Corporate commandeering and your CD library
Re: Pop music is pap today, classic tomorrow, Sept 1st
I hate to disappoint you Caleigh Rykiss [author], but your initial impression about pop music today being pap is actually true. But for different reasons than you suggest.
Far from just the knee-jerk cynicism you cite as the cause, the real cause is a full-speed-in-reverse return to corporate hegemony and the culture of conformity. With the massive mergers of music corporations with other media outlets during the 1990s, the increasing priority became bottom line profits. For a corporation, this means minimizing risks, which translates into carefully calculated (in some accounting geek’s mind, anyway) choices about which musical acts to sign onto major labels. The result: a new era of mediocrity and demographically-pitched “artists.” Not unlike the 1950s, when it took mavericks like Elvis and Chuck Berry to bust mediocre white pop music out of its kitschy dead-end.
All art is about taking risks. This actively works against the corporate principle of maximizing shareholder profits. You mention Pink Floyd. Well, under today’s corporate regime, a Dark Side of the Moon (the world’s record holder for number of consecutive weeks in the top Album charts) would never see the light of day, except maybe as an independently released CD. Thankfully we have Radiohead to contradict this principle. But how many others like them can you honestly list today?
During the golden era of rock and pop music, circa 1966-74, record industry A&R men (or talent scouts) were all competing with one another to hunt out and sign up new artists. In the open-minded, genuinely liberal spirit of the times, risk was seen as a valuable asset in exposing new talent to the world. Now record labels compete to clone their version of Britney Spears. For interest’s sake, just compare the sheer number of “classic” bands (i.e. those whose music has just as much freshness and appeal to successive generations as it did when released) produced by the “classic rock” era with today. I guarantee you it’s no contest.
Until we decide to limit the powers of corporations at all levels, this is just one example of their ongoing negative effect on human culture and society.
Art Joyce
New Denver, BC
Checkup on the Epoch Times in China
Re: Copps: “diversity” will save China-West relations, Sept 1st
Nitzan Rotenberg wrote that “the Epoch Times [is] largely distributed in mainland China.”
The Epoch Times is in fact banned in China and four of its reporters are currently imprisoned there.
P. C. Choo
