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Prince Gets Wordy About Napster
pezpunk sent in a link to an ABC News story about Prince putting his two cents in about Napster. Prince has actually been on the cutting edge of distribution technology for years. Say what you want about his style, but Prince knows where it's at. He's been running his own label, Paisley Park, for a while, and he features artists like George Clinton.
One point that he touches on, which is not commonly expressed, is that motivation- love vs. consumption. If you put in some work (years of it) studying music, production, sound engineering, you gradually become more able to target the median of consumer desires, and you learn how to avoid including anything that would offend a consumer- and then you get to be mainstream, possibly a million seller, if you're properly hyped.
This is not art, but commerce.
Prince has in some ways used 'commercially popular' techniques (good production, intense vocals, high squealy notes and high squealy guitar solos etc etc etc) but he is also one of the few who's genuinely shown an experimental spirit- perhaps best illustrated by one of his monster hits, 'When Doves Cry'. The production of this remains unusual but at the time that it came out, was quite shocking- sparse, largely empty, producing more impact by virtue of the sheer bareness of the track. Prince was known to record many parts in the studio and then work by subtraction, taking out this and that track and seeing what combination of parts worked best- in "When Doves Cry" this subtractive technique was carried to an extreme. It breaks all the rules for 'popular' music production, and breaks them so well that it became a breakout monster hit.
The important thing to remember about art is that it is individual, and it's not possible to achieve artistic peaks and still avoid making enemies of your work. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin- the nearer you come to some person's love, the more another person will hate what you've done. A real artist (and I do consider Prince a real artist) will ignore this, accept the hate, refuse to water down their artistic vision.
Naturally I consider my music art ;) more significantly, _only_ since I started to accept it as art have I liked it worth a damn. I produced music for years, in an agony of trying to tailor it to what I thought people would like. (This is all pre-Internet and little remains of this stuff.) It was OK- never managed to get beyond my own idiosyncracies and never succeeded in making truly commercial music. Then I started again, and for particular reasons (access to mp3.com) I decided to do some music that was just what _I_ felt like doing- to do a lot of different music based only on what I felt like playing and composing and hearing.
Since then, it's been freaking awesome! :) I've talked with a lot of other musicians, made a lot of really rabid fans, a lot of really rabid enemies, and a kinda-lot of money (to me, a couple hundred bucks is a lot). I've seen people fixate on the strangest things and be delighted, and I've had people take GREAT PAINS to convince me and anyone else reading that I'm a complete loser who's not good enough to be commercial. And I love every bit of it. My artist side was long suppressed and restrained, but now when I see someone come off all negative and totally scorn my music, I'll laugh at them and tell them to listen to stuff like the 'Hard Vacuum' noise album, or 'Bone Dragon' or 'Water Dragon' from the Dragons album which are downright weird, or I'll just sneer back at them and go off and produce some more music that they'd hate even worse. Because I do what _I_ like- I do what I think is good, and I like a lot of truly peculiar music :)
I've tried to arrange my mp3.com page so that it explains to people a little better what they're getting into- but what I'm about is not being 'the Microsoft of music' or pinning down the widest possible range of consumers. What illustrates me best is the picture of me running a roaring shortwave radio through homebrewed multiband compression and screwing with the controls to produce a definitive Noise track (White Dwarf), something which most of the world might think is just crap! But there are Noise fans out there, protesting at the tendency for industrial techno to genre-trespass into Noise charts, people who understand _immediately_ just what's being attempted in 'White Dwarf' and instantly recognise it as canonical Noise, from a hitherto unheard source. Or the image might be the composing of 'Water Dragon', spending _days_ painstakingly filling in the froth of flickering piano notes around the spacey lead piano theme, and composing a drum part that is so relentlessly experimental that it seems to stretch and contract in a peculiar disjointed rhythm- which evokes the unforgiving wasteland of the sea. You can't dance to the sea. You could drown in it. You can't understand it. It's not necessarily pretty- but there's a validity to trying to express it in sound and music- and when Prince talks about people listening to music for love of it and teaching themselves to understand it, he's not talking about making more crappy manufactured hits, he's talking about the forces that eventually got me onto my own artistic path- of people exchanging and learning from stuff that's beyond what the major labels feed 'the consumer'.
How many of you have used Napster or something like it to try and find something really _obscure_ or weird or unpopular? Never mind if you found it- that'll come. Have you searched for something that Warner Bros. would not sell you, because there's 'no market' for it? This is what Prince is really talking about. This is the reason I've so often asked for my music to be openly traded on Napster This is the only way towards cultural education now that there's no market for culturally educating people in school...
"The notion of copyright was not invented by artists to protect themselves from honest individuals sharing their enthusiasm about their work," he writes. "It was invented by artists to protect themselves from dishonest and hypocritical individuals and companies exploiting their work without their consent."
I couldn't put it better. It isn't the technology of Napster that is feared, it's the distribution channel.
You've got a company exec who says, "An increasing number of young people don't buy albums, so we are not only losing that immediate revenue. They are growing up with a notion that music is free and ought to be free." Who says that it shouldn't be free? Who appointed this exec God? Or, who appointed "tradition" as fact? The idea that sound is a commodity is a rather strange development that arose due to the limitations of technology and some clever businessmen.
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