html.
But Heiner had put together a script which did away with the worst outgrowths, and from there, I could clean out the rest. In May 2005 the files were good enough to replace the old ones. Thus, Seal turned out to have benefits beyond the use of Seal itself.
That is just about all I can tell you about it; for the technical details, ask Heiner. What I know is: it works!
What you can do
What you can do? Well, you can do anything you can with any other pdf file, such as: print it out or send it to your friends, but that’s not what I was going to say. The contents is released under the Creative Commons (CC) licence. This means that you are free — and encouraged:
- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
- to make derivative works
as long as you:
- attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, and
don’t use it for commercial purposes. - If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
In other words: just like the dylanchords site, the contents is distributed freely, available for anyone who wants to play some good music, and — hopefully — learn something along the way. The conditions are that the attribution is retained, that you don’t make any money from it (I don’t count the free beer you get, playing from it in your local pub), and that if you use it in a “derivative work”, e.g. include it in teaching material or make your own book, this new work should also be made publicly available under the same conditions.
The intention is to make sure the material is and will remain freely available, but without abandoning all control. That is why the CC licence is also labeled “Some Rights Reserved”. It is not a complete “copyleft”.
It goes without saying that this applies only to the parts of the contents which is in some way or another my “intellectual property” — the introductions and instructions, of course, but even the chord charts fall under this category, even though Bob Dylan, as the copyright holder of the original work, has the right to decide about their publication. The same, naturally, goes for the lyrics (where my contribution is more modest: correcting some errors in the published versions, and, probably, adding some new ones).
I’ve been hesitant to put a CC banner on the site before because of this — I wouldn’t want to postulate a publishing licence for Dylan’s work — but I now feel more confident and justified, both because the context is different, and because I now know more about the legal issues involved.
For me, this is a way of responding to the statement “Everybody must give something back for something they get”. Working this closely with Dylan’s music over the years has given me tremendously much: a deeper insight in one of the most remarkable musicians in modern Western culture; a peek into the musical universe populated by the likes of Dock Boggs, Woody Guthrie, heck, even Hank Williams, which I would otherwise never have touched but which has been opened up with Dylan as a guide; some great friends; some html skills; and an opportunity to tune my ear (and my guitar). This is my way of paying back.
The Irony of commercialism
I have a spam filter on this blog. That’s one of the mixed blessings of blogging: once in a while I get bombed with comments like “Like your page, interesting comments” and then fifteen links to online casinos, phentermine, cialis and texas holdem. Most of them never see the light of day, thanks to efficient blocking.
The downside is that once in a while a legitimate post gets trapped too. Usually it’s transparent enough so that those comments end up in “purgatory” and I have to approve them manually (which is why some of you may have experienced a considerable delay before your comments appear on the site), but occasionally, they are sent to “spam hell”.
The irony is that one of the words that trigger this, is “free”.
Freedom’s just another word for something you can buy.
Sad, that’s what it is.
“Lyrics Dustup Ends in Apology”
Wired News: Lyrics Dustup Ends in Apology
Kinda interesting, this one… Especially the last couple of paragraphs.
Beginning in January, the Music Publishers Association, of which Warner Chappell is a member, will begin pursuing a campaign against 5 to 6 such companies, according to MPA CEO Lauren Keiser.
“Lost revenue for rights holders is in the millions,” said Keiser, “We’re not going after fan clubs, but websites that make money.”
True, I do have that “small donations welcome” link hidden away at the bottom of some frame, but I guess that doesn’t really count — I’m a small potatoe here (sob! my ego is hurting!).
Anyway, for various reasons, I will not make any drastic changes quite yet, but stay tuned.
Thanks to Per Egil at www.chordie.com (another Norwegian in the tabbing trade) for the link.
Thank god! There is still hope!
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Young ‘prefer illegal song swaps’
So, the question of file sharing and illegal music sites is coming up again. One consequence is that dylanchords is temporarily down. “Sam Spade” first posted a note in a different thread, about the record industry being intent on stopping sites like this one. Fair enough, perhaps. I took a consequence of that. An overreaction, perhaps, but that was my decision.
The post also contained a link to a report about a study that Jupiter Research has undertaken, about the music habits of young people. One conclusion is that illegal file sharing networks are used three times as much as the legal ones.
I don’t know what to say about this: of course artists should be paid for their work, but according to artists like Roger McGuinn, there isn’t much that gets past the record company. Then again, they also need to make some income to run the whole apparatus of production and distribution.
All in all: fair enough, and I do pay for my music.
But there was another line that caught my eye:
[The report] also warns that file-sharers, particularly young people, have little concept of music as a paid commodity.
That’s the most vulgar, obscene, inhuman expression I’ve heard in a long time: music as a paid commodity.
Here’s the dictionary definition of “commodity”:
That which affords convenience, advantage, or profit, especially in commerce, including everything movable that is bought and sold (except animals), — goods, wares, merchandise, produce of land and manufactures, etc.
At least animals are excluded…
Raise your heads, clap your hands, sing hallelujah or Allahu akbar! “Young people” have little concept of music as a movable item that is bought and sold. There’s still hope.