My little sister reminded me that I gave all the proceeds from my backyard carnival to the JFK Library. I’d forgotten. How did she remember? She was only nine at the time.
But that’s how we reconstruct history, through the collective consciousness, the wisdom and memories of those who lived through it. But usually, we’re too caught up in our present petty issues to look back. But when we do, we’re stunned to find insight into today’s problems, stunned to find that we’re just part of the giant continuum, of life.
I don’t hear JFK’s name invoked much in this Presidential election. I’ve heard a lot about Reagan, and a lot about our sitting President, George Bush. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Bush’s policies, no one accuses him of being an intellectual, a great thinker, a ponderer of the past who brings great insight to today’s challenges. George Bush hears a set of facts and shoots from the hip. He relies on his advisors. He’s not an intellectual, he’s a boy prince.
JFK was an intellectual. Our Presidents used to be the best and the brightest. But in this country based on illusion, now education and the power of analysis it excretes are seen as the privilege of non-patriots living on the coast, who just don’t have the gumption of a true American.
Jack Kennedy had that gumption. And a Harvard education to boot. His college thesis was published as a book and sold thousands of copies. Jack Kennedy was curious. Not only did he travel widely as a young adult, he went to the Middle East, to gain a further knowledge of the Muslim world, long before he ran for President.
Sure JFK was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But so were all the tramps splashed all over PerezHilton and TMZ. Wealth and status only give you a starting point. Where you go from there is up to you.
Walking through the JFK Library, one is stunned that the same issues debated in the 1960 election haunt us now. Health care, the financial system and national security were key. But JFK believed government could and should help our citizens. The coin of his realm was optimism, hard work and sacrifice rather than today’s entitlement. To view the exhibits is to be alternately inspired and deflated. Magnetically drawn to the power of passionate people and repelled by the mine for me society of today.
Although we fight terrorists in this decade, the big enemy fifty years ago was Russia, and creeping Communism. Seems quaint now, but when one is confronted with the map of Communist countries in the sixties one can understand the fear that we were on the brink of the dominoes tumbling, of ending up with the short end of the stick. America wasn’t the bear berating and manipulating so much as the scrappy young fighter standing up and doing the right thing. The Twin Towers were annihilated by terrorists, rogue agents in this modern world, but missiles were place in Cuba by a very definable enemy, one that not only wanted to bring us down, but dominate the world, and appeared to possibly have that power.
The first exhibit you see at the JFK Library is one of JFK’s youth and adolescence. And Byron White’s report on the sinking of PT 109. When you read the previously classified document about how the wooden boat was sheared in half by a Japanese destroyer and JFK swam to shore, tugging an incapacitated seaman along with him, and then swam from island to island, exploring a way to be rescued, you feel small. You wonder if you could brave these seas, if you’d make further efforts upon reaching terra firma in order to benefit the rest of your crew, languishing behind on the beach.
From there you go into a theatre and watch a film. Which immerses you in history. You feel like you’re really living back then.
But what stunned me was the following words, from a speech at Yale University, back in 1962.
"As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Mythology distracts us everywhere–in government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs."
President Kennedy didn’t know how prescient he was, he was speaking of the modern music business, one run on a set of preconceptions that we must adhere to.
I think it’s great that Doug Morris donated a million dollars to the City of Hope, I just wonder how he became so wealthy, where he got so much money that he could sacrifice a million and so many of the artists he built his fortune on the back of are struggling, barely able to pay the bills, many not even able to play music for a living anymore.
At the same time Doug Morris ranted against theft of his product. As if it’s truly Doug’s, as if he and Jimmy bequeath this material on the public, primarily for their own benefit.
We must stop speaking of the theft of our music. We must stop thinking of sale of individual tracks, never mind albums. We must confront the reality that citizens now own a plethora of music, of many different genres, and if we were to charge them what said music was worth under old pretenses, they’d be bankrupted.
We don’t have percentage mechanicals, preventing distribution in accordance with consumption, all because publishers don’t trust labels. The public is ignored. Everything is done for the benefit of the fat cat, the businessman, who has succeeded, in the case of the record labels, in destroying a great deal of the value of the companies they lord over.
There’s a myth that a number one record should translate into millions of sales, and that a single should sell albums, even though people are abandoning radio and everyone knows the odds of the rest of the album being good are almost nil.
We’re supposed to believe in these artists, even though they’re quite clearly tools of the corporation, who are primarily in it to get rich themselves.
And getting rich is harder than ever before. Because with multiple avenues of exhibition and distribution, it’s hard to gain critical mass. But we don’t see the lumbering labels adjusting for this. They just overpay their executives and hemorrhage worker bees. And ask for more rights from the artist to better their bottom line.
For an industry that wants things to continue the same way they were in the nineties, it’s astounding that there’s a refusal to look back any further. To see that the sales boom was started by the Beatles, an act so good that they’re the top selling catalog act almost fifty years on. To see that bumps in revenue came from format change, from LP to CD, and a new method of exhibition, music on television, i.e. MTV.
MTV was not the enemy. The labels owned the clips that the music channel launched on. But the labels couldn’t see how to monetize them. The labels cannot see that the Internet is about opportunity, and that the way to make money is to try new things, not to kick the tires and ultimately say no.
People want to own their music. At least for now. Streaming on MySpace is like taking a taxi when you want to drive your own car. But MySpace Music fits the label’s requirement of control. But the labels don’t realize they’ve given up control, it was snatched from them years ago.
JFK did not say we should stop progress, that we should leave the government out of business. He said we should rally around our challenges, together, and march into the future. The space program not only put men on the moon, it ignited technology firms in America, it jump-started so much of today’s computer world.
I don’t want to criticize, I want to believe. But in order to make progress, one must run against the old men, who insist that there be no change, at least not without them getting their cut. That formula resembles nothing so much as the Mafia, which Robert Kennedy did so much to undermine and eliminate.
It’s no longer a top down music business. Everybody’s chasing the customer, everybody’s vying for attention. Attention comes first, then monetization. And said monetization may not resemble what came previously, and the revenue generated for each act may be much less. But to deny this is to believe in the myth, that somehow we can go back to an era where the major labels dominated, when diamond selling acts plundered like pirates all over the world. We can have no progress until we all get on the same page, and not only admit our problems, but accept reality.
Reality is music is the most powerful art form on earth. TV and movies pale in comparison. Video games too. A great record can inspire you, coddle you, give you hope and drive you to excellence. And no matter how many times you play it, it doesn’t lose its power. It’s not an evanescent commodity, but a life force that needs to be respected by its purveyors. The audience, the consumers, the public, they already respect music more than you ever will. They live for it. Stop beating up on them, not only are they the future, they’re already one step ahead.
