The Merchants of Cool Pt. 1

About two years ago I read a book called "MTV: The Making of a Revolution" by Tom McGrath. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It explores the creation of MTV and the early days of its conception. For me it began to shed light on a whole new set of issues we face today. I began to wonder things like: "When music became a commodity to be produced, bought, and sold like a new pair of shoes coming from some plant across the ocean, why did the industry act so surprised when consumers no longer valued the art or artists, but instead found short cuts to getting the goods?" If you could go online and in two minutes have a pair of first edition Air Jordan's materialize out of your printer, the temptation would be hard to resist. So in an age when the creative process has been marginalized to test groups and market analysis why are we shocked that the response is a culture of disposable artistic consumerism? MP3's have become like napkins at the corner 7/11. You can take one or a handful and someone is going to pay for them, but you don't have to so you don't think twice about stocking your glove box full. Hard drives across America are cluttered by the gluttony of artistic consumerism and instead of digging down and examining the roots of this crisis, those in power chose to treat the symptoms by handing out lawsuits and suing 13 year olds for having no value for what has been shoved in their faces. Now, I want to be clear that I do not support piracy, I do not have peer to peer software on any of my computers and I do not agree with downloading music for free on the internet, but it is not enough to merely disagree. We as artists need to understand what went wrong and begin to change the culture surrounding our music and media. Below there is a link to a film called "The Merchants of Cool" put out by PBS Frontline several years ago. This film addresses a few ideas and practices that explains some of what went wrong and if you have 45 minutes to spare I'd recommend watching it.


Click HERE to watch the film


More on this later.