4 May 2005

Volume Two

One month later, I've finally gotten around to setting up "volume two" of the "God's ex-Boyfriend" site. From now on, all new entries in this category will go there.

John Peel is Dead

I just learned that John Peel died last month. I suppose it's an indication of how out of touch I am that I didn't know about it until now. But there you have it.

If you live outside the UK, you probably don't even know who Peely was. Simply put, he was probably the most influential non-musician in the not-insignificant British music scene of the latter half of the 20th century. He was one of the original DJs on BBC Radio One (when the offshore pirate radio stations were shut down and he went legit, back when I was still in diapers), and the last of them to leave the airwaves. He introduced British radio listeners to punk, to reggae, to hip-hop, and countless other kinds of music. He single-handedly launched the careers of dozens of musicians, from Bowie to the Sex Pistols to the Smiths.

I came to know John Peel during a brief residency in the UK, spending a term at the University of Aberdeen, back in the mid-1980s. American radio was already well on its way to becoming the corporate pablum it is today, but I'd experienced the thrill of doing college radio, which whetted my appetite for more cutting-edge music. Then I got to Britain, where this proper-sounding middle-aged bloke on the fucking Bee-Bee-Cee was playing stuff that no one in the States would even touch. I recorded stuff liberally from the John Peel show, and mailed cassettes to a co-conspirator at my home college to play for the colonials.

I lost touch with Peely when I returned to the States, but I brought with me several EPs recorded for his show, released in those days in a series called "The Peel Sessions". A few names from the sleeve: OMD, AC/DC, T-Rex, Jeff Beck, Joy Division, Billy Bragg, Teardrop Explodes, Cocteau Twins, Joan Armatrading, Xymox, Wire, The Specials, XTC, the Fall, Pink Floyd, Elvis Costello, Manfred Mann, the Cure, and We've Got A Fuzzbox And We're Gonna Use It. The belt on my little-used turntable has turned brittle, and it broke apart when I tried it just now, so I had to spin the Undertones' disk (one of Peel's all-time favorite bands) by hand. Which seemed appropriate, somehow. John Peel loved music at its most raw and elemental, and "Listening In" at 15-60rpm was the kind of thing he would have played and played up on his show.

I don't want to count how many years its been since I've heard John Peel, and I'm saddened to think that I'll never again hear him live on the air. But I can still hear him in my head, plain and clear as if it were yesterday. I ran across a quote from him that I can easily mentally transcribe in his voice: "I've always imagined I'd die by driving into the back of a truck while trying to read the name on a cassette, and people would say, 'he would have wanted to go that way.' Well, I want them to know that I wouldn't."

He didn't, of course. It was a heart attack. But I do hope he had some good music on at the time.

Cat Stevens: Terrorist?

Anyone questioning whether the U.S. government has lost its collective mind on the topic of "homeland security" has one less reason to doubt it. It turns out the feds consider Cat Stevens a likely terrorist. A plane he was riding in from London to Washington was diverted to land in Maine "on national security grounds" when they discovered he was on it. The plane sat there for three hours before it was allowed to proceed without him.

After all, despite recording a bunch of feel-good pop tunes in bygone days, and currently running Small Kindness, a charity that provides humanitarian aid to widows and orphans of war (primarily in the Balkans), he's... well... he's a Muslim, and goes by the name Yusuf Islam now. Plus, that trim little beard he used to wear back in the hippy days is now long and looks a little bit like Osama's.

Even if the U.S. government considers him unwelcome here, grounding the plane in Bangor is an hysterical overreaction. Just let the plane land where it was supposed to, then have some jackbooted thugs board it when it reaches the gate to escort him into custody, and let the other passengers go on with their business in D.C. Or did they seriously think there was a chance that he and his daughter (who was allowed into the country without him) were going to hijack the plane and fly it into the White House? If so, they need to get back on their meds, pronto.

In somewhat related news, the Transportation Security Administration has demanded that airlines turn over a bunch of information about passengers on their planes in the month of June. Among the information they'll be turning over will be people's credit card numbers and their meal preferences (which could be handy in identifying Muslims who don't eat pork). As it happens, my first airplane ride in quite a while was in June. I guess they noticed.

This Song is Your Song

If you've been paying attention to the popular infotainment media lately you're probably familiar with JibJab and the animated version of "This Land Is Your Land" that they did, in which candidates Bush and Kerry attack each other and each claims that, "This land will surely vote for me". It's what passes for mainstream political satire these days, taking neither side and glossing over any real substance. But it's cute and it's funny.

And it's the subject of a lawsuit.

It seems that an outfit called The Richmond Organization is suing JibJab, claiming that the duo's use of Guthrie's tune and the filked version of his lyrics violates their copyright on the song. JibJab's defence is that their little music video is parody, and that protects it from copyright infringement suits under the doctrine of "Fair Use".

But where it starts getting dodgy is the question of what they're satirizing. The "Fair Use" doctrine says you can copy and distort something for the purpose of satirizing it, but that doesn't mean you can copy it for the purpose of satirizing something else. So the question isn't whether JibJab is making fun of John and W, but whether they're making fun of Woody's song.

I think they are. Sure, the presidential candidates are the main target, but even if it wasn't at the forefront of their minds, they're making a commentary on the original song as well. "This Land Is Your Land" was intended as a populist anthem. It was written as an answer to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" (Guthrie's original title for it was "God Blessed America") written from Guthrie's perspective as a socialist. In the current political system it's no longer "your land" and "my land" but Kerry's or Bush's. JibJab's version points that out. They could have based their song on "Yankee Doodle" or "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" or "Disco Duck" (the sort of thing Mark Russell has made a career of)... but they chose Guthrie's anthem, for the irony of its message in the current context.

Probably the greatest irony in this case is the fact that a copyright suit is even possible. Guthrie had no use for copyright. In one of the lyric sheets that he used to send free of charge to anyone who asked for them (selling sheet music was a major source of income for songwriters in those days), he included the following notice: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." He probably would have committed it to the public domain except that his publisher wouldn't have touched his material with a 10 foot pole if he'd done that. Sure, the writer was doing the equivalent of telling his fans to "steal this song", but at least this way the company technically still had ownership of it.

Which was a mistake on Woody's part. Because 28 years was just the beginning. Since then the U.S. Congress has repeatedly extended the terms of copyrights, and some 60 years later, when Woody's been dead more than three decades, that copyright is now owned by some corporation that makes its living by licencing the compositions in their portfolio of copyrights. And they're under no legal obligation to adhere to Guthrie's obvious stated wishes. So they're suing JibJab, for doing precisely what the composer had invited us all to do.

OK, maybe this isn't exactly what Woody had in mind. He probably figured that people would keep to the original lyrics, mostly. But I think he would have approved of this use. He'd probably snarl about how gutless the jibjabs at Bush and Kerry were, but he'd appreciate the fact that they're making fun of these two corporate candidates, both far to the right of Guthrie's own politics.

Woody never would have approved of what TRO is doing. Not only do we have that old copyright statement to tell us that, we also have the original lyrics of the song. The song went through several revisions, and Woody himself apparently toned down and later dropped the version I'm about to quote, but his manuscript of the original lyrics includes the following verse, which he followed with a slightly-changed chorus:

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

I wouldn't go as far as Woody appears to be going with this, challenging the whole concept of private property. But I love the cleverness with which he questioned it, and I admire him for doing so, because I think our society treats it as far too sacrosanct. Like in this suit.

By any reasonable standard (and certainly by Guthrie's expectations) "This Land Is Your Land" should be in the public domain by now. Expurgated or not, it has become part of our cultural legacy, and anyone should be able to use it without getting permission or paying royalties to some corporation that happened to get its legal mitts on a copyright that Guthrie never really wanted in the first place.

This song is your song, this song is my song,
From the fields of Texas, to the streets of Boston.
For the right-wing nut jobs, and the liberal sissies,
This song was made for you and me.

UPDATE, 25 August: The pretended owners have backed down, following the introduction of evidence that the song was published in a songbook in 1945 whose copyright was not renewed (back when that was required). They still claim that the 1956 copyright they were suing under is valid, but that's a bit preposterous, since you can't copyright a song twice... and if they really believed it, why would they (the party with the deeper pockets) be giving up?

Van Hagar

To my surprise, I went to a Van Halen concert last night.

OK, I knew ahead of time that I was going. One of my friends won a pair of tickets from a radio station a few weeks ago, and invited me to go to the concert with him. I've never been a fan of the band and I've never given him any reason to think I was, so I figured he was having trouble finding someone who was willing/able to go. And I'd already admitted I had no plans for that evening, so I had no graceful way to decline. So I went.

I won't make any cracks about how old the band members are. In fact, they all seem to be in fine condition, especially the Van Halen boys. Alex (the drummer) and Eddie (the guitarist) both performed shirtless, and are in considerably better shape than I. Woof. They certainly put a lot of energy into their performances. Most of the band are pushing 50 (vocalist Sammy "I Can't Drive 55" Hagar is 55), but they clearly aren't ready to push up daisies. Even bassist Anthony Michael Hall was pretty wild, and bass players are always the sedate guys in the band. They all seemed to be having a lot of fun and glad to be back on tour again, especially Eddie, who (my friend told me) had a brush with cancer a few years ago.

The show suffered from a compulsion that most rock performances have, but especially the metal/hard-rock genre: turning the volume up high enough to hurt. We were sitting on the far end of the arena from the stage and speakers, but I still felt the music as much as I heard it. I put in ear plugs, which helped, but... why the fuck should a person have to use earplugs to listen to music? That's like having to put on sunglasses to watch a movie.

I've got nothing against loud music, as such. I was into punk and hardcore back in the day, and that's stuff you just can't play quietly. I get that. But this need to push it too far, then push it even past that, is the kind of the thinking I normally associate with shallow-minded 15-year-olds. And I didn't see any of those at the concert (though I suppose a lot of those present were, back when Van Halen's first albums came out).

Likewise with the musicianship. When Eddie or Alex took the spotlight, it was all just "look what I can do with my equipment" (a mindset understandably typical of the aforementioned 15-year-olds). Don't get me wrong: they're good at what they do. But what they do...? Alex's extended drum solo was (like most rock drum solos) mostly devoid of, y'know: rhythm. It was all about beats: how many drumheads he could hit per second. Eddie's guitar solos rarely touched on, say, melody. It was about how many notes he could squeeze in ("look, I'm picking the strings with both hands!"), or other guitar tricks, like fiddling with the reverb controls and picking up vibrations from the speakers instead of actually picking the strings, or using a bitless power drill to drive the guitar's pick-ups. Sorry, Eddie, but I think Jimi Hendrix took that whole concept to its logical conclusion back before you guys got your first recording contract. It's played out.

But from time to time, on a few of their popular hits, and especially reviving their cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", the band hit a groove and simply rocked. Those were the parts of the concert I enjoyed, and they made the event worth my while.

Of course, getting to see it free of charge helped. I can't imagine spending $70 per person (and more for those with better seats) for it. My friend said they were selling concert t-shirts for like $50. With concerts becoming obscenely expensive, record stores becoming irrelevant, the RIAA trying vainly to tighten its stranglehold on ownership of the recordings, the tedium of all the corporate-packaged music, and the centrally-programmed homogeneity of radio stations across the country, I figure there's gotta be another revolution brewing (like happened with bebop, rock, punk, and rap). But that's another topic for another day.

iTunes, Not Tunez

Apple is crowing that they've sold 25 million downloaded songs through their iTunes Music Store since it opened in April (to Mac users only at first, and to Windows 2K/XP users just recently). At nearly a buck a piece (an album of 12 songs usually sells for $9.99, making the per-song price a little cheaper than buying them at 99 cents each), that's close to 25 megabucks in retail sales. (Of course a lot of that is passed on to the record companies that own the music, so it's not all cabbage for Apple.)

I'm glad to see this, because it restores some of my faith in the willingness of the public to actually pay for "creative content" rather than just ripping it off.

I'm something of a born-again copyright believer. In high school and college I routinely made my own copies of friend's LPs or movies I rented. As I started working, and could afford to spend more money on entertainment, I bought more stuff legitimately, but when the opportunity to dupe a movie or CD came along, I still took advantage of it.

Then something happened which changed my attitude. Some friends of mine were a band with a local fanbase, and started recording an album. They were all still starving college students, and I had a full-time job, so I loaned them the money they needed to pay off the recording studio, then did the legwork and spent the money to get the album published. I was a record label.

The shoe was on the other foot. I wasn't an actual member of the band, but I'd been there while they worked at recording their music. So I understood that every unauthorized dupe of the band's new album represented several dollars that weren't coming back to me any time soon. I wasn't in it for the money (I didn't charge the guys interest on the loan, and the contract I'd written for the album production stipulated that I wasn't entitled to profits - if any - from it) but I did want to get my money back.

Some years later, I wrote some software which I made available online as shareware, and that strengthened my discomfort with bootlegging. Programming is work, and the person who does it deserves to be compensated for it. I think that anyone who has actually produced anything worth ripping off can understand what it's like to have that happen to him. (Writing free software to give away as open-source code is another matter. That's a choice that benevolent hackers make, rather than bootleggers making that choice for them.)

From then on, bootlegging just didn't feel right, so I stopped doing it. I try not to be too moralistic about it, because I know that it's a lot easier when you have enough money to easily afford the stuff you want... and I did. But when I "fell on hard times" (as they say) several years ago, I still stuck to my principles. I cut way back on my music purchases, stopped buying movies altogether, and became very selective about buying software. I started taking greater advantage of educational discounts (since I'd gone back to school) and freely licenced software, but the bottom line was that I stuck to the letter of the terms offered. And I quietly squirmed as the "file sharing" phenomenon took off. Unlicenced unauthorised downloads of warez, tunez, vidz, etc. suddenly became commonplace.

There was nothing new about people letting their friends copy their legally-acquired music. But now their "friends" had come to include "anybody on the internet". And people started acting as if they were entitled to make copies of whatever recordings they wanted. To which I say, "bull shit". If you didn't create it, it's not yours. You can't "share" something that doesn't belong to you in the first place. People try to justify it by saying that they're stealing from the evil record labels, but that's missing the point. The evil record labels then respond by giving the artists even less money, so it's not just the RIAA that gets hurt.

The RIAA has resisted the idea of making music available for downloading, and I can actually understand that. It just makes it that much easier for the bootleggers to "share" that music with 6 billion of their close personal friends. The RIAA insisted that people wouldn't pay to download music (because we'd gotten too used to stealing it for free), and I was afraid they were right. But Apple has put together a large enough selection of music, really easy tools for browsing and buying it, and reasonable usage rights (you can transfer the songs to three of your computers, to unlimited iPods, and/or burn them to unlimited CDs for personal use). It's a hit, and now everyone and his brother is rushing to set up their own online music store. (To be fair, a few of them were there before Apple.)

As much as I like Apple, I'm glad they're getting more competition. Right now Apple is considered THE online music store, and that kind of market dominance is never a Good Thing. My main concern is that Apple and its rivals will compete by locking in exclusives, which is just another way of saying "narrower monopolies". I also think they (Apple and the others) need to keep working on enhancing their selection; as I browsed the iTunes store to see if I could fill some holes in my collection (from the lean years), I found gaping holes in their catalog. And an iTunes for Linux would be nice.

In the Mood

Through a typically circuitous course of random cognitive meanderings* while out walking this afternoon, I found myself humming - or boppita-pop-pop-ing and doodle-oodl-ing, rather - Glenn Miller's "In The Mood".

I'd never really thought about the tune beyond the fact that it's one the best known compositions of its era. I'm certainly not a jazz buff; jazz is mostly the stuff that my parents' and grandparents' generations used to listen to, and kind of the background to the stuff I grew up with. Most adults alive today can't remember when "In the Mood" came out, and probably a majority can't even name it, but play them the opening measures, and most will say, "Sure, I've heard that before." It's a classic. And I think I've figured out why. (I'm sure this is no great revelation to people who think about this sort of stuff all the time, but it was to me, so I'm sharing.)

It all starts - literally - with those opening bars. Ironically, they're almost impossible to dance to, which seems odd for a swing number. After all, the whole social function of the genre was to provide music for dancing. But those introductory bars aren't for dancing: they're an announcement. It's a trumpet fanfare, to get your attention, telling you that the dance music is about to start.

This gives all the fellas a chance to turn to their sweeties (or vice versa) and say, "Let's dance!" By the time they make it to the dance floor, the band has finished the fanfare and has settled into a melody that's as easily danceable as the intro is not. It's got a smooth beat that's easy to follow at first, with just enough syncopation to be fun, and by the time it gets to the trickier part where the musicians get to briefly indulge themselves, the dancers will be loosened up enough to deal with it. Even middle-class white guys can cut a rug to "In the Mood".

The annals of pop music are littered with recordings that start (and somtimes drone on and on) encouraging people to get up and dance. Miller's tune does it even more effectively, and without stooping to using words, like "everybody dance now". It's pure, unfettered music, and people just respond to it.

(*The news of Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield's death started it. It got me thinking about the phenomenon of white guys doing soul music. I also remembered thinking when I first heard the title "Unchained Melody" way back when, that it was a jazz number by someone like Dave Brubeck. Which led me to thinking about white guys doing jazz, which brought me quite naturally to Glenn Miller.)

Pledge Time

I listen to a non-commercial radio station (WYCE on FM and internet) most of the time when I'm at home or driving my Geo Metro. And it's the time of year that every listener of public radio (or viewer of public TV) hates. Pledge week.

This is the week in which the uninterrupted bliss of non-commercial broadcasting gets interrupted over and over by earnest pleas for donations. They point out how much you probably spend on coffee over the course of a year, or the cost of newspaper subscriptions or cable TV. They talk about how important you, the listener, are to them. And they repeat that damn phone number so many times you're afraid you'll accidentally dial it instead of 911 in an emergency.

But you know what? I don't mind it.

I'm not saying this as some kind of lecture about how the benefits of non-commercial radio are worth this kind of hell. I'm saying it because I really don't mind listening to them during pledge week.

In addition to WYCE, I also listen to the local repeater station for WUOM, the NPR/PRI station operated by the University of Michigan. Their pledge week drives me crazy. WYCE's doesn't.

I think the main reason is that WYCE's pledge breaks don't jar away from the regular format of the station so badly as others' do. WYCE is a nearly-all volunteer station, with a small army of volunteer programmers who come in each week to play music, chat with the listeners, and above all, have fun. And when pledge week comes along, they just keep at it.

Yeah, they do stop the music more often, and talk more, repeating the damn phone number over and over. But the programmers are still having fun. The station double-staffs the pledge shifts, bringing in additional volunteers from the community as well as our usual on-air friends, which lets these duos banter back and forth a bit during the breaks, keeping their fun level up, and keeping the listeners' up as well. It's like listening to one of those "morning drive" teams on commercial radio... but with intelligence and post-adolescent maturity.

Of course it also helps that WYCE is the kind of station that listeners quickly come to love. It features an eclectic, ever-changing mix of music that's free of the monotonous over-playing of corporate-selected "hits", and the deliberately irritating attention-demanding ads of commercial radio. I gave WYCE a listen when they started out over 15 years ago, and my dial's been stuck there (except for NPR's news programs) ever since. If they happen to pick a song I don't like, I know the next one will be something completely different, and almost certainly interesting. I grew up listening to Top 40 radio and later graduated to what was then called "college rock". But now I get a tossed salad of jazz, blues, folk, rock, and genres from around the world... making pop and commercial rock seem as bland as unflavored oatmeal.

What I find amazing is that so few communities actually have a station like WYCE. Some of the big cities have jazz stations or world-beat stations or block-programmed ("Tuesday is blues day") stations, but very few have anything that really breaks down the stultifying formatting that is the bane of modern radio. And it's not like Grand Rapids is some kind of cultural hotbed. And yet, every pledge drive rather easily meets its goal (which probably adds to the fun and relaxed nature of them). The only reason I can think of that more communities don't have their own is that - like me, back in the day - they don't realise what they're missing: a radio station so good that even it's pledge drives are enjoyable.

WYCE broadcasts at 88.1FM in the Grand Rapids MI area, and on the internet from wyce.org.

My Ride's Here

Not very surprisingly (I practically predicted it the other day), Warren Zevon died yesterday. I figured he wouldn't last long after the release of The Wind, since people have a tendency to die shortly after achieving a milestone (probably because they will themselves to hang on a little longer to reach them). Like I said, this was as good a way to go out as one could hope for.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Warren Zevon's last album recently came out. I've only heard a couple tracks from it so far, on the radio, and while they seemed more subdued than, say, "Excitable Boy" "Mr. Bad Example", or "Lawyers, Guns, & Money" they were solid stuff. The Wind is not a bad way to go out.

For those unaware, Zevon's been living under a death sentence the past year: a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. His response was to start recording another album. Of course there was no shortage of famous friends who went out of their way to lend their performances - and moral support - to the recording sessions. But the focus is still on him, and I trust him to pull it off; only a man with his wry attitude toward mortality would have the artistic guts to record "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" while he's doing so himself.

I've heard some people say that they hope this isn't really Zevon's last album, that he'll live to record more, etc. I hope not. Don't get me wrong: I'd be happier if he were healthy, and I'd love it if he could stick around and share more of his talent with us. But personally, I wish him a timely departure, with a minimum of discomfort. Nobody ever gets enough time to do everything they wanted, but his goal was to record one more album, and despite some times when it looked like he wasn't going to finish... he did. He lived the see the birth of his twin grandchildren. But he's too weak for a "farewell tour", or even to do publicity interviews for the album. Short of a miracle (yeah, right), he's not going to get any better. From what little I know of the man from his recordings, and based on everything I've read, he's as ready to die as a person can be. Sounds like the right time to go. We should all be so lucky.

Sleep well, Warren. Thanks.