Nothing comes from Nothing

I write this, clearly, after having seen the Rip Remix Manifesto and absorbing one of its core message; a message that was painfully obvious at every time throughout human history and up until twenty years ago or thirty years ago or whatever it was: nothing comes from nothing. Borrowing or even stealing completely the melodic lines and lyrics from one song and putting them in another is perfectly natural and is the way that new good songs are created and the way that traditions and inspirations stay alive and at the same time replenish themselves. That anyone has been tricked into thinking otherwise is a tragedy for human creativity and a victory for talentless people who only seek to claw raw dollars out of the souls of honest artists.

Look here at what I am saying:

Bob Dylan dedicates this song to Woody Guthrie. Not only does he refer directly to Guthrie's song, Hard Travelling, but he lifts the melody directly from The 1913 Massacre. This doesn't diminish either song.

The complication here is, of course, that the time when people borrowed liberally from each other and sang each other's songs predates the present condition of the market and the music industry. The problem now is that certain groups and musicians can prosper from songs that other people wrote because they have an unequal access to moneyed consumers. In this particular way, one might level a criticism at Led Zeppelin for borrowing so much from so many different people, becoming millionaires by it and then never remunerating those people whose songs they took.

Led Zeppelin is awesome, and my teen years wouldn't have been complete without them blasting and a pair of butter knives wedged under the burning elements of my stove, but I wonder how rich Bert Jansch got from Jimmy Page's uncredited arrangement of his song?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkX7Q2J7k48&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUMGuvmVmxI&feature=related

John Hutnyk writes quite extensively about this in some book or another of his that I read a couple of years ago. Essentially, while going out of his way to disparage Madonna's Ray of Light album and everything ever produced by Kula Shaker (and quite deservingly in the latter case), Hutnyk says that it's all very well and good for big time artists to say that they are being inspired by India (for example) and that this is all part of a growing global consciousness, but the fact is that while the big artists are borrowing all this stuff, the Indian artists, with no real access to the pathways of the global market, are not making anything for the music that they developed and practiced for years.

And then again, Paul Simon did open the door for a lot of world music acts back in the 1980s with his Graceland album. Would music is in many respects a stupid, probably racist, label for an extremely diverse range of recordings and traditions that have more or less been squashed into a horrible collage of exotic sounds suitable for the background at swanky cafes selling soy chai lattes and CDs from the Buddha bar. I have nightmare visions of Japanese hippies in the Metro playing sitar accompanied by Australian backpackers with didgeridoos and I have visions of people in Lulu Lemon tights sweating and bending to the sound of Persian flute music …fuck, I have to go, my kitchen smells like sour milk and I can't stand it anymore!