p2pnet - rss feed: Where thieves and pimps run free
A while back Dave Allen, founding member of both Gang of Four and Shriekback and former president of the World Domination record label, posted on a list I’m on.
He’d included several juicy quotes centering on the record industry.
The sheer venality, coupled with a total lack of ethics and moral standards Big Music has displayed in its Super Bowl Pepsi-iTunes-RIAA farce, made me think of it again and I dredged it up from my email archives.
One quote in particular caught my eye. But before I get to it, here are a few other examples from Allen’s post, and from They Said It!
American music is something the rest of the world wants to listen to. Our job is to make sure they pay for it.
- Jay Berman. (When he said this, he was the RIAA’s [Recording Industry Association of America] boss. These days, he runs the IFPI [International Federation of the Ponographic Industry].)
If we do our job … Music’s not black or white, it’s green.
- Jim Caparro, PGD
The whole music business in the United States is based on numbers, based on unit sales and not on quality. It’s not based on beauty, it’s based on hype and it’s based on cocaine. It’s based on giving presents of large packages of dollars to play records on the air.
- Frank Zappa
In Los Angeles, they don’t want you to fail, they want you to die.
- David Geffen
My bass player came up to me and said, ‘Sarah, when are you going to start being a bitch?’ And I said, ‘That’s why I have a record company.’
- Sarah McLachlan
You go through stages where you wonder whether you are Christ, or just looking for him.
- David Bowie
You’ve gotta be business savvy really, or else you get the piss taken out of you.
- Melanie B, Spice Girls
Without music, the greatest marketing plans in the whole world don’t mean shit.
- Eddie Rosenblatt, Geffen Records
Without marketing plans, the greatest music in the whole world don’t mean shit.
- Christopher Knab, FourFront Media and Marketing
But as I said earlier, one quote in particular caught my fancy. Attributed to Hunter S. Thompson, it goes;
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
Where does the line come from? - I asked myself. So I went on a Net search.
It’s all over the place and hits at show biz in general, TV, radio, the corporate community - you name it. But it seems it originally came from Thompson’s Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s, published by Summit back in 1988.
David Emery was way before me. He’s on About.com and actually looked at the book.
Sadly, he says the item which really sets the quote off - “There’s also a negative side” - was apparently added by someone else. Ah well …
I lifted the pic from a Paris Review article here.
Cheers! Jon
