So the curiosity was killing me and I finally looked up the infamous miley cyrus vma clip...couldn't finish it. That was horrid. Is this music?! She did not by any means look like she had rehearsed, nor did she look comfortable doing any of it. If she wasn.t comfortable doing, it she should have made someone change it. Who's the boss here Miley? Not the role model I would want my daughter to have. When did skin and sex become more important than the message of the music? Not that that song really had a message...

Like I have previously discussed, music used to be about keeping traditions and history alive in an easy to remember format. The music had a message. Sometimes it was what a bad king had done that must not be repeated and other times it was stories of gods and goddesses. As music evolved, it became a way to secretly pass messages, like with the underground railroad. But it always had a message. During the vietnam era, it was a message about loving your fellow man and how we shouldn't go to war. (The reasons for the war and the message certainly conflicted but that's another blog.) 

What message are we sending these days? Not only do we have visual messages with body language thanks to video, but listening to the actual words, I have to say we aren't saying anything that I want to be remembered for in the future. Our music is saying that we give license to people that think about promiscuous sex, drugs, and murder. Now I'm not saying all music these days has this message, but for some reason the most popular music does. When you add the fact that once-sweet, wholesome children that were a good role model, become hip thrusting, drug bingeing rehab escapees (I'm looking at you Lindsey and Britney and yes, Miley and Justin, too) This is not a good thing people! 

The part that makes me the saddest, isn't the loss of a beautiful thing like music used to be, it's that there are parents who think there is nothing wrong with teaching their two year old to sing ICP (just an example)! Parents that see nothing wrong with letting their 12 year old dance like a stripper. Parents that are afraid to tell them no and assert their responsibilities as parents and forbid anything their little angel wants even if it's not in their best interest. Until you reach a certain age, music like that should not be the moral compass or even a guidebook. It shouldn't even be a suggestion from a facebook friend. To be honest, I have to say if my daughter or son starts liking that stuff or acting that way, I'm gonna do what my mother threatened and lock them in a room til they're thirty!!

Part Five--Piracy! (arrrr!)

Ok for part five we are getting into the business aspect of the music. I know my tone through out this blog has been that music used to belong to everyone for free until some greedy sucker decided to charge for it. The reality is that the laws are protecting the artists who take the time and trouble to compose these songs. Should they make as much money as they do? Probably not but that isn't the issue. Should they be role models while talking of smackin hos and smoking weed like a freight train? No, but again not the issue.

Should they be protected from being robbed? Yes. And that is what the piracy laws do. From a business perspective, it doesn't make sense to not protect your work from theft. Many court rulings have repeatedly ruled that sharing, downloading, and uploading music, movies, pictures, etc. is copyright infringement and can even in some cases become criminal infringement.

Try to think of it this way.  If you go to all the trouble of making a big cake for the bake sale, you probably want to protect it from the locals (i.e. always hungry husband and heathen children) right? So you put a notice out that this cake is for the bake sale, maybe put a lid or cover of some kind on it. Then it's finally time to sell your cake at the bake sale only to find, as you lift the lid, that little gnomes have snuck in and distributed your cake, piece by piece, to the masses. The very masses that were supposed to buy your cake to raise money for the starving children in some unpronounceable country, now no longer want to buy your cake because they already had it for free. Now, because they aren't buying it, you not only lost out on the opportunity to feed poor starving children(!), but you also lost all the money it cost you to make that cake.

Does that make sense? People lose money when piracy of movies or music occurs. Sure it's mostly rich people that have lots more anyway, but it is still money that belongs to other people. It's like I tell my 3 year old, "If it's not yours, NO TOUCHY!!"

I don't whole-heartedly agree with the laws but it's not my job to. It's a law and that is what matters. Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean that you can ignore it. Most laws do have a really good reason for being laws in the first place. Sure I miss the days of free (music) love, but I'm glad to know that if my kids ever want to become singers or actors, that their work will be as protected as possible.

That being said, there are sites that you can download music from that are perfectly legal because the songs are public domain, not protected by copyright laws. It's a little harder to find these sites and you aren't going to find new stuff on them, but I love the oldies anyway...

Part Four-rock and roll!!!

Ok I admit I am skipping over quite a bit of musical history here but what do you want from me?! Besides Im pretty sure that no one will mind as long as I talk about Elvis at some point. No I'm kidding. this is actually my favorite blog to date and the one I was the most excited to write about. I love music (cant carry a tune in a bucket) and the twenties to the eighties, give or take, is all music that i love to listen to. Not any particular type really, although I'm sure there are if I look at each particular era. I like songs that my grandma used to sing like Silver Wings or even old timey gospel.

We begin with the twenties and the rise of Jazz. Oh yes, I listen to some jazz on occasion as well as some of the other types of music that came out in the Great Depression. there were a great many young folks that believed that their ticket out of the slums and poor towns was music. You see years before a cat named Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Later down the road someone invented a radio. (Don't ask me who, I'm not really into science.) Then the ultimate genius took both ideas and invented the music industry. It wasn't quite that instant but you know how these things work.

I know it sounds really stupid and un-researched but if you watch O Brother Where Art Thou? you will hear alot of these songs and see what the music industry was like back then. Depending on who you went to, either you paid or were paid to record yourself and possibly your friends and family on a record for some guy that would then sell the record to a radio station and all of the people who told you that no one would ever want to listen to you sing had to eat crow because you were on the radio!!! Never mind that they were probably eating crow anyway, 'cause, well, you know, depression. Any way, someone decided that hey if people really like this music that much why don't we start putting music from one singer or group on a record and sell it that way! To the public itself not just to radio stations! 

Fast forward a bit and we are in rock and roll. The Beatles, Beach Boys and a couple other bands I can't think of right now. Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, the guy that did La Bamba (I know his name but I can never spell his last name right. Sorry Ritchie). Elvis, Cream, the Monkees, Jefferson Airplane, and my reason for making it through the nineties, the Grateful Dead. 

When you ask someone who lived through the 50's- 70's (Dave?), heck even someone from the eighties, one of the first things they think of is mix tapes. How you would sit for hours listening to the radio, waiting  for that one song to come on, trying to be quick enough to not cut off the first twenty seconds. I had a note book that I kept a record of the songs I wanted, which ones I had already gotten and what tapes they were on. I remember my first Mix Tape (some of you know where I'm going with this) being for my half sister's boyfriend. I had the biggest crush on him. I found the tape on my sisters nightstand later with the remains of a joint stubbed out on it. I was heartbroken. My sister was grounded when my father found her stash later. ;)

The Grateful Dead and many other bands made it big because of mix tapes. They weren't very popular until someone had the dedication to sit in a smokey bar or grassy hippie filled park and record them playing a set, then make copies and sell it to friends that had never heard them before. The bands weren't paid for it.  They didn't come back later and say, "Hey, you stole that music. You have to pay us now for all the copies you made and sold. We want our cut." Even through the smokey haze that most of them walked around in they realized that spreading their music through the underground was the way to go. Free advertisement! People actually sell these tapes on ebay.  If Eminem goes for that much....

So how did we get the point where Metallica (! shame on you James) is suing fans for getting their music for free? I know while music being about money is nothing new (minstrels remember?), when did it get to the point that it was ALL ABOUT THA BENJAMINS??  Sorry had to put that in there. lol.  Why do we have to have all these new laws in place to protect the bands from not making money? Music used to belong to everyone not just the privileged few who could afford to buy a $30 cd whenever they felt like it. I'm sorry but to the girl who put her heart into a mix tape because she was poor, those laws are just stupid. To the fan who sat for hours to catch all 20 minutes of a set, then spent forever copying the tape to get the bands name out there, these laws are crushing. 

Tune in next time when we will actually look at these laws and their impact on not just the music industry but the world.

Part three--the Golden Age of Music

In this episode, we will explore the concept of patronage, which is not what you are thinking. Your parent, SO, therapist, etc., says "Why, yes! I do see the pink polka-dotted elephants!", is patronizing. Patronage is the concept we discussed in part two, when the rich people paid the minstrels and wandering musicians to sing and play for them and...what do you mean you haven't read part two?! *sigh* Ok. Go ahead, I'll wait.....

Yes I went there. That's what you get for slackin"!

Anyway to continue our discussion, patronage became quite popular among the gentry of the day (1700's to around the early 1800's) and at the peak of the fad almost everyone among the landed gentry was a patron of some artist or another not just musicians! Getting a patron became the dream of parents with musically talented children and for good reason. If a child showed remarkable talent early enough, then all of their schooling would be paid by the patron not to mention room and board, clothing, food, everything! The hard part was actually getting a patron. Most often the child would have to make do with an improvised instrument and find a place to play or sing that lots of rich people would frequent.

Hmm, this is kinda familiar. Oh I got it! Finding a patron back then was alot like paying your dues in the music industry now! So there are lots of ways that music has evolved but there are more that is really hasn't. But I digress...

After finding a patron a child was usually set for life (unless there was some fatal accident that left them incapable of doing what the patron was paying them for.)  Eventually this practice evolved and the patrons paid the musicians to do nothing but make/write/play music. The artist would show up at balls and accept invitations to attend parties, in a purely social capacity sometimes and at others in a professional capacity. Some of these musicians threw off the shackles of their patrons, if they were the jealous type that is, and became musical mercenaries, plying their trade to the highest bidder.

Because of this Golden Age of Music, when people were paid to be original and imaginative, (and apparently wear goofy looking wigs) we have many, many changes to the world of music from the Middle Ages. There were many new instruments invented, some that became popular and haven't changed from their inventor's original,

 and some that we look at now and go "WTF?!"

We also have some of the most beautiful music the world has ever known and some of the most powerful. But music was at this point still available to the masses because other less well known musicians could learn to play what was written by the masters and spread the joyful sound to the less fortunate.

In the next blog we will see the conception of the evil money making machine called the music industry.

Part Two - The Middle Ages

By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, music had also become a medium for entertainment. It was still most definitely a religious experience, but people had started to train specifically for singing and playing instruments, to become musicians. Then, and now, musicians used their music to express their own agenda and opinions in the form of satirical verse.

Somewhere between the chanting accompanied by drums and flutes, and the era of wandering troubadours, minstrels and trouveres, someone figured out that you can put poetry to music.  This was a time when poems expressed love that could never be, fierce family pride and exposed kings and lords as buffoons. Being that  few people could read or write, setting the poems to music, which makes them easier to remember, became quite the fashion. Soon after this it became almost a battle of wits and wealth, because lords, dukes and kings would hire minstrels to pen a verse put to music about some of their enemies then spread the resulting song to the masses. One had to be especially careful when satirizing a king however...

The need of minstrels to make more and more obscure references led to the formation of many slang terms and also to the commercialization of music. How you ask? Because there were a skilled few who were in hot demand. The bidding war started! At first, the offers consisted of room and board, then moved to horses, clothing, women and finally to gold.

Minstrels, troubadours and trouveres had a nomadic lifestyle. They moved from shire to shire, village to village, kingdom to kingdom, not just to share the music that was already known, but to expose their own work in the hopes that they would make enough money to live on when they could no longer play. So for a duke or minor lord or even a king to offer room, board and everything that they could possibly need for the rest of their lives plus gold besides...it was an offer they couldn't refuse!

But they should have because they were then under pressure to KEEP being so clever and bold. This led to further developments in musical style and form that took so long that nothing really earth shattering came along  until composers like Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to name a few, hit the scene...but that is for the next Blog!

Part one

Music has been around for as long as there have been people. And I mean that almost literally. There are cave paintings of primitive people playing primitive musical instruments. The world’s oldest instrument found to date is over 35,000 years old. 

In its earliest form, music was used during ceremonies and on special occasions. Tribal or clan histories were set to music to make them easier for young (and old) minds to remember. Songs and chants were sung over sick people to appease evil spirits, to convince them to leave the body of the victim. Singing was a way of gaining the attention and, hopefully the favor, of the gods, such as before a hunt or a raid on another clan or tribe and, much like today, to attract or communicate with a potential mate or lover. The flute and the drum, the most widely used instruments used by primitive peoples, were often played together. Native Americans still play the ancient music taught to them by their ancestors and passed down through generations.

To this day music is played during special occasions. Weddings, funerals, parades, graduations, birthdays…people have balls and parties where music is played as background noise to create atmosphere, possibly as a conversation starter, and for dancing to. In modern times music is used for advertising, in movies, on television, and of course radio.  It’s hard to go one day without hearing some kind of music.

So how did music go from hairy people sitting around a fire singing to the gods to Gene Wilder singing about a world of pure imagination? How did it get to American Idol? How did it become a multi-billion dollar business spanning the globe that everyone pays for and is the nexus of numerous legal battles and new laws?

o   This blog is prepared by a paralegal student as a class project, without compensation. The content of this blog contains my opinion, and is offered for personal interest without warranty of any kind. Comments posted by others on this blog are the responsibility of the posters of those messages. The reader is solely responsible for verifying the content of this blog and any linked information. Content, sources, information, and links will most likely change over time. The content of this blog may not be construed as legal, medical, business, or personal advice.