p2pnet - rss feed: The Great American Bottleneck
“Playing American rock and roll has been the hardest and best thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says Gavin Castleton.
“I sidestepped college and a solid paycheck in order to give my life to it. The emotional highs and lows of doing this are stressful, but I would rather be living those peaks and valleys than living a straight line.”
He made the right choice.
He’s the vocalist with Grüvis Malt which toured with Sage Francis last year and, “When we got back, I released two solo records,” he told p2pnet.
“There is a song that is very relevant to much of the content on your site. It’s called Great American Bottleneck.”
Castleton says there’s a long intro. Right. It’s long. He also says “but please stick around to the end”. Right again.
It’s an absolutely amazing piece. And so are the lyrics, painstakingly linked.
With this kind of innovative art around, there’s no way Big Music is going to win.
The lyrics are below. You can get the mp3 from Grüvis Malt - more mp3s there too - and we’re also hosting it here.
………….
The Great American
Bottleneck
This message
is to every musician speaking
out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and
stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a
middleman or lazy. Squidnecks
You major label suckers make
me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, “Hey
we cut your paycheck in half because you’ve got to help pay for the 250 billion
copies we give away. Have
they mentioned when they cut
new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they
mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising
the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move
to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first?
I’ll tell you: the
business that’s about to make it’s bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the
RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those
same five labels that pay them are charging
you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you’re negotiating
whether or not the
latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast
and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they’ve
positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can’t really expect to turn the tide with a
few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT’S THE ISPs,
IT’S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed
monopoly by the FCC so
We’re standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions
I say bring it
when the wickedness of big
business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it’s drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock
this is not an issue of children
not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn’t even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it’s creation, the playing field of American music
was almost leveled, and that, in the opinion of five
big wallets, is unacceptable.
Finally the world was given a voice to respond to the one-sided conversation
conducted
by the music industry for the last 80 + years. Anyone who tells you that we’ve
always
had a voice, and it’s in the form of money spent, knows good and well where
your money
goes when there’s only one product on the shelf. You disagree? We can discuss
it every four years in November
This already happened but
most people weren’t alive or don’t remember. Radio showed up in the 20’s
and labels panicked, declared unlicensed broadcasts illegal, and lobbied all
sorts of garbage until Capitol Records came along and broke ranks in ‘42. When
they rose to the top of the pile, the other labels woke up and embraced radio
too.
we already know how the story ends - the new technology becomes consolidated
and sold to one or two old white men.
Maybe the RIAA isn’t right, it’s just afraid.
Afraid that artists
will find a new way to get paid
maybe removing profit from the picture will expose the parasites
who spent 19 million
in campaign donations every year to extend your copyrights
we’ll see who’s still making records when there’s no compensation.
if there’s no beer at the party, the only people left will be there for the
conversation.
Maybe art is only art when it’s depraved.
Maybe the deck is so stacked, we need to start from scratch.
We’re standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical
proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness
of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that
it’s drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
and though I may soon be swept away
I can’t wait to see who steps in to take my place
April 23rd, 2004 at 12:22 am
cencorship up the ying yang feee expression about the passion in the music is not allowed , yet this lanauge isused in the music and the feature stories
please remove the athoritarian moderators.
( in reference to all the deleted comments)