The ultimate copy protection

mrG — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 21:42:38 -0400

The ultimate copy protection. That's what it is, and it all came out in a conversation today happening on the SATURN-L mailing list where I was taken to task over my exhuberant and unrepentant fan-taping and sharing, and then having the unmittigated audacity and gaul to suggest that this was the digital age, and that nothing short of a strip search could prevent fan-recordings, so musicians (and promoters) had better grow up and just learn to live with it.

And that brought me back to this page, this story and the brilliant stroke of copy-protect genius that is the Voice of Fire.

time to wake up Margaret: the digital millenium is here. it arrived while you are out. Modern recorders are smaller than your thumb and take better sound than most FM stations; many cellphones have video capabilities using low-light CCDs. The McLuhan notion of technology extending our bodies now extends to our senses and our memory.

If you want to beat reproduction, here's how: Go to the National Gallery in Ottawa and look at Voice of Fire. It is astounding, and it totally defeats all attempts to reproduce it in books, texts, postcards ... and sneaky fan-photos like me (yes, I confess, I have covertly photographed art) How does it do this? By being. By its presence. Voice of Fire, look it up, google it (you will probably get my essay about it) [ie this page]

May has been listening to Sun Ra since we met. At first she thought I was in some kind of weird cult. She was right, of course, but the point is, she just didn't get it. My friends, same way. In the techno-enlightened 80's some of my friends would call it my "Time to Go Home music". Some liked Lanquidity and the trippier friends liked There Are Other Worlds; when it came time to go see Ra that first time in 1983 (I couldn't afford the Toronto 70's show, maybe I was in Winnipeg at the time anyway) I'd heard a whack of live bootlegs like the Donneschausen and Stockholm radio dubs I'd traded with the professor of architecture at U of Manitoba, and I knew I had to see this thing for myself.

There was, simply put, no comparison. I buy a "Yes" album and see them, it's the album with faces; I see the Stones in '66, it's the records with faces and Jagger's prancing, I'd seen Miles and Diz and Ornette in amphitheatres and small intimate clubs, but each was still only just a shade more than a nice quality stereo dub. But Sun Ra? Sun Ra defeated all that.

How did he do this? By being. By having an overwhelming all-embracing wrap-you-up-and-take-you-away presence.

My taping doesn't change that.

Far from it. My tapes, like the records, are like fuzzy pictures of Nessie, the porkpie-hat black smear of the UFO. But I saw it! you tell your friends and neighbours, but most just shake their heads and pity the poor kook's family. But I saw it, I felt it, I heard it and it was like St Therese with the arrow through her heart. Yeah, right. From some far out jazz band? He was born in Alabama, y'know.

Forget it, you can't make them see. Not unless you can coax them to come with you, and even that is no guarantee. But if they don't go, if they just stick it in their iPod, they are left out, though they still get left with that Mystery of why was he such a zealot about this band? Could they be? Do you suppose?...

You see, Sun Ra had also told his crew that if they only played music that machines could play, they were going to be out of a job because computers would overtake them and do it all faster cheaper better. I don't know that he said it in so many words, but he also clearly demonstrated how if you only play what can be captured in a bitstream, you are an endangered species so you can stand there in the headlights and chant that DRM will save you, or you can get the hell off the road and do something else. Sun Ra chose the latter path, a multidimensional Spirit Music that positively defies mechanical reproduction just as does the Voice of Fire.

Why Live Music

mrG — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 11:42:16 -0500

One cornerstone of the business model for the One-Track Universe is an assertion that fundamentally, in the very real human terms, recorded music isn't very important. Sure you probably have music playing now and a stack of recordings in your cache, but recordings are only the media, a poor substitute, playing in your environment now as an escape from the rest of the work and study environs because it reminds you of happier places ... and that place is where the music is live.

Think for a moment: What are your fondest music memories?

Just about any Torontonian my age can answer the question, "Where were you the night the Stones played the El Mo?" ... I know where I was: Walking by outside, saw the poster for April Wine and thought, "naw..." and asked the roadie on the street who said, calmly, "The Stones" and I thought, "Yeah right" and walked on by on my way to take some more slides off the 16" MacLennan telescope.

Now ask those same late boomers, "Where were you when the Stones released 'Some Girls'?" and you'll get blankness, even from people like me who were in the hype of the record business at the time. I dimly remember being told (by the rep) how Dire Straights were "The biggest thing since the Beatles" but I couldn't tell you the date.

Music defines a place. A time and place where we experience being. Recordings are mere shadows, holiday snapshots and fashion magazines to make us wish we were there, in that place, back there instead of here, where we are ...

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The ultimate copy protection

Why Live Music