Thinking
of the 1958 Chinese number I referred to yesterday, “Socialism Is Good” it is
striking to consider what was playing over in New York at roughly the same
time. I’m continuing my bop
bassist search and have come upon two albums by the one Doug Watkins. The 1960 release “Soulnick” and the
song “One Guy” with Yusef Lateef on flute is filling out this lovely spring
day. How stentorian and arhythmical the prior would have sounded to the ‘Soulnick’
set, how decadent and frivolous the bop groove would have registered in China’s
Great Leap Forward élan.
And fate is tricky.
Li Huanzhi the prior song’s songwriter managed to live through the great
famine and the insanity of the Cultural Revolution to greet the new millennium, when
he died at aged 81. Our man from
Detroit would die within two years of this session he lead in a car accident at the age
of 27.
Caught up in irony and hypocrisy today; my own and 世态炎凉[1].
Clearly of Greek origin, I had a look at the etymology of the aspersion 'hypocrite' today:
Whereas hypokrisis applied to any sort of public performance (including the
art of rhetoric), hypokrites was a technical term for a stage actor and was not
considered an appropriate role for a public figure. In Athens in the 4th
century BC, for example, the great orator Demosthenes ridiculed his rival
Aeschines, who had been a successful actor before taking up politics, as a
hypocrites whose skill at impersonating characters on stage made him an
untrustworthy politician. This negative view of the hypokrites, perhaps
combined with the Roman disdain for actors, later shaded into the originally
neutral hypokrisis. It is this later sense of hypokrisis as
"play-acting", i.e., the assumption of a counterfeit persona, that
gives the modern word hypocrisy its negative connotation.
Regular readers already know that workers are building a
structure in the home behind mine in this compound. They saw and bang away all week and it's a drag when the
windows open and there ain’t much I can do about. But I also happen to know that our compound has a rule
prohibiting noisy construction on Sundays. So as the circular saw started whining this morning,
and I found myself enduring as always, it occurred to me that it was Sunday and
I called the management office and asked them in Chinese to speak to these
folks about this rule.
Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later I could hear the
guard go over and talk to them and it was quite for a while. Then, all noises save the circular saw
started up again. Nah. Uh, uh. I called the management office back and said: “So it’s me
again. Your man went over, and
talked to the workers and they’ve completely ignored him. This is ridiculous. If you don’t have any enforcement your
rules are simply a joke.” The man
agreed and said he was on it.
Random construction noise continued for a while. I was very tempted to yell out the
window and tell them, “what did you not understand about ‘no noise’?” or “please gents, go home.” But here, where the rule of law is only
imperfectly adhered to, I would accomplish nothing but trouble to insert my
foreign ass directly into a dispute, unless it were absolutely necessary. I started thinking about how not
working would probably mean they weren’t going to earn critical money for the
day. But on the balance I settled
on the relative legitimacy of the idea that for one day at least, we should
have some quiet. The guard
returned, more flustered, animated this time, they objected, he insisted, and
then, they left for the day.
Later some workers miraculously showed up at my place days days later than
requested, to finally replace some sheet rock that had been damaged by
water. Long overdue and
I showed them to spot and offered them something to drink and left them to it, and
it occurred to me, that technically, I should tell them to go home and return
tomorrow. But practically I
resigned myself to letting them use screw guns and other noise generating devices in my home on a Sunday, until someone else raised the matter as annoying. They wouldn’t be making much noise . .
.
I often speak about the “imperfect migration from the rule
of man to the rule of law,” when discussing China, but realistically that is an
imperfect migration in all of us.
Certainly it is in me: acting a a self righteous role, acting a sly one.
Alas, the theme continues. I shared with some old friends my appreciation of the
Menahan Street Band whom I first introduced a few days ago. Walking around on a sunny Beijing day
yesterday, they sounded divine.
It’s a caustic, ironic bunch these friends and one pointed out that the
band was probably only getting $0.47 per year or so from Rdio for all this
celestial music I was enjoying. I
escalated things sarcastically. Others
chimed in, and I gleefully ratcheted the sarcasm higher. But the underlying point isn’t so easy to dismiss.
Making use of Rdio is a like being eight years old in a
candy store with a pillow-case and being told to help yourself. It’s a fabulous cornucopia that I pay
$10.00 per month for. Doug Watkins
and more recently Yusef Lateef have both passed. So too, perhaps are the statute of limitations on what is in
“the public realm.” I absolutely
feel that, having bought the “license rights” “the IP access” for “Abbey Road”
and “Let it Bleed” and “Highway 61 Revisited” and five hundred other albums once, when it hurt, with my
hard-earned driveway shovelling money as a teenager and then probably again, in
my twenties, when I purchased the CDs, and I have no issue with listening to such things now,
without paying a cent. But
certainly the Menahan Street Band, who released one of the albums I’ve been enjoying
in 2012, are all, as far as I can tell alive and kicking, and heretofore have
not received a penny from me, sans the meagre Rdio trickle for all the joy they brought me these last few
days.
Technology will continue to drive disruption. The manner in which music was produced
and consumed in the late twentieth century will quickly fade ever faster into memory
as an adorable anachronism. The 33
RPM LP that replaced the Victrola, the Sony Walkman and the iPod are all,
already, equally irrelevant staring forward. Music will continue to completely change, in accordance with
what technology enables in terms of sounds, means for consumption and . . . how
value is transferred.
So what’s to be done about the fact that musicians do not
receive much of anything from a service, which I’ve paid only the barest
minimum to enjoy? Analytically it
means this is not sustainable and in accordance, the music itself, the way
people make it and distribute it, will all continue to change. But personally is there anything
practical to be done about addressing the hypocrisy of enjoying a personal
bounty to the detriment of people who aren’t properly compensated? Music is by no means the only area out from which these glaring headlights shine.
Certainly live concerts like the family excursion to the Ray
Lema Quintet last weekend, where I gladly paid twelve bucks on top of the
ticket to have his latest CD that is not
on Rdio, are one answer. But in
general, I’ll never have the chance support 99% of the music I consume that
way. Do we have faith then
that human ingenuity and sense of moral refinement will find a way to fund what
will otherwise die for lack of oxygen? Or is this next hundred years a new, tighter, tightening of the screw
that commoditizes art into something with less and less a chance to flower
and disseminate?
Innately I presume that humans will simply find a new way to express themselves. But when no one is around the hypocrites must answer to himself. Certainly I have consumed more music in the last six months than I have otherwise heard anew for the last three years. Vitamin charged, what is my responsibility as one acting through life? In a world where socialism is no longer especially "good", in the way Li Huanzhi suggested, where does the thread of 'fair trade' lead?
Innately I presume that humans will simply find a new way to express themselves. But when no one is around the hypocrites must answer to himself. Certainly I have consumed more music in the last six months than I have otherwise heard anew for the last three years. Vitamin charged, what is my responsibility as one acting through life? In a world where socialism is no longer especially "good", in the way Li Huanzhi suggested, where does the thread of 'fair trade' lead?
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