This is our house and our house music - I am the creator

This post expounds on the points that Tripp made in his post today.

There's a common misconception in popular music that there is a hard and fast line between the artist as the visionary and creator and the person forking over their eighteen dollars.

This is far from the truth. An album doesn't have any meaning until people start playing it. The easy and popular example of this phenomenon is demonstrated most by the paradigm of the DJ, combining snippets of different recordings, scratching out new sounds and creating a distinct product.

But there are for more subtle examples as well. The Rage Against the Machine son "Killing in the Name" has one set of meanings for me as I listen to it on my stereo right now, but it meant something very different to me as I listened to it as kid in a highly regimented Catholic high school. And "Fuck the Police" will never mean to me what it might mean to a black kid in Compton blasting it out of his jeep as he pulls up next to a cop stopped at a traffic light.

So who the hell is an artist to dictate what devices that their music can play in or how much of the music the consumer has to consume?

What's funny is that the record companies have thrived on a healthy disrespect for the intentions of artists. The whole genre of hip hop, the most popular segment of the buying public has been built on the outright larceny of song samples.

Here's a different argument that just occurred to me: How is the practice of constructing albums not a monopolistic practice in and of itself? In the thirties and forties 5 (or was it 4) film studios controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of films in the US. While their ownership of theaters wasn't complete they exercised de facto control by block booking which in effect said that if a theater wanted the new Cary Grant movie they'd have to carry two or three of the studios B pictures as well rather than cherry picking hits from each studio. The model is the same basic one that would have me buy a whole Britney Spears album just to pick up the Neptunes song "Slave 4 U." Our government saw fit to break up the vertical integration of the studio sytem back then, so why are they bending over backwards today to further entrench the hegemony of the record companies today?