Techdirt ran an interesting post recently about The Myth of Original Creators. In it, they explored the Romantic Era notion of the artist as the sole creative participant in a work.
And when I say ‘Romantic Era’, think Beethoven. He was the poster child for art as unique ‘self expression’ rather than art as contributing participant in a cultural dialogue with antecedents and referents.
I’m not saying Beethoven was deluded – and nor that his genius is diminished if I claim that no work is wholly original – but simply that he was making an assertion about his art that has captured the imagination, and which largely remains as the basis of our music copyright law.
But music – especially popular music – is part of a cultural conversation.
The piracy of Elvis
Peter Friedman, the law professor whose blog is quoted in the Techdirt article, cites the case of Robert Johnson. As he points out, Robert Johnson didn’t sell his soul – he just listened to what was going on around him, developed some ideas and was recorded.
In other words, he was no more the ‘originator of the blues’ than Elvis was the ‘inventor’ of rock and roll.
Both men took elements around them, engaged in the conversation, and fashioned those elements into something that had not previously existed in that way. Nobody’s denying the creativity or genius that goes into it – just that these things don’t happen in a vacuum.
And you can’t bake a cake without ingredients.
The locked ingredient cupboard
Unfortunately, because of the power of that Romantic notion of the lone genius and the fact that it’s been crystallised in copyright law – which, for interests with which we are now entirely familiar, enforces the myth of original creators – most of the ingredients from which we could make more popular music culture are locked away in vaults.
Tapes, mostly – and they’re decaying rapidly. Most of them will never see the light of day for the simple reason that the corporate owners of those vaults cannot imagine a way in which investing in releasing and ensuring the availability of those works will turn a profit.
And since music is, for them, purely a commercial interest, the cultural, communicative and ‘conversational’ component – and the potential value of those works as springboards into other, possibly significant cultural works – is entirely overlooked.
For that reason, the ideal of musical composition as solely an artistic, cathartic and personal endeavour that is simply an expression of the creative outpouring of the artist – and which may or may not be shared with an audience – is problematic.
Not only does it (inadvertently, perhaps – but inescapably) serve the exclusive corporate interests of the ‘music purely as commerce’ brigade, but it also denies the very real fact that music is culture – and that the seemingly inevitable disappearance of that culture is not only tragic but, because it is entirely avoidable, criminal.
Music as Lone Works of Genius vs Music as Culture
Put simply, copyright law assumes that creative works are either wholly original, or they represent theft. That idea is nonsensical, because no works are wholly original. Because significant corporate interests are based on that framework, works that are under copyright but which are not commercially viable are dead works – stolen away and left to rot.
This stolen past – conservatively estimated in the region of 90% of all recordings ever released – could seed a massive, profound and important shift in popular music culture – like the birth of the blues or the genesis of rock and roll. Or it might just inspire a few good dance tunes. We just don’t know.
But what we can be certain about is that our stolen musical heritage cannot hope to contribute to culture where it is now – and that’s important.
12 Responses to “Building upon a stolen past”
Good post, we definitely have a lot of baggage from the Romantic Era. Are you familiar with Christopher Small’s books? He deals with a lot of these myths…music as a social act vs.music as an object, etc. It came to mind the minute I started reading your post.
No – but thanks. I’ll check his stuff out.
@Dubber: Cool, if you get the chance, Musicking is probably the best to start with. Music Society Education is also a great read…had a profound effect on me, actually.
I’ve just ordered a copy from Amazon.
Cheers.
Does your argument extend to all types of creative works? Books, films, prints and photos? Academic works, dissertations, theses? Does it extend to patents for software, car designs, medicines and so on? Presumably none of these creations is entirely original either and all make use of cultural precedents.
(I’m genuinely interested to know your view, I’m not trying to argue the opposing case and I don’t have an immediate answer myself. )
I suspect that’s true to varying degrees. Depends on which part of my argument you mean.
Do I think that authors of books are indebted to the authors of the books they’ve read in the past? Absolutely. Do academic works build on the creative endeavours of antecedents? That’s a pre-requisite. Are photographs part of a cultural tradition? Of course.
But whether there’s an industry being effectively incentivised to lock that culture away is another matter. It’s probably true of the film industry. You could definitely make a case for this applying to books and professional photography, though I suspect the parameters and effects would be quite different.
Remixes, mashups, samples, breaks, scratching, loops, mixtapes, DJs, chord progressions, arrangements, playing-along, live performance and related activities that incorporate other musical artifacts probably don’t have easy parallels in other media.
To be honest, I haven’t given it a great deal of thought outside of the music industries, because that’s where my interest specifically lies. You could probably write a much bigger book called ‘Deleting Culture’ – but that’s not what my focus is.
I suppose the part of your argument I was referring to was your central idea that music is part of a cultural conversation, and that therefore any creative works within the musical field in some sense belong to the culture; since their creation is never wholly original they can never be wholly owned by any one person or organisation.
I was asking your opinion about how far this extended to other fields as it’s not immediately apparent to me how musical works are a special case distinct from other forms of artistic work, or for that matter any form of creativity in not obviously artistic areas such as engineering or medicine.
On further reflection my position is that I agree with and wholeheartedly support your conclusions but don’t feel they stem best from the arguments you’re using to make them. I think that either all creativity is part of a cultural conversation, no matter which field it’s happening in, or it’s not. I also don’t see how the uses to which something can be put have any logical bearing on whether someone is obliged to make it available to us.
If I had to use a food analogy I wouldn’t choose the “Locked ingredient cupboard” idea (as we have to pay for ingredients, and often for the cake), I think I’d go instead for an “Are you going to eat that sausage?” analogy.
If I’ve got something I’m not using and you want it, it’d be simply churlish of me to refuse to give it to you, and completely inappropriate for me to offer to sell it to you. I don’t think you could persuasively argue it’s not mine, but you can very persuasively argue that general levels of happiness will increase if you let me have it.
I think as musicians we should just say: “you’re not using that music, let us try to do something creative with it”, and not try to argue it on the basis of legality, as I’m not sure we’re on our strongest ground there.
I take your point – and I love your sausage analogy. That’s a chapter heading right there, if you don’t mind…
That said, while music’s not a ‘special case’, per se – it does have its own unique characteristics.
I don’t necessarily agree that creativity is the same thing across different disciplines. The kinds of processes, practices and cultural conversations that take place in songwriting are not simply the same processes that are used in pottery, dancing, architecture, graffiti art or academic writing, performance and so on – merely applied differently. I think they’re substantively different categories of activity that we group together as having familial similarities.
I take your point on the legality thing too – but it’s at the level of policy that ‘Music As Culture’ needs to be addressed, because everywhere else, people seem to see these sorts of arguments as reasonable, common sense observations – while copyright law is constructed in such a way as to defeat such prosaic, common sense at the behest of lobbyists for ‘Music As Commerce’, who represent the interests of those who have stockpiled all the sausages and are simply saying “Mine!” like a 2 year-old whenever anyone hungry tries to reason with them.
Appreciate the chance to grapple with these ideas. Cheers.
Go ahead, use my sausage.
Thanks for the link. Do you know Martha Woodmansee’s work? Her book *The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics*, is as responsible as any work for the understanding that the Romantics are at the root of our notion that creation is the solitary act of a divinely inspired creator. An interesting point is that Wordsworth was (1) as good a propagandist for this notion as anyone, perhaps the best, (2) likely remarkably dependent on Coleridge and his sister for many of his ideas and works, and (3) an extremely effective lobbyist for the first western copyright law with real teeth.
One more thing: in the case of Robert Johnson (Olufunmilayo B. Arewa makes the point in “Seeing but not Hearing Music: How Copyright Got and Didn’t Get the Blues”), it may not even be that he was some unique and outstanding talent among his peers. Rather, he developed that reputation because a bunch of white rock and rollers in the mid-sixties (Eric Clapton, among others) started listening to him and genuinely heard something they had never heard before. They therefore assumed, and the myth has since developed, that Johnson was a unique talent. Maybe if Clapton listened instead to Charlie Patton Patton would be considered the outstanding blues talent of his generation. The plain truth is we don’t and never will know the vast majority of the work of which Johnson’s was a part.
Hi Peter – appreciate you joining the conversation here.
No – that’s a new name on me, but a quick Google search amply demonstrates that Woodmansee is someone I need to be engaging with in the research for this book.
This is one of the things I love about this process – that the clues start piling up, and the more we talk about this stuff, the more the disparate threads start to weave together from different disciplines and corners of the world. I look forward to this happening more and more.
Interesting that you raise the KLF in your latest blog post, by the way – they’ll come into this story as well…