p2pnet.net News Feature:- Way back, I used to read Matt Groening’s Life is Hell in Now, a Toronto alternative weekly. That’s where the first Blinky – then a rabbit – appeared.

These days, my daughter and I watch Groening’s The Simpsons frequently. Emma is eight but she has a great sense of humour and even at her tender age, recognizes parody. We home school her so The Simpsons also opens up all kinds of other educational opportunities. (I expect to get slagged rotten for this admission ; )

Emma and I also like Fairly Oddparents, supposedly for kids aged two to 11. The series features Timmy Turner, 10, and his fairy godparents, Cosmo and Wanda whose job it is to grant Timmy’s every wish. Fairly Oddparents lampoons parents, parenthood, politics - you name it. It’s hilarious. (And educational ; )

But I digress.

Christ Turner has written a history of The Simpsons called, appropriately, Planet Simpson. I haven’t read it, but the reviews are great.

More to the point, Turner quotes Radiohead’s The Bends, Idioteque, and I Might Be Wrong and to do so, needed the appropriate permissions.

He got them.

Turner and his wife, Ash, are at the tail end of Planet Simpson’s Asia-Pacific promo tour and Ash told us there are changes to the item below - “links and a photo of the contract to use the lyrics”.

For now, however, read on (Jon) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Me & Radiohead & The (Necessary?) Evils Of Copyright
Chris Turner - Planet Simpsons

I have here on my desk a photocopy of a "licence agreement" between my agent and one David C. Olsen, Director/Business Affairs, Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida. This document grants me "the non-exclusive right to print, publish, distribute and sell at [my] sole cost and expense" the lyrics from an attached schedule of "copyrighted musical composition(s)." Namely: the songs "The Bends," "Idioteque," and "I Might Be Wrong," all by Radiohead. The cost of securing these rights was "the sum of THREE HUNDRED FIFTY ($350.00) dollars, payable in US funds," plus "one (1) gratis copy of any publication in which the composition is utilized."

Which is to say: I paid $350 (in US funds) to use a handful of quotes from Radiohead songs in my book.

There are several odd things about the whole rigmarole that surrounded procuring this license agreement:

1) I was not required to fork over a single dime to quote from The Simpsons itself, nor to quote at length from Tony Hendra’s excellent book Going Too Far, nor to quote from Foucault or Mark Twain or David Foster Wallace. But to use 87 words from the collected lyrics of Radiohead? Three hundred and fifty simoleons. Roughly $4.02 per word. (Which, incidentally, is more than double the highest amount I’ve ever been paid per word to write for a magazine or newspaper.)

2) Specifically, I paid to quote from "The Bends," and indeed I do - three lines of lyrics, 22 words total, as one half of the epigraph on the title page of my book’s Introduction. I paid to quote from "Idioteque," and you’ll find 24 words from the song on page 208 of my book. And I paid to quote from "I Might Be Wrong," and lo and behold you’ll find nine lines (41 words) from the song on page 220 of my book, pursuant to a discussion of Lisa Simpson’s symbolic connections with the left-wing activism of recent years.

On page 219, however, there are 15 words from "Karma Police," five from "Paranoid Android," and 18 from "Subterranean Homesick Alien." Total cost: zero, zilch, nada. Which means either a) you can quote from the Radiohead album OK Computer free of cost but not from other Radiohead albums, or else b) there is some threshold crossed between 18 and 21 words of citation (20 perhaps?) at which point citing Radiohead lyrics legally transforms from free-of-cost "fair use"/"fair comment" to use of copyrighted material requiring a licensing fee of $4.02 per word. I dunno which it is.

3) Perhaps the oddest thing about the situation: of all the TV shows and movies and books and rock & roll songs I discuss in Planet Simpson (a vast, vast, vast number), the only artists I’ve met personally are Radiohead. In other words, I’ve had to pay to discuss the work of the only people cited in the book who, in theory, I actually could’ve asked in person for permission to use their work.

Let me explain: in August 2001, Radiohead came through central Canada on their Amnesiac tour. Coincidentally, some old friends of Ashley’s were in Toronto (where we were living at the time) for work-related reasons. They’d met and befriended Radiohead’s tour manager years earlier, before the band broke it big, and they had plans to meet him for dinner the night before Radiohead’s Toronto/Barrie show. I was off hanging out with another friend at the time, but Ash was along for the dinner at an upscale Toronto restaurant called the Mercer Street Grill (now defunct). After a while it became clear that the band’s members would be joining them later on.

Now, Ash isn’t much of a fan of the music (she calls the OK Computer album "the depressed boy soundtrack") but she knew I was a rabid Radiohead fan. She snuck off and called me: "Uh, Turner, I guess Radiohead’s coming to meet us for dinner in a few minutes. …I, uh, suggest you come down here as soon as you can." Which I did, post-haste. I arrived to find Ash seated at a large table next to Jonny Greenwood, the band’s brilliant guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. Lead singer/lyricist/driving force Thom Yorke was down at the far end. In between were Ash’s friends and Radiohead’s tour manager and main manager (by the way, the nicest guy of the bunch). And thus began my dinner with Radiohead.

It was a lovely meal, though I can’t remember what I had. What I do remember is chatting with Jonny Greenwood about some sort of mathematical puzzle he’d been obsessing about. I remember Ash leaning over to sardonically ask me if the guy at the far end of the table with the wonky eye was "a roadie or something". I gently hissed at her that it was Thom freaking Yorke (The name meant nothing to her, at the time). Early on, Ash also ended up asking Jonny Greenwood what he did in the band. Actually, I think the actual question was, "So… do you sing, or do you play an instrument?" The rest of the Canadians at the table (fans, all) sort of stopped talking, tensed up, waited to see what would happen. Jonny is well-known as a spectacularly gifted musician - and to not know this, well, you’d have to’ve been living under a rock, or you weren’t a fan of Radiohead - and c’mon, who isn’t a fan of Radiohead? Well Ash wasn’t (still isn’t, though she doesn’t mind "Fake Plastic Trees"), but she’s polite and nice and such and out for dinner with foreign strangers, and was sincerely asking a question. After a short are-you-shitting-me-or-what pause, Jonny quite humbly answered that he played guitar and a few other things. Sigh of relief from those of us who weren’t in or affiliated with the band. A short while later, Ash and Jonny figured out that they were both huge fans of the hilarious BBC sitcom Father Ted, at which point Jonny pulled a quick Dougal impression, Dougal being the dimwitted young priest who supplies many of the show’s best gags. Note to Radiohead obsessives: Jonny Greenwood does an excellent Dougal.

Okay. Here comes what was, from my perspective, the coolest part: It just so happened that I’d stopped by the Shift magazine office earlier that day to pick up a few copies of the new issue, hot off the press. And that issue just happened to contain my cover essay "Why Technology Is Failing Us (And How We Can Fix It)," which moreover just happened to be probably the best piece of magazine writing I’d done to that point (and would go on to win the President’s Medal for Best Canadian Magazine Article at the 2001 National Magazine Awards). So of course I gave copies of the magazine to Jonny and Thom and the two managers.

After the meal Thom went back to the hotel and the rest of us proceeded to the Cameron House, one of Toronto’s finest watering holes, and we had a few beers and Jonny and I talked about jazz and the divide between British and American pop-music aesthetics. And then we walked up the street to the Rivoli and at some point Radiohead’s manager used the fantastic English gangster-slang term "Old Bill" and a fine evening was had by all.

Fast-forward to the next night, Molson Park, Barrie. Radiohead’s on stage. (This was the first and to-date only time that I’ve had backstage passes for a major rock concert, so I was just all kinds of giddy at this point.) Thom Yorke introduces "Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box" thusly: "This is for all the people who sit in traffic all day trying to get to and from work. Sitting, listening to the radio, thinking: ‘How the fuck is the global economy helping me, exactly?’" It strikes me that this sounds a bit like a passage in my Shift essay in which I describe the traffic jams on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley, the information-economy revolutionaries idling in their cars under smoggy skies. Later on, Thom cites a statistic about the size of the hole in the ozone layer that’s unquestionably lifted directly from my essay. I’m delighted, of course.

Afterward, we made use of our backstage passes to go chat with the band and its managers again (sans Ash - who, fair enough, wasn’t interested in the concert. She’d enjoyed the dinner, but still wasn’t a fan of the music). Shortly after we took a seat in the meet-and-greet tent, Thom Yorke extricated himself from a gaggle of fans to come over and mention that he loved the essay, that he thought I should try to place it in a British magazine, and that he wanted to talk more about it onstage but didn’t want to carry on too long. Then he sort of shuffled off. Radiohead’s tour manager, his jaw agape, explained to me that this was highly unorthodox behaviour for Mr. Yorke. I floated home, wide-grinned and beaming, and the tale of my encounter with Radiohead eventually found its way into Shinan Govani’s National Post gossip column.

Later, I gathered from the notes at a few Radiohead fansites that Thom Yorke continued to make onstage reference to the environmental-disaster stuff in my essay for the next couple weeks.

So then: I’m reasonably sure, indeed almost certain, that the members of Radiohead who actually wrote the songs I cited in my book would’ve happily allowed me to quote from them free of charge. But this was simply not an option. Instead, the enormous corporate apparatus of big-time music and big-time publishing churned out a standard-issue license agreement, and I footed the bill. My intentions as a writer - i.e. to use the song’s lyrics to help reinforce an argument that’s quite consistent with Radiohead’s own stated beliefs - was irrelevant. That I as a person kind of knew the guys in the band - also irrelevant. That the members of Radiohead as people surely didn’t need the money, would most likely have wished me well in my work, and are avowedly anti-corporate and thus probably opposed to the usurious rates I was charged to quote from their songs - also irrelevant.

This is what’s so ass-backwards about the way copyright is (over)protected in our culture. And this is but one of a million stories about the "business" of music that reveals the size of the lie when the corporate side of music claims to be the defender of the rights and interests of musicians. $350.00 US. Sheesh.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 24th, 2004 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 2804 times