Yesterday, I tried to make sense of the relationship between various forms of “value” and popular culture. I should have known not to bring up the internet and, especially, not to have tried too hard to translate some of my own thinking about the early years of U.S. pop culture industries (from 100 years ago) into contemporary examples. It didn’t work. Yet, a quick perusal of some of my usual website-checks (NPR and Marc Ribot) confirmed the complexity of the topic of value and culture.
NPR reported on a new development in the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ evaluation of the national Gross Domestic Product (supposedly, the sum totally of all “goods and services” the country sells during a given period of time). It seems as though we will now be including the artistic time and labor that goes into hit records and blockbuster films when calculating the GDP. Traditionally, concert tickets and album sales have been included, but now the figure will add performers’, directors’, and studios’ time and labor though, after reading this short report twice and listening to the slightly-expanded radio version, I’m not at all sure what this means or how one figures out the labor Lady Gaga expends on her records. Is it an amount of money Gaga invests in her self while writing and recording? (Hence, the simile, Dan Sichel—the Wellesley economist and a Lady Gaga fan NPR contacted for advice—uses: “It’s quite analogous to a factory investing in a new machine,” Sichel says. But it’s unclear to me what the “it” in this sentence refers to.) Or, as also implied, is someone trying to figure out how to put a price tag on the value of the “intangible good” that is intellectual property? Either way, it seems like a short-cut way to bump the GDP up 3% (a move that might make elites feel better about the economy yet only further obscures the very real reality that millions of Americans a hurting right now). It seems, no one is really very clear the value of popular culture.
Avant-garde guitarist and composer, Marc Ribot, knows enough to recognize he’s getting screwed. I’m surprised to see Spin give a shit about Ribot’s music or opinion but, again, it’s clear that I can’t keep up with the cultural development of the intertubes—here’s Spin not so much calling Ribot’s critique of free music downloaders out as noting to his anger. Also at the link (ironically? provocatively?) is Ribot’s new song, “Masters of the Internet.” And here’s Ribot’s response to Spin:
A number of people have asked us what’s up with Masters of the Internet. Do we hate are fans? Are we Luddites? Well, no and no. Here’s what we think:
We don’t really expect much from asking people who are downloading stuff for free to voluntaristically pay up- although, yeah, we could use that dollar right about now, and we support Trichordist’s Principles for an Ethical and Sustainable Internet . We don’t know what the ultimate solution is- but we know it isn’t the impoverishment of musicians and defunding music. And we know it isn’t pretending that no-one is being hurt. Corporations are making huge profits from the ads on ‘free’ sites, from selling the hard and software that make illegal downloading possible. They need to give back a portion of their billions to the people who do the work: hey, we love our tech toys too, but an empty i-Pod is just a crappy paper-weight. Giving us back part of the value we create would make a real FREE culture possible- one where fans get what they need, AND creative community workers get paid. Bread and Roses, baby!
