Gail Zappa and her lawyers have made a full time job out of crapping on everything her late great husband stood for.

I'm not reading anything by anyone who describes herself as a "provocateur."

I'm on this hippie speak.

Here are her main points:

1) Echoing Frank's sentiments that the corporate honchos used to be fat men with cigars that wanted to see a profit and would take risks on new acts to see this profit, and at some point in the 70s they abandoned that and started engineering scenes and creating their own demand.

2) As a result of that, the industry has since become disintermediated and the big guys hate that they're no longer as relevant since you don't need a huge advance to build a studio in your basement and distribute via iTunes

3) To compensate for that, big business has infiltrated government to retain their relevance by increasing the term of their copyright, strangling creativity in the name of money. This will either result in no culture being created and a defacto dictatorship, or a state-controlled culture and a fascist state

4) As a result, now we have an industry built on 360 deals for unproven artists who just put on a nice show and the music has been taken out of the music industry in favor of smoke and shadows

5) Yet science will prove there is such thing as creative genius, but the industry will be too afraid of changing their business model to adapt. You will never kill the artist, you'll just deprive people of the ability to be stimulated by art.

In other words, someone got stoned and read a Lessig book.

Fin.

Also, the music industry has effectively turned the creative process into a mechanical one, and that's why music sucks.

Music also sucks because Frank is dead and they won't release Roxy & Elsewhere on DVD, because goddammit the Zappa Trust owns the copyrights and they can do what they want with them for as long as they want.

Farking commufascists.

El Chode: Also, the music industry has effectively turned the creative process into a mechanical one, and that's why music sucks.

Music has, does and ever shall suck.

People tend to forget the amount of dreck that has been produced throughout the ages. For every Mozart there were hundreds of second- or lower-tier composers churning out operas and symphonies by the dozen.

Music has, does and ever shall suck.

People tend to forget the amount of dreck that has been produced throughout the ages. For every Mozart there were hundreds of second- or lower-tier composers churning out operas and symphonies by the dozen.

I think her argument is the fear that the Mozart is going to be stifled while the second-tier composer will become the legend.

Or that the Mozart will be a shill and considered the real deal, and at the very least that people won't demand anything better.

Shostie: Music has, does and ever shall suck.

People tend to forget the amount of dreck that has been produced throughout the ages.

And the funny thing is, if you started right now and listened to music nonstop, you would die of old age before you ran out of good music.

ne2d: Shostie: Music has, does and ever shall suck.

People tend to forget the amount of dreck that has been produced throughout the ages.

And the funny thing is, if you started right now and listened to music nonstop, you would die of old age before you ran out of good music.

I disagree. There's PLENTY of great music out there. There are some obscure Eastern European composers who wrote incredible, powerful music. They are, however, little heard outside of their home countries or in hard-core music circles. Keep in mind that the origins of Western music go back as far as the Medieval (if not further). That's hundreds of years of music; some great, some not so great.

Whaddya mean Judes? Just because Mr. Bigmoney won't let us play the Copa Club why gorsh, that don't mean the shows over! Why the shows NEVER over!

We got a barn don't we!
We got a P.A. don't we!
We got an impressive alpine heap of Marshall stacks that makes Motorhead's setup look like they should be playing in a coffee shop!
We got thundering cock-rock supergroup brap and the huggabunch kids to open for us don't we!
So get to popping some corn and selling some tickets!
We're gonna rock this town so freaking hard its balls blister up and fall off!

Gee Mick, you forgot a don't we.

Oh that's rich coming from you, ya pillhead!

Shostie: And the funny thing is, if you started right now and listened to music nonstop, you would die of old age before you ran out of good music.

I disagree. There's PLENTY of great music out there.

I think we're saying the same thing.

ne2d: Shostie: And the funny thing is, if you started right now and listened to music nonstop, you would die of old age before you ran out of good music.

I disagree. There's PLENTY of great music out there.

I think we're saying the same thing.

You know... You're right. Damn my lack of reading comprehension...

Generation_D: Gail Zappa and her lawyers have made a full time job out of crapping on everything her late great husband stood for.

THIS, dammit. Pulling all of Frank's work off of iTunes was the last straw. I'm just damn lucky I bought as much as I could there before she did that.

Now, instead of Frank's children benefitting from his work, I'll be stealing his music instead.

\yes, I BUY music.

WTF? When did HuffPo start letting the Boat People in?

I mean, because of her last name they're letting her submit the equivalent of a pot-induced e-mail as editorial?

God reading that made my brain hurt. Why was this greenlit?

Even with El Chode's excellent decode, I still think Gail is going crazier every day. She's trying too hard to pretend that she's as intelligent and talented as her husband was. That essay is full of his quotes and sentence structure, but it reads like a rambling diatribe (and I oughta know).

Gail's superpower is to crush Frank's legacy into a fine powder, remix it and sell it on two discs for $60 with extensive liner notes. She has harangued talented, passionate Zappa cover bands like Project Object (with Zappa alumni), preventing them from performing in major cities by threatening to sue the clubs they attempt to play in order to protect her own Family cover band, the overpriced Zappa Plays Zappa. ZPZ is full of talent, but they don't give you the full Zappa experience like Project Object does. But Gail doesn't make money off of them, so despite the legality of cover bands, and PO's passionate take on Frank's music, she threatens to sue and the clubs back down because they don't want to spend money on lawyers. She's just as much of a fascist as the recording executives she's talking about. Plus she's shooting herself in the foot by attacking a potential generator of interest in the Zappa back catalog.

And she's not releasing Roxy & Elsewhere or 200 Motels.

Kyosuke: \yes, I BUY music.

You know what? I do too. I know I don't really have to. But I'm not some impoverished school kid, I can afford to buy the things I want. So I do.

And ever since '256kps without DRM' became the de facto standard of retail d/l music, I've been downloading my music like never before.

2009 has been one of the best years for good rock music in recent memory, but at this point my Album of the Year is probably going to be an album available by download ONLY^*.

This is no longer the wave of the future, and anyone in the industry who doesn't get that by now is utterly doomed.

^*The Boxer Rebellion - Union

As you can see.... Girls... Music... Disease... Heartbreak... they all go together. Take a tip from Joe. Hock your imaginary guitar and get a good job.

/Music can get you pretty farked up.

Subby, I thought you were exaggerating on the amount of Wharrgarbl, but that was seriously batty.

You know, Frank abstained from all drugs and alcohol, right?

I think it's because his wife took/drank it all first.

Apparently, the thing I'll miss most about the death of newspapers is editing.

I postulate that the Huffington Post and Livejournal, with their respective site layouts removed, are indistinguishable from one another.

Whoa.... (I tried surrounding this with a [Keanu] tag but that didn't work...) (but instead of square brackets I used triangle brackets)

This article (the one posted) was pretty far out (yes pretty far out man) and had far too many asides (like this one) to maintain readability (not easy to read because of all the parenthesis) and was kind of fake-wordyish (also, tl;dnr).

The old business model for music is dead (, man). Embrace the future my friends, for it is friendly.
\purplemonkeydishwasher

GurneyHalleck: And she's not releasing Roxy & Elsewhere or 200 Motels.

So glad a few years back I converted my VHS copy of 200 Motels to a DVD. That shiat still blows my mind.

/Magic Fingers for the win

El Chode, Thanks for the translation. That was a painful read. I think she used up her yearly ration of parenthetical asides. The best paragraph was the one in which she began with her questioning the future of copyrights and worked her way to dictatorships and football vs. the arts without actually getting to copyright issues.

The only thing she left off was a reference to "The Puppy Who Lost Its Way" and "Knibb High football rules!"

the_colonel: The only thing she left off was a reference to "The Puppy Who Lost Its Way" and "Knibb High football rules!"

Or a reference to a certain town in California known for growing turkeys