June 2012

It’s OK to steal, cos it’s so nice to share

Media / / 4 minutes of reading

In 2001, American alt-country singer Gillian Welch released a song that, in her ever-so-quiet way, excoriated the download generation. Everything Is Free made a crucial observation: that musicians, artists and writers would keep creating content regardless of whether anyone actually wanted to pay for it or not.

“Everything is free now,” she sang plaintively. “That’s what they say / Everything I ever done / Gotta give it away / Someone hit the big score / They figured it out / That we’re gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn’t pay.”

That drive – the physical compulsion to create – has always been at the centre of the artist’s core. They don’t choose to live in penury as such: poverty is simply the most common by-product of the fact that one doesn’t really choose to be an artist, either. It’s something that more often chooses you.

Welch wrote the song just before file-sharing service Napster was taken to the cleaners in the courts, but the damage was already done. Who wanted to pay for anything they could get for free anymore? Loudon Wainwright III put Welch’s viewpoint more pungently in another song, Something For Nothing: “It’s OK to steal, ’cause it’s so nice to share.”… Read more..

Bayoneting the wounded

Media / / 7 minutes of reading

In her classic long-form essay The Journalist And The Murderer, American writer Janet Malcolm used an opening gambit that immortalised herself while throwing a bucket of corrosive acid over her profession. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she declared. “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse…

“Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the public’s ‘right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”

After one of the most traumatic weeks in the history of Australian media, perhaps now is not the kindest time to be quoting Malcolm. But I was reminded of her words last Thursday, when a nasty spat broke out over at Media and Marketing website Mumbrella after Tina Alldis, head of PR agency Mango in Sydney, penned an opinion piece for the website that seemed to do a tap-dance at the prospect of thousands of people about to hit the dole queues.… Read more..

The beginning of a breakdown: Lyon

Music / / 7 minutes of reading

“Welcome to the big, fat south of France,” says Andy.

Actually, we’re not fully in the south yet. We’re in Lyon, which is more in the central east, really. But it’s sunny, it’s very warm, and after a day and a half’s driving, the cold and wet of Brittany feels another world away. The road had taken us away from the major highway, through winding hills and small Terracotta-topped villages. Then we’d spent a good hour poking our way through the city’s outskirts to its mad, pulsating centre.

There’s less than half a million people here, but it feels like more. Maybe that’s because I’m still driving the Big Black Car. The streets in the city are narrow, the roads are chaotic, and parking is slightly … desperate. We want to check out Dangerhouse, a famous record emporium near the city centre, but it’s impossible to find a space for the van anywhere, so in the end we just head for the venue. It feels hot and crowded and stressful.

Actually, it’s not that bad, just a bit of a taster for what’s to come in the real south – in Marseilles. And the stress falls away pretty quickly once we’re on the boat.… Read more..

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