ideasarehere

February 28, 2010

Art. Now.

Filed under: marketing,media,music — Erik Dobberkau @ 20:08

Sometimes, people who make money with music decide it’s time to stand up for something and use their work to create a major change. Now here’s the punchline: The last time this happened was in 1984, when Harry Belafonte persuaded Ken Kragen to produce a single, the song for which was written by Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson. Only a few months before Bob Geldof had done the same in Great Britain. Both songs, We are the world and Do they know it’s Christmas, are larger-than-life art. Not because music is a form of art, but the very idea behind these specific pieces.

They were, and still are, quite rightfully massive successes, not only because they were performed by the most famous singers (and musicians) of their time, but because the ones who created them were so passionate about what they were doing, that you must be deaf not to hear it.

In the meantime there have also been natural disasters like earthquakes in Haiti or Chile, Tsunamis in South East Asia, drought in Africa. The world is still in massive need, maybe more than ever. But it seems that it needs cataclysmic events — only that some folks gather up and re-record a 25-year old piece of music. And today, it’s yet another song. As a person who loves music, it sickens the hell out of me to hear a piece of crap like Artists for Haiti. Who are they trying to kid? One moment I thought “Hey, is that Stephen Hawking singing? No wait — it’s some guy with an autotune and vocoder effect. What the bloody hell??” (Apologies to Mr Hawking.)

This is not art. This is not passionate. This is not authentic. It’s just a scam, a cheap stunt. I’m not buying it. If you are not passionate enough to make this your quest, to put your own sweat and blood into this, I won’t believe your story. Never.

When there are more than 50 artists people who happen to have a gross fortune of more than 1,000,000,000 (yep, that’s one billion) dollars and they decide to make a record that generates, say, 25 cents net profit per copy that could go to charity, and every other American buys one copy, that’s about 40,000,000 dollars going to charity. You’d have 25% more if everyone participating gave 1M like that. But why should they, right?

Art has become really, really scarce nowadays. Which should encourage everyone of us feeling the passionate urge to do art to overcome our inner resistance and start doing it. Now.

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