The Weak In Rock

I have a bit of an obsession with the plight of the successful musician stuck in a lousy record deal. It just amazes me that after decades, heck nearly a century of musicians getting reamed by record contracts, management contracts, publishing deals, promotional deals, etc. ad infinitum that no one ever seems to get wise.

On the one hand I get it. You want your record to be released and you want people to be able to buy it. Making music, like making any art, is largely an external expression of the artist’s ego. He/She wants to be loved and he/she wants to have their work appreciated. I get that. But it would seem that after all this time that some musician would occassionally consider whether signing on the dotted line was a good idea based upon the obligations contained in the contract.

Alas, nope. Doesn’t work that way. Steve Albini said is best:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke”. And he does of course.

Way back in the vast wastes of time (the late 1960s to be exact) it dawned on Van Morrison that he’d swum the above mentioned trench and needed to get out of his record deal and into a better one. He owed his label a certain number of songs and was smart enough to see that his contract allowed him to deliver pretty much any songs he wanted, so that’s what he did. Contractual obligations met he signed a lucrative deal with Warner Brothers and then handed them his masterpiece, Astral Weeks.

WFMU have dredged out the 30 songs that Morrison delivered to Bang Records to fulfill his contract and posted the mp3s for us to enjoy. It’s hilarious. I particularly like Want A Danish.

Enjoy.

(thanks to Boing Boing for the link)

This is Banned Books Week as promoted by the American Library Association.

Think about that for a minute. What on earth is the rationale behind banning a book? If that question doesn’t boggle your mind as much as it does mine have a look at the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books list maintained by the ALA.

Here are my favorites (and by favorites I mean that in a sense of shock and awe at the stupidity of the self-appointed monitors of public morality who live among us):

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck - an utter and total classic work of American literature.

Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling - childrens’ books found objectionable because the heroes are wizards and witches.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - oooh, a confused teenage boy swears a lot.

Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine - another set of childrens’ fiction that people challenge because it talks about the supernatural.

Final Exit by Derek Humphry - a book about euthenasia.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood - uh oh, it’s a work of science fiction that postulates a world of inequality driven by sexism.

What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras and What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras - heaven forbid that kids should actually understand their own physiology. What’s really fascinating is that the book for girls is far higher up on the list, as in far more frequently challenged, than the book for boys is. I suppose the logic is that boys need to understand their equipment but girls should remain ignorant.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - if you read this book and you’re offended then you’re a friggin’ bigot.

Cujo by Stephen King - ????? It’s about a rabid dog. This is somehow immoral?

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - If I were a fascist trying to retain power I’d probably want to prevent people from reading a book that documents war crimes and attrocities committed by the Americans and English in WWII.

Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford - ok, this is just confusing.

The most astonishing thing about this list though is the number of times that Judy Blume’s books show up on here. Parents objecting to Forever, which is about teenage sexuality and deals with it in a very frank way, I sort of understand. But the rest of her pre-teen books… well, that just makes me shake my head like the duck in the Aflac ads.

I highly recommend you head to your local library and check out a banned book this week. Read it and enjoy it and encourage others to do likewise.