The Reverend Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church were back in the news this week after being hit with a $10.9 million judgment in a civil action brought by Albert Snyder, the father of Matthew Snyder, a Marine lance corporal who was killed in Iraq in January 2006. Phelps and some of his church members picketed the funeral, as they have other military funerals in recent years, in the belief that (here’s where things get weird) U.S. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan represent God’s punishment for American tolerance of homosexuality.
Not surprisingly, the verdict has been applauded across the political spectrum. Liberals, moderates, and many conservatives are repulsed both by Westboro’s views and its tactics, while even those religious conservatives who share some elements of Phelps’s views on homosexuality are appalled by his actions, not to mention mystified by his logic, and are generally embarrassed to be associated with a philosophy best captured by the oxymoronic label of “Christian nihilism.” (The group is fond of declarations like “God hates the world and all her people” and “Thank God for 9/11”).
Still, there exists a minority opinion that Fred Phelps’s constitutional rights have somehow been violated here. The lawyer who defended Westboro in the case made a statement to the effect that the church’s actions were protected under the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and that the verdict was likely to put a chill on political protest in the U.S. As someone who takes a broad view of freedom of speech, it’s an argument that I take seriously.
But is freedom of speech truly the issue at stake here? The answer to this question may lie in the distinction between civil and criminal law. The right to freedom of speech, like other protections in the Constitution, is intended primarily to protect citizens from the actions of their government—in other words, to protect us against the criminalization of speech, except under certain well-established standards, including incitement to imminent lawless action (e.g. “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”) and, more problematically, obscenity.
The situation is somewhat different in the realm of civil law, which deals primarily with legal actions taken by citizens against one another. The necessary role of government in mediating such actions leads to a legal gray area in terms of the extent to which government can be involved in restricting speech, an area that remains highly contested. Courts have consistently allowed citizens to being lawsuits restricting speech that violates established principles of tort law, particularly that of defamation (i.e. slander and libel). Snyder’s suit against Phelps and Westboro is a civil action; in other words, his claim is not that their speech constitutes a criminal act, but rather that it amounts to harassment and an intentional infliction of emotional distress, two well established principles of tort law.
I don’t know enough about either the specifics of the case or the vagaries of tort law to know whether Snyder’s suit has merit on these grounds. I suspect that, once the appeals process has taken its course, the verdict will be upheld but the size of the award will be reduced. My point is merely that a blanket appeal to freedom of speech is not necessarily a legitimate defense against this type of action. It is one thing for a government to protect the sanctity of free speech by its citizens; it is quite another to protect those citizens from the consequences of that speech, which in this case take the form of a civil lawsuit. Fred Phelps and his church may have the constitutional right to continue their hatemongering, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be compelled to, quite literally, pay for their actions.
03 November 2007
16 October 2007
Karma Police
As nearly everyone has no doubt heard by now, Radiohead has released its new album In Rainbows exclusively (for now) through its website. For a group of Radiohead’s commercial and critical stature, this would be news enough, but of course there’s more: The band is allowing customers to set their own price for the album, meaning that, aside from a minuscule credit card processing fee, it’s possible to download the album for free. Legally.
I preordered In Rainbows and downloaded the album when it became available the morning of October 10. I chose to pay around $10, which according to most economists, would place me somewhere between Forrest Gump and a brain-damaged squirrel on the intelligence scale, since I voluntarily paid for something that the seller was offering more-or-less for free. But as the legions of Pop Tones readers are no doubt already aware, I don’t think like an economist. Neither do a lot of other Radiohead fans, apparently. According to one British survey, the average price paid for the first million downloads (yes, the album went “platinum” in less than a week) was around $8, and only one-third of customers chose to pay nothing.
Nevertheless, I was buying something with my money, and I’m not talking about the ten songs on the album. I was buying into a new distribution model, one that has the potential to fundamentally change the way music is bought and sold. Radiohead may or may not care how much money they make from this experiment (although I predict they’ll wind up doing quite well), but if the offering is a financial success for the band—or rather, if it’s perceived as a financial success—more artists will be encouraged to emulate Radiohead by cutting out the middlemen and selling music directly to the public. (The band plans to release a conventional CD version of the album next year, but no hard date or distribution details have yet been announced.)
Why is this a good thing? For one thing, it should ultimately lead to artists earning more for their work, as well as lower prices for customers. But it's also a matter of justice: the music business is finally getting what it deserves. With the possible exception of the airlines, it’s difficult to think of another industry that has shown such callousness and hostility toward its own customers, overcharging them ridiculously for CDs and now randomly suing people who’ve chosen to rebel against this price regime through illegal downloading. Earlier this month a judge in Minnesota—apparently now ground zero for all manner of legal idiocy—awarded the industry $222,000 in a lawsuit against a woman who had allegedly downloaded 24 songs. If this seems like a reasonable decision to you, here’s a thought experiment: 24 tracks, multiplied by the 99-cent rate charged by Apple’s iTunes store for legal downloads, comes to $23.76 worth of “stolen” merchandise. If someone were convicted of shoplifting $23.76 worth of merchandise from a discount store, would you consider a $222,000 fine to be an appropriate punishment? Unless you can honestly answer “yes” to this question, you now have some sense of the warm feeling I get every time I read a news story about how much money the music industry is losing because of illegal downloading. It’s satisfying to see the public exacting some revenge on the industry, and doing so in the only terms it understands.
Of course the labels are fond of responding to complaints about their high prices and recent litigiousness by saying they’re merely protecting the interests of their artists—an argument that would carry a lot more moral weight were it not for the fact that most artists with major-label record deals make only about a dollar for every CD sold, and many end up in the hole once promotional costs are recouped. For a lot of these musicians, $8 an album might not sound so bad.
I preordered In Rainbows and downloaded the album when it became available the morning of October 10. I chose to pay around $10, which according to most economists, would place me somewhere between Forrest Gump and a brain-damaged squirrel on the intelligence scale, since I voluntarily paid for something that the seller was offering more-or-less for free. But as the legions of Pop Tones readers are no doubt already aware, I don’t think like an economist. Neither do a lot of other Radiohead fans, apparently. According to one British survey, the average price paid for the first million downloads (yes, the album went “platinum” in less than a week) was around $8, and only one-third of customers chose to pay nothing.
Nevertheless, I was buying something with my money, and I’m not talking about the ten songs on the album. I was buying into a new distribution model, one that has the potential to fundamentally change the way music is bought and sold. Radiohead may or may not care how much money they make from this experiment (although I predict they’ll wind up doing quite well), but if the offering is a financial success for the band—or rather, if it’s perceived as a financial success—more artists will be encouraged to emulate Radiohead by cutting out the middlemen and selling music directly to the public. (The band plans to release a conventional CD version of the album next year, but no hard date or distribution details have yet been announced.)
Why is this a good thing? For one thing, it should ultimately lead to artists earning more for their work, as well as lower prices for customers. But it's also a matter of justice: the music business is finally getting what it deserves. With the possible exception of the airlines, it’s difficult to think of another industry that has shown such callousness and hostility toward its own customers, overcharging them ridiculously for CDs and now randomly suing people who’ve chosen to rebel against this price regime through illegal downloading. Earlier this month a judge in Minnesota—apparently now ground zero for all manner of legal idiocy—awarded the industry $222,000 in a lawsuit against a woman who had allegedly downloaded 24 songs. If this seems like a reasonable decision to you, here’s a thought experiment: 24 tracks, multiplied by the 99-cent rate charged by Apple’s iTunes store for legal downloads, comes to $23.76 worth of “stolen” merchandise. If someone were convicted of shoplifting $23.76 worth of merchandise from a discount store, would you consider a $222,000 fine to be an appropriate punishment? Unless you can honestly answer “yes” to this question, you now have some sense of the warm feeling I get every time I read a news story about how much money the music industry is losing because of illegal downloading. It’s satisfying to see the public exacting some revenge on the industry, and doing so in the only terms it understands.
Of course the labels are fond of responding to complaints about their high prices and recent litigiousness by saying they’re merely protecting the interests of their artists—an argument that would carry a lot more moral weight were it not for the fact that most artists with major-label record deals make only about a dollar for every CD sold, and many end up in the hole once promotional costs are recouped. For a lot of these musicians, $8 an album might not sound so bad.
20 September 2007
Combat Rock
Sarcasm as an artistic mode is problematic at best. There are, of course, some glorious exceptions—Bela Tarr's 450-minute long-take extravaganza Satantango and Sly Stone's 1973 cover of "Que Sera Sera" jump to mind—but too often sarcasm is the province of the smug, the lazy, or those just not smart enough to be witty.
Certainly none of the above qualities apply to the Sri Lankan-British singer-rapper-producer M.I.A., whose just-released sophomore album Kala surely qualifies for that list of exceptions. First, some recent history: Flush with the artistic and (relative) commercial success of Arular, M.I.A. (aka Maya Arulpragasm) was apparently planning to record her second album with the ubiquitous Timbaland, before visa troubles derailed the collaboration. Indeed, if Rolling Stone is to be believed, M.I.A. was only able to re-enter the United States after Bono, of all people, put in a good word for her at the request of the president of Interscope Records.
So perhaps we have the Bush administration to thank for the globe-trotting Kala. Recorded on several continents, the album draws from sources as musically disparate as Bollywood film scores, raga, hip-hop, and the Modern Lovers—and that's just on the first track, the booming "Bamboo Banger," which reimagines Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" as a portrait of a kid running alongside a tourist's hummer. Not menacing but not exactly friendly, the image establishes an uncertainty of tone, a sense of unknown intentions, that pervades the whole album.
The first three cuts revise and extend the eclectic globo-club music of Arular, while rocking harder and dirtier than anything from the debut. The squawking and clattering "Bird Flu" aims squarely for the central nervous system; the Trinidadian-inflected lead single "Boyz" rides the album's biggest beat. With the fourth track, an interesting development: The album's first conventional "song" is "Jimmy," a lush rendering of a 1980s Bollywood disco tune that a young Maya used to dance to for money at her mother's behest. After a barely decipherable opening verse about Africa ("Take me on ya genocide tour/Take me on a truck to Darfur") she lunges headlong into the original lyrics, attacking the insipid chorus ("You told me that you're busy/Your loving makes me crazy") with girlish (or by her own account, drunken) enthusiasm. It's clear we've entered uncharted territory. What's not clear is exactly what is undercutting what here. Are the casual references to genocide merely a sarcastic send-up of disco vapidity, or also a bitter acknowledgment that the political game is rigged and that those who can might as well dance the night away until the other shoe drops?
M.I.A. may "represent the world town," but she's also pursuing her own singular vision and becoming a global star in the process ("I hate money cos it makes me numb," she says in another song.) Referencing the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" the genre-bending "$20" melds digitally processed Middle Eastern chanting with the deathless bass line of New Order's "Blue Monday". M.I.A. sings "I put people on the map that never seen a map," a boast she's just made good on with a pair of tracks featuring, respectively, a teenage Nigerian MC and a group of aboriginal Australian rappers. Still, as elsewhere on Kala, political ambition is inextricable from the threat of unrepressed violence (the song's title refers to the cost of an AK-47 in some necks of the woods in Africa) and any pretensions to sloganeering are immediately lost in the woozy indeterminacy of the music. Throughout the album, even as M.I.A.'s lyrics reach toward a brave new world, the grooves drag everything back to the grime of the hear and now.
It all comes to a head on "Paper Planes," a song that distills Kala down to its essence. Over the buoyant midtempo pulse of the Clash's immigrant paean "Straight to Hell," M.I.A. raps about a hustler making faking visas, the mock-triumphalist lyrics ("Everyone's a winner/We're making our fame") setting up the ballsiest chours I've heard in years: "All I wanna do is [gunshot] [gunshot] [gunshot] [gunshot] and [gun cocking] [cash register ring] and take your money." By the time she give a shout-out to "third world democracy," the joke's already on us. A masterstroke of world-weary vitriol, "Paper Planes" both returns the gift and swallows its own tail. Just as "Jimmy" is simultaneously pop and anti-pop, it's both political and anti-political.
Nothing could possibly follow it, and so the Timbaland-produced "Come Around" seems deliberately positioned as an afterthought, an ironic nod to the commercial second album that could have been. Timbaland himself sleepwalks through a couple rote verses about picking up some girl in da club, and while the track satisfies in conventional hip-hop terms, its inclusion feels nearly as sarcastic as that of "Jimmy." Or maybe it's just that Tim's beats sound relatively tame compared to what we've been listening to for the past 45 minutes.
What with M.I.A.'s recent bristling at critical insinuations that Arular was masterminded by her former boyfriend/producer Diplo (who worked on three Kala tracks), the type of tired bullshit that, even at this late date, still seems to attach itself to our best female artists, it's tempting to read "Come Around" as an act of aggression: M.I.A. swallowing up and regurgitating in her own image a famous male collaborator. But by this time there's no doubt: Despite the presence of Timbaland, Diplo, primary co-producer Switch, and many other collaborators, this album is no one's but hers. And if anyone makes a better one this year, I'll be amazed.
Certainly none of the above qualities apply to the Sri Lankan-British singer-rapper-producer M.I.A., whose just-released sophomore album Kala surely qualifies for that list of exceptions. First, some recent history: Flush with the artistic and (relative) commercial success of Arular, M.I.A. (aka Maya Arulpragasm) was apparently planning to record her second album with the ubiquitous Timbaland, before visa troubles derailed the collaboration. Indeed, if Rolling Stone is to be believed, M.I.A. was only able to re-enter the United States after Bono, of all people, put in a good word for her at the request of the president of Interscope Records.
So perhaps we have the Bush administration to thank for the globe-trotting Kala. Recorded on several continents, the album draws from sources as musically disparate as Bollywood film scores, raga, hip-hop, and the Modern Lovers—and that's just on the first track, the booming "Bamboo Banger," which reimagines Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" as a portrait of a kid running alongside a tourist's hummer. Not menacing but not exactly friendly, the image establishes an uncertainty of tone, a sense of unknown intentions, that pervades the whole album.
The first three cuts revise and extend the eclectic globo-club music of Arular, while rocking harder and dirtier than anything from the debut. The squawking and clattering "Bird Flu" aims squarely for the central nervous system; the Trinidadian-inflected lead single "Boyz" rides the album's biggest beat. With the fourth track, an interesting development: The album's first conventional "song" is "Jimmy," a lush rendering of a 1980s Bollywood disco tune that a young Maya used to dance to for money at her mother's behest. After a barely decipherable opening verse about Africa ("Take me on ya genocide tour/Take me on a truck to Darfur") she lunges headlong into the original lyrics, attacking the insipid chorus ("You told me that you're busy/Your loving makes me crazy") with girlish (or by her own account, drunken) enthusiasm. It's clear we've entered uncharted territory. What's not clear is exactly what is undercutting what here. Are the casual references to genocide merely a sarcastic send-up of disco vapidity, or also a bitter acknowledgment that the political game is rigged and that those who can might as well dance the night away until the other shoe drops?
M.I.A. may "represent the world town," but she's also pursuing her own singular vision and becoming a global star in the process ("I hate money cos it makes me numb," she says in another song.) Referencing the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" the genre-bending "$20" melds digitally processed Middle Eastern chanting with the deathless bass line of New Order's "Blue Monday". M.I.A. sings "I put people on the map that never seen a map," a boast she's just made good on with a pair of tracks featuring, respectively, a teenage Nigerian MC and a group of aboriginal Australian rappers. Still, as elsewhere on Kala, political ambition is inextricable from the threat of unrepressed violence (the song's title refers to the cost of an AK-47 in some necks of the woods in Africa) and any pretensions to sloganeering are immediately lost in the woozy indeterminacy of the music. Throughout the album, even as M.I.A.'s lyrics reach toward a brave new world, the grooves drag everything back to the grime of the hear and now.
It all comes to a head on "Paper Planes," a song that distills Kala down to its essence. Over the buoyant midtempo pulse of the Clash's immigrant paean "Straight to Hell," M.I.A. raps about a hustler making faking visas, the mock-triumphalist lyrics ("Everyone's a winner/We're making our fame") setting up the ballsiest chours I've heard in years: "All I wanna do is [gunshot] [gunshot] [gunshot] [gunshot] and [gun cocking] [cash register ring] and take your money." By the time she give a shout-out to "third world democracy," the joke's already on us. A masterstroke of world-weary vitriol, "Paper Planes" both returns the gift and swallows its own tail. Just as "Jimmy" is simultaneously pop and anti-pop, it's both political and anti-political.
Nothing could possibly follow it, and so the Timbaland-produced "Come Around" seems deliberately positioned as an afterthought, an ironic nod to the commercial second album that could have been. Timbaland himself sleepwalks through a couple rote verses about picking up some girl in da club, and while the track satisfies in conventional hip-hop terms, its inclusion feels nearly as sarcastic as that of "Jimmy." Or maybe it's just that Tim's beats sound relatively tame compared to what we've been listening to for the past 45 minutes.
What with M.I.A.'s recent bristling at critical insinuations that Arular was masterminded by her former boyfriend/producer Diplo (who worked on three Kala tracks), the type of tired bullshit that, even at this late date, still seems to attach itself to our best female artists, it's tempting to read "Come Around" as an act of aggression: M.I.A. swallowing up and regurgitating in her own image a famous male collaborator. But by this time there's no doubt: Despite the presence of Timbaland, Diplo, primary co-producer Switch, and many other collaborators, this album is no one's but hers. And if anyone makes a better one this year, I'll be amazed.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
