The Waste Land - MP3s, Metal Music and the RIAA

I got a legal notice that I was sharing MP3s, but was my act "wrong"?

August 30, 2006

Only sick music makes money today.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

The R.I.A.A. has adopted a humorous attitude regarding online Mp3 music trading. You can find this humor in the lawsuits against children. It continues in the targeting of people without computers. It culminates in the harassment of the absent, with even the deceased proving fair game. Yes, the RIAA is humorous. It would even be harmlessly so if it did not impede upon something far more important than its concerns over profit loss.

In Western society, music has become commodified to such an extent that popular albums are marketed as products to appeal to the highest common factor uniting the anaesthetized drones that purchase them. Cultural vitiation ensures this is invariably either the prostitution of a hypothesized ideal form – the sexy socialite with friends, fuckfriends and a Trimalchian penchant for partying -, or the conscientious objector, able to buy rebellion on tap; Rock music served by section in the vaporous plasticity of a shopping mall store.

Where great composers of the past were rewarded monetarily and on occasion provided works to order, their best offerings were great artistic communications, with money arising as a byproduct as opposed to an end in itself. German philosopher Georg Hegel averred that where art is most healthy it founds the cultural scaffold of its epoch. Today great art flounders because our consumerist society lacks the sense of transcendent unity that allows its creation. The high Modernists lamented its death, the postmodernists played with its wreckage; we 'apathists' instead change the channel in utter, utter indifference.

Is there any music of integrity left? Maybe if all that commercial jazz is no good, old sport, we might dive into depths unprobed by the mainstream radar?

In the genres of Black and Death Metal, the term 'underground' has become undesirable due to its association with a supposed objective quality in which, we are told, the music is good because it is underground, as opposed to being underground because it is good. Metal has been mapped in such a way that bands are categorized stylistically rather than ideologically, resulting in the standardization of once shocking aesthetic innovations and their integration into stylistic norms.

It is no surprise that this has led to Metal labels beginning to adopt the mentality of their mainstream peers. One time Death Metal label Roadrunner now hosts Nickelback; Nuclear Blast from Germany markets bands like soft-drink products. Increasing commercial aspirations, no matter the clever justification ('Metallica 'sell out' every stadium they play in, anywhere in the world' – Jason Newsted), sound the death-knell for artistic quality in band, or record label output.

"Fantastic...incredible...MASTODON has nearly mastered rock dynamics" - THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Meet the best band on the planet. The Atlanta quartet are the future of metal. It's high time you were introduced." - KERRANG!

"Mastodon: The new Beatles? Perhaps even the new Beethoven?" – Rateyourmusic.com

(In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo – T.S. Eliot.)

This author contributes to an online Metal Mp3 community in which out of print, rare or classic albums are offered amongst a selection of newer releases. In a society of integrity, laws formulated to negate the influence of morons are unnecessary, with honor replacing monetary gain as the protocol of the social contract. This allows for a pursuit of more important ideals. The best areas of the Metal community work to this belief in regards to file-sharing, holding that if an individual finds worth in an album, and if he has the means, he will purchase it. Likewise, as selling albums at extortionate prices on auction sites is parasitic, intelligent Metalheads make out of print albums of artistic note available as lossless quality, FLAC downloads. This not only sidesteps inflated pricing but preserves a library of significant music against being denied, forgotten or tidied away into the corner of a loft, to gather dust with other 'reveries' at the behest of a normalized spouse.

Classical music and the best in Metal offer a voice of sanity in a deluded epoch. Death Metal conveys poignancy more essential than television or newspapers, bringing to brutal awareness the anaesthetized nature of humanity's broken relationship with its own finitude -

"Mortality now echoes throughout this world!" – Bolt Thrower

- while identifying the root cause of psychological trauma – depression - and, after correctly contextualising it against the imminent possibility of meaningless death, showing it to be baseless; founded upon the myopia of avarice as opposed to the transcendent, Romantic eternal.

"Latest Being drowned in fictive degradation" - Gorguts

Before Metal lost its heart it and became a circus of its own gestures, or was covertly amalgamated into the mainstream through a mimicking of advertising technique, it presented music and ideals so deeply essential to life that the shunning and ridicule they receive by normals today accounts for a great part of many people's misery.

If you listen to music as product; you will be justly tried for theft. If you listen to music as art, the value is no longer monetary but aesthetic; you are enriched.

I made Gorguts Mp3s available not for commercial gain, or to slight the band members, but because the music is beautiful to me and I wish to increase its listening audience. Honest music is created as a communication. When free from commercial aspirations, those behind such music are only too keen to have its audience expanded, since communication is what is most important. This mindset is incomprehensible to those who value music by the dollar as opposed to the epiphany. The worth of a piece is not in how many units it sells but in how many minds it inspires.

Having received two angry letters from a college intent on enforcing the scare tactics of the R.I.A.A., this author appeals to whatever intellectual conscience remains in the world to recognize that the cost of depriving 'free' non-commercial music from people may be far greater than the $4.2 billion allegedly incurred by the R.I.A.A.; it may constitute nothing less than an eradication of whatever sensibility, taste and even hope remain amongst those living and growing up in a desolate, plastic, neon-fugue Waste Land.

"What's practical is logical. What the hell, who cares?" – Britney Spears

by Nile577