Meet the new badness... same as the old badness
IN 2014, the legendary American musician Van Dyke Parks was invited by Ringo
Starr to his house in Beverly Hills, to write a song with him. They spent two days writing and recording, and when it was done, they tried to figure out what the “day rate” might be, for their time and effort.
Van Dyke Parks wrote: “Forty years ago, writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about $80. When I got home, on closer study, I found out we were way too optimistic…”
“How Songwriters
Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age” was the headline of the piece that he wrote about it. And immediately I thought not just of the professional songwriters, but of that legion of men and women who would write a song or two with the dream that some day it might become a One Hit Wonder, covered by Michael Buble — at which point all their troubles would be over.
We may talk in abstract terms of the ways in which intellectual property is being devoured by the tech monsters, but this is what it comes down to, the killing of one more dream in the human heart — the last best hope of the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker if there was any such thing.
Yet I am always wary of denouncing such outrages of the “Digital Age” as if these forms of badness were only invented by a few smart lads over in LA in 2014.
Musicians and people of talent in general have been getting screwed by their inferiors since ancient times — always some way has been found to rip off the creative types, be it by locking them into “slave” contracts or by the “professionals” in whom they trust simply stealing their money.
The evil itself is not new, it just feels that way due to the vastness of anything to do with the “Digital
Age”. Whereas you had an image in the mind’s eye of some crooked manager or agent helping himself to an artist’s royalties, the idea of “the internet” paying a songwriter .000000000000000023 cents every time a song is played seems beyond the realm of the imagination — and yet while badness may have better delivery systems now, it is still the same old badness.
When the Tories do up a fake ‘Factcheck UK’ Twitter account during the debate between Johnson and Corbyn, clearly they are finding more opportunities to fool people than they might have fooled in olden times with some other such scam — but the fault is still in their inherent Tory badness, not necessarily in Twitter.
If anything, the standard of political chicanery has slipped somewhat since the days when legends of the game such as Fianna Fail were capable of planting trees in a constituency before a by-election, and having them dug up again when their man lost — or even according to legend, trying to buy every copy of the Evening Herald in the shops, in an attempt to kill a dangerous story.
Indeed the death of
Niall Toibin reminded me of one of the first major interactions between the Irish political stroke-merchant and the “new technology” — this was the interview during an Election Special which Brian Farrell in the RTE studio tried to conduct with Sean Doherty of Fianna Fail at the count centre in Roscommon.
I met and interviewed Toibin shortly after that, and he was still greatly amused by the way that Doherty, on hearing a question of Farrell’s to which he did not have any plausible answer, suddenly went silent... it seemed he had decided that the smart play here was to pretend that the line to Donnybrook had gone dead.
And even on the offchance that there was a genuine technical fault, the fact that a shrewd observer of the scene such as Toibin
instinctively believed otherwise, was a statement in itself. Sure, it’s not quite on the scale of Russia stealing the US election and putting their guy in the White House, but it reminds us there has always been something in
the soul of the politician that is unembarrassable.
The American founding father James Madison would have seen all this coming, because back in the 18th Century he was worried about the potential of the mob —“In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed... Passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason,” he wrote.
Indeed Madison had believed that the largeness of America would help to prevent mobs from mobilising with their “dangerous energy”, but with new media technologies such as the circulation of newspapers, he feared that those dangerous energies would no longer get the chance to burn themselves out. To him the notion of all that information being consumed at the one sitting in the newspaper every day was terrifying, knowing as he did the corruptibility of Man. We are all James Madison now, and rightly so. And yet we must not let ourselves be totally overwhelmed by the mob-friendliness of the “digital age”, because there’s an older truth here — the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
‘If anything, the standard of political chicanery has slipped somewhat...’