I purchased "The Gulag Archipelago" before I learned how to pronounce his name. But I never read it.

At this late date, I believe "Anna Karenina" to be the best book ever written, but when I attempted "The Gulag Archipelago", I had not read Tolstoy’s work, I was a Russian literature newbie. And I failed. I never got past page 25.

But what fascinates me nearly four decades later is why I purchased "The Gulag Archipelago". Maybe I was fascinated with the Russian labor camps, a dark world akin to the concentration camps of the Nazis. Or maybe I still believed that books were important, that music wasn’t the only art form that could change the world.

Yes, by 1970, you listened to the radio if you wanted to know which way the wind blew. And it was not to hear the bloviating of political commentators, but the music of young longhairs, intertwined with the musings of deejays from the same generation and the minimal advertisements of companies that attempted to be our friends as opposed to pulling the wool over our eyes.

People still write books. People still make music. But both are passe art forms in terms of their impact upon society. Few people read novels. As for music… It’s become about whoring yourself out to the man, so you can get paid. Whoring yourself out to the man has become legitimized by a homogenous society out to get every scrap, every morsel, every dollar it believes it’s entitled to. And if someone else loses out as a result, well then fuck them.

89 is a ripe old age. If I live that long, almost twenty years past the expiration date of my father, I will be happy. Still, the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is unsettling to me. Because it’s another manifestation of the end of an era. When a solitary individual could lead the masses, not wanting election or riches so much as a desire that life could be better, for everybody.

So I’m trudging through the obituary in the "New York Times". Learning about a complicated man. And I come across this passage:

"He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged ‘not to participate in lies,’ artists had greater responsibilities. ‘It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!’"

Rappers tried to defeat the lie. I remember after the L.A. riots realizing that Ice-T was right. But this was before the goal of a rapper was to have a clothing company, to live life large with ho’s and cars on gigantic rims.

As for rockers… Shit, the art form expired with Bon Jovi and the rest of the hair bands back in the eighties. To this day, I’ve never heard Jon Bon Jovi utter a negative word. He doesn’t want to offend anybody, he doesn’t want to risk his lifestyle, he doesn’t stand for anything. Whereas Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was only about the truth, he was willing to risk his life for the truth, he was driven to stand up to a repressive government. While in the twenty first century Justin Timberlake serves up African-American Janet Jackson after disrobing her at the Super Bowl, needing to be on America’s Team, one that is always right and does no wrong.

What has America’s Team become? One solely of rampant commercialism?

I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with making money, but when your whole social structure is only about making money, you’ve truly got a bankrupt society.

The goal is to run a hedge fund. To try and make $50 million a year. If someone is rich, they must be revered. Taxes must be lowered so just in case you become rich, you can maintain your wealth. But the American Dream of the American Team lives on in Western Europe more than the United States. Studies show upward mobility in America has declined dramatically. But, the working class borrows at exorbitant rates to purchase trucks and evanescent merchandise in a hollow attempt to emulate the rich. How bizarre.

But no one writes about this bizarreness. And if anyone is singing about it, he’s got such a poor voice and plays his instrument so ineptly that few listen. Whereas the most mainstream of artists used to protest inequities. That’s why Paul McCartney can never be John Lennon. John Lennon spoke his mind, he stood for stuff. The establishment hated him, his fans love him to this day.

I believe truth and honesty only live online today. Where anyone with an Internet connection can post his inner feelings. Technology allows the previously disenfranchised, those without power, to testify and spread their ideas. The best and the brightest don’t want to play music, they want to create a Website, that changes the world.

Facebook has changed the world. More than any record released in a decade. Mariah Carey prances around in fuck-me pumps, showing off her surgically-enhanced body, and a fading mainstream media delineates her prancings as if they matter.

But they don’t.

Music’s only hope as an art form is if the artists embrace Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s words, and try to defeat the lie. But, they’ve become the lie.