mocktalk: Dead KISS rock = Dead rock KISS
Gene Simmons hands down his son, in Esquire of all trendy scriptures, the current commandment of Rock music: thou shall not fileshare.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/interviews/a26330/gene-simmons-future-of-rock/
From his top-down perspective of KiSS fame, Gene manages to sound like a catholic preacher bent on making us repent, accept our punishment and ultimately cough up more dough on the way out. But then again Rock is a religion to some and any preacher with a church, a cash cow and a bank account, meets the Esquire criteria not to be questioned thoroughly.
Then again, fans killing music, killing Rock? …could be, at best, partly true, since the listener is one part of the file-sharing debacle. For someone who had more than his fair share of dedication from fans maybe Gene could have done his soul-searching too and asked himself some questions:
- Was the music we sold any good or was just marketing that ‘made us and kept us big’?
- Was the price of our albums, tapes or CDs always right?
- Were there many better bands than us that didn’t make it to the top because we got in first? After all that is why too, Kiss want a big record company behind them!
- And the most difficult question for any band: Why are Kiss still around? Wasn’t rock supposed to be a young man’s game, shouldn’t Kiss have cleared the stage when the 80s were over? To be fair to Gene, this question never gets asked since Mick Jagger passed 40.
In many regards Rock is not dead because it still has to sound authentic to be accepted by the larger public. Corporate whores, can’t rock, it’s a known fact. However, they can try, as many do; but one can or will hear it loud and clear in what they do since it is not easy to hide. We have come some full circle and Gene is trying to hide the fact he is now a corporate exec trying to sell us fans the rock start he was 30 years ago. If rock was a fertile ground for young rebels, to have harvested money out of it day in day out, is not something that could have gone on forever, unless corporate greed is divorced from reality.
Rock was never supposed to go corporate in the first place, and that is the broken promise of many bands. Rock still has its resistance mechanism in place for good. So copying music for free is what it is too: … a way to resist the corporate commodification of music and Rock in particular, and a way to resist the corporate world taking over our culture only to downgrade it to satisfy their greed.
The actions of many fans can’t be any clearer: Rock music has been corrupted and you should say thank you we still consume it for free, like advertising. Since it doesn’t do much and doesn’t get any better than an advert. This is the only way we accept your current sense of entitlement as ‘Rock star’ Gene.
More often than not we have seen proof of music marketing actually killing Rock ie. the ‘genre-centric approach’ married to multichannel ‘vertical alignment’ and use of ‘demographics’ doesn’t come across as something ‘authentic’.
This may have more merit than the claims Gene makes 20 years on from the launch of the maligned mp3. If analogue recording was the best and vinyl offered both the coolest and warmest quality the human ear could enjoy how come we ended up with a so-so digital ‘approximation’ to pay for? It seems digital aligned so well with all the corporate mantras of profit while vinyl didn’t offer enough returns. Who produces and controls the distribution of music and who listens, as proven, are not on the same boat and there is a larger disconnect now more than ever before, and that is a defining point of our relationship with digital products.
If bands say that the media corporations are right, fans are killing the music; then in market terms, the fans are saying back: your current products and distribution formats are not worth paying for. With the advent of digital, the fan has found some leverage to undermine back a corrupt industry – to force it change however much it resisted change in the past. What is happening socially is a consequence of a culture where the gap between rich and poor is widening. As ‘the poor’ we are left with a harder task than before to find something worthwhile in a culture generally unauthentic and irrelevant. As seen, the plan Amazon and Apple had, was to sell bytes at the same price as print and vinyl and it enriched them fabulously – and they are not complaining. So no, an LP plus cover are not the same as a digital download and a PDF however hard Gene sells it. In the realm of the bytes, we do not have a true and a material ‘contract’ between the artist and the fan, and so there is ‘no ownership’, every file being in fact a copy of a copy of a copy etc. Vinyl and print had the opposite characteristic – one would own something unique, at least in spirit. Bytes have always been susceptible to being ‘replicated, shared and transmitted’ and fans according to Gene should refrain from doing what comes naturally to any byte.
Ultimately, in pursuit of money ‘the industry’ was the one that buried and killed musicians more than anybody else on this planet. I don’t mean the few that made it drugged and barely alive to the top and either collapsed or became corporate execs, but the many that didn’t, that got pushed aside so that one big name can get bigger and capture more audience. Today we have a lot of American and British bands clinging on to ‘power’ past their natural glories, afraid to let go and become mortals again… And no, it is not talent that keeps them there but their past glory married to corporate greed and the connections in the industry. These are anachronisms that bypass and destroy any real competition in music!
In terms of culture-value, the contract between ‘the fan’ and ‘the industry’ representing ‘the artist’, will get much worse for the fan even if we pay or don’t pay for the ‘privilege’ of digital music. Rock or a form of, could only benefit from a new contract and probably redeem itself through young bands. Meanwhile ‘digital copying’ as a natural ‘sharing process’ offers the fan a way out of a forced overpriced contract, not to be cheated of a fair deal. Like anything American, Rock was murdered by their ‘too big to fail’ denial… and in this context ONLY, Rock is now buried by the fans, Gene. RIP
