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6/12/2010

Blood on the Tracks

Shed no more tears shed for the music industry, says chief Radiohead scruffbag Thom Yorke.
If the mass-music industry had never been invented,  we would still have had our own local Beatles, as people did before Edison,  and we would have loved them just as much. In spite of what it likes to think, the industrialised mass-media didn't invent music.
True, the technology and commercial constraints formed the music of the C20th, but that was an artistic price we had to pay, and which was often a bargain. But compared with the real price of popular culture, it was nothing. The real price being the endless parade of tortured and destroyed lives required to feed the class-driven ShowBiz machine.
Before Minstrelsy and since, Showbiz has always been an escape from poverty, and many of its most memorable stars were performing out of fear, more than anything else. What we call talent is not much more than a neurosis. A horror of descent into the pit of poverty and abuse whicih always gaped under the feet of a Judy Garland or Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday or Richard Pryor... The Art of  Desperation.
It is important,  when popular culture has become so trivialised and devalued by the advertising industry (especially) to hear the  real stories in the music. The stories of the little children afraid of hunger and sickness and desperate for security. When the real story is heard, the false barrier between art and showbiz tends to disappear.

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