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| Payola July 26th, 2005 -- There's an article on Fox News about Payola that I just read. There were apparently some internal documents that just got uncovered detailing how Sony was paying radio stations to play J-Lo and others, including Franz Ferdinand, which was a surprise to me. FF's album is so fun and well written, I don't know why a record label would have to pay a radio station to play it, unless it's just not quite radio-ish enough to play, which I could see. It doesn't have the same kind of polish that most radio music has. Anyway, though, I have no problem with Payola, as long as the stations are honest about it. Just have a little disclaimer before a set that says "these songs are commercials bought and paid for by Sony, and the radio station does not necessarily vouch for their quality." The problem, I think, is that people don't get that much bang for their buck when it comes to buying a CD, and it's made all the worse by the fact that they can get the same thing online for 1/10th of the price. So, who ends up buying CDs in a record store? Either people that have a strange collector's fetish for the physical CD, or people that are casual music buyers that go into the music department at Wal-Mart not neccessarily knowing what they're going to buy, and they end up buying whatever band or singer's CD that they think of first. That's where Payola really pays off. The ethical problem people have is that, in a perfect world, radio stations are supposed to be playing a wide variety of music, and if people really like a certain song a lot, they'll call in and request it, and the songs that no one requests end up not getting played. Therefore, the songs that are good end up bringing the bands that recorded them into a higher place in public eye (ear?), and when those casual folks go to Wal-Mart they might think of them first. Payola kind of messes that up. But, so what? Lots of things mess that up. Videos, good looks, bad looks, crazy outfits, fun live shows, tabloid exposure, ridiculous scandals, 6-hour marriages, etc., all of them raise a band's profile. If they get an extra five plays a week on a radio station, I don't see how it upsets some kind of perfect balance. Plus, even if it did work the "ideal" way, it still wouldn't be fair. A multi-platinum record is not 10,000 times better than an indie, but they make 10,000 times as much money. How many people actually listen to their old Warrant and Poison albums? I think the best a band can hope for, if they're talented and they work really hard, is to break even and scrape out an okay living doing music and maybe some other things on the side. A lot of indie folks open up record stores and start labels, or start teaching music, booking bands, managing bands, and producing other people's albums, all while continuously playing in their own bands. Why do they do it? Because they love music, not because they get private yachts. Most people don't get to spend their lives in fields that they love, they make livings doing something they happen to be okay at. I doubt most CPAs chose their careers because they just loooove handling money. But, us musicians get to be in music, and we don't have to take on some slummy job that we hate. That is, in the end, all the reward we should need. Keith |
| I Gots Nothin' July 20th, 2005 -- Well, it's Tuesday a-gain, and my Tuesday bookmarks brought up the page I use to write the post for the webpage, so here I am. I can't say I really have anything to say right now, so if you leave at this point I won't hold it against you. I'm amazed at people whose brains seem to have an infinite amount of good and new things to say. Guys like Doug Wilson, who is a successful pastor, publishes a fascinating magazine, writes dozens upon dozens of books (and reads hundreds of others), and yet he still finds time to do nearly daily posts on a weblog. I think I'm one of those people that thinks he should be like that, but I've just found way too many videogames to play, internet sites about bad album covers to visit, and delicious food to be eaten. And kids to raise, wife to love, work to do, etc. I don't want to talk about how we're all just cogs in a machine, but I guess as long as we're reasonably happy cogs, it shouldn't be a big deal. But, maybe we idolize happiness. It's in our founding documents even, the pursuit of it given equal weight with life and liberty. From an evolutionary standpoint (or a design standpoint, it doesn't matter), you can argue that this total lack of the ability to be content could be really useful for a society's productivity. You have millions of people who think they're just a swimming pool or high-definition TV away from happiness, so they work just a little harder to get to that little carrot hanging on a string. If you stay in this mode forever, you live one very productive life. Of course, your life sucks, but that doesn't matter to the society that gets a lot of use out of you. Most people have a perfect balance, they might have ambition, but not too much. If you have absolutely no ambition, it's pretty easy to say "ok, how much can I get in welfare checks and credit card money, and that will be my budget." If you have too much ambition, you're not very useful for most companies. It's hard to get a job if you tell them "yeah, I'm just hoping to get this job so I can get some experience, find out all of your trade secrets, quit, start my own company, hire away your workers, and put you out of business." So, what's the secret to happiness on this side of death? I guess you just have to play with the cards you have, look at the long term, have some goals that cover all of your priorities and will take your lifetime to accomplish, and take the steps to accomplish those goals. None of that's terribly revolutionary thinking, but revolutionary thinking is rarely right. When it comes to my career, I have certain goals I want to accomplish, but I don't think many of them are long-term. I imagine that's probably a common mistake. Actually, it's exactly the problem with the tv/pool/carrot people I was talking about above. I guess I've internalized the fact that I don't need much more to be happy, I just have to accomplish these meager goals and I'll be all set. Of course, when I achieve those goals, I'll make equally inane and easily accomplished goals, and the plowing will continue. So, here's a goal for me to set for myself, and I'll put it right here. I want to have some music published by a real publishing company. I'm not going to set a date, and I'm not going to constrain it to a particular kind of music, but I want my music to be considered good enough by a company to be published and sold to other people. I'm nowhere near this goal now, so I think it's a good one for me to set. You folks hold me to it. Later, folks, and have a great week, Keith |
| Forgone Conclusions July 13th, 2005 -- I've been thinking a lot about how we as a people find truth, particularly about how we tend to come to the answer first, and then figure out whether the evidence supports that. If it doesn't, we come up with some kind of conspiracy theory that explains the lack of evidence. For instance -- George W. Bush is evil. Why? Because, well, he is. Just tell me something about him that's unevil. What, he lowered taxes and gave everyone a big tax refund? Well, um, he only did that because he wanted to give tax breaks to his big rich friends. AND, his tax cut ended up affecting rich people more than people that pay no taxes, so that's my proof. What, he helped free 30 million people from oppressive governments? Well, he only did that because he wanted oil for his rich friends and, um, he hates Arabs. See, it's easy to contort evidence against your view into proof of it, especially if the fundamental truth is hard or impossible to deduce absolutely (which it almost always is.) Science is supposed to be above this, but I don't think, by and large, it is. Science in general may correct itself over the course of generations, but individual scientists rarely do. If a scientist spends his entire life trying to figure out how his pet theory is true, he's not going to completely jettison it near the end of his life just because someone happens to raise serious questions about it's validity. If he has to, he might alter it slightly, but no one's going to say "I've wasted my entire life, and I'm stupid. Please disregard everything I've ever done." However, even though the individual scientist may stubbornly hold on to something, the science community, which doesn't have as much invested in his work, will feel free to reject it on the merits. The big problem comes, I think, when the entire science community is on the wrong track, and most of them have invested their lives barking up the wrong tree. This has happened numerous times in the history of science, and it will surely happen again. To believe science always has the answers is, historically, idiotic. Right now the favorite punching bag of the science community is Christianity, particularly regarding things such as evolution. "Ha ha, what kind of ignorant backwoods 'scientist' believes the world is less than 6 billion cajillion years old and that all organic life forms came from inorganic life forms? Ha ha ha ha ha, stupid different thinker." I say . . . so what if they're wrong? Why does that bother you so much to know that they think something different than you do? If you're so firm in your beliefs, then let them twiddle away their lives proving, in the end, that you were right all along. Whenever I see a large number of scientists attacking other scientists, I start taking the attackees ideas a little more seriously, because scientists generally don't attack quacks, they attack rivals. So, how do you find truth, if truth is often unknowable? Well, my theory is that you really don't, and you should be skeptical of things you tend to believe are absolutely true unless you have an incredibly intimate knowledge of the subject at hand, especially when the consequences for your being wrong are disastrous. For instance, you see a woman in a grocery store, and she has a large belly, and has a couple of small children with her. Do you say "when's that baby coming?" or do you say " . . . ". Or, you're in Burger King and you don't know for absolutely sure the gender of the stout "person" with short hair, a low husky voice, and a nametag that says "Bobbi". Do you risk a "ma'am" or "sir"? I take the same approach with life, and it seems to work out pretty well. ********* I updated the music page yesterday, including instructions on how to do the whole guitar techno thing, for anyone that's interested. I also uploaded some of the older and rougher incarnations of guitar techno, so have a listen. Keith |
| Moral Relativism Doesn't Exist, Only Politeness July 1st, 2005 -- I can't go more than a week without hearing a Christian teacher or leader talking about "Moral Relativism", ie, the idea that everyone's right, that there is no absolute truth (I know this isn't a good summation of the actual belief, but this is the idea as it's often portrayed by Christian leaders.) I think this is a Trojan horse. I don't think anyone believes that there's no absolute truth, and I think we need to come up with a new term. I propose the term "unbelief". Here's what I think: If you say "I believe there was a Hebrew man who lived several millenia ago who supposedly lived a perfect life and, according to a cosmic rulebook there has to be someone to pay for all of the stuff that we've done wrong (according to him), and he decided that if he was killed by the local government for something he didn't do, it would magically pay for the sin of the whole world, as long as you believed him," people won't like to say "you're an idiot and you're wrong". That's considered rude. So, they think to themselves "well, who's it going to hurt?" or "whatever", and they smile and say "I'm glad that works for you." Relativism is unintuitive, it's not based upon regular experience. If I see a telephone sitting on my desk, and I reach for it and feel its weight in my hands and the plastic on my fingers, I'm certain that it's real, that it's absolutely true. I believe in the phone, because there is substantial evidence for its existence. With religious systems, this can't really be the case. Religions are generally centered around things that we can't know in an absolute, I-feel-the-phone sort of way. They're based upon metaphysical things, supernatural things, and unverifiable (according to many people) history. So, I imagine myself telling some random person "I believe that there is a race of astronauts that lives on an invisible moon next to the sun, and they make large dark chocolate candy bars that cover the sky, and they have little sprinkles on them (us humans call them 'stars!'), and if I count to 472 at dawn and sunset for the next 17 1/2 years as I face toward Hershey, PA., they'll whisk me away in their enchanted Gravy Bowl and we'll go and live together in a tropical paradise for all of eternity! My life just didn't have purpose before, but this secret race of Confectorians has changed me in fundamental ways and made my life worth living!!!" Whoever I was talking to would probably say "I'm glad that you're happy, and I'm glad that works for you, and if you think that's right, that's great" and would walk away trying to squelch a laugh, and I would go and make a video about how absurd it is that "the world" believes that they are right and I'm right too, about how they are all relativists that don't believe in absolute truth, and about how I'm so smart to point out their absurdity. People, Christianity is absurd to non-Christians. Be glad that they are polite enough just to say "whatever", and aren't into the whole "let's make them into human candles" thing. We don't need to worry about the fact that our people are turning into some bizarre human form alien to all of history that believes up can also be down and that left can be right, we should worry more about the fact that us calling them morons all of the time will finally make them think that they shouldn't be polite any more, that the lions are getting lazy and need a little more sport over in the coliseum. Keith Update: After I wrote this, I realized I should probably say what actual moral relativism is, to satisfy all of those folks that subscribe to it, knowingly or not. It's the belief that there is no absolutely perfect moral code in existence, or that we as mere humans can't know what that perfect moral system is. What I described up there is probably more accurately defined as moral pluralism, which genuinely is nutty, but which few people genuinely subscribe to. |
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Older posts can be found here.
Write Keith at keith@thewind-ups.com |
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