Off The Leash!

It's a rock & roll world for most people. They live fast, play loud, and (in the case of the recent era of the internet) will attempt to draw as much drama and attention to themselves as humanly possible regardless of just how good or negative the story lines are (see: Chris Brown, Rhianna, and modern pop music). The checkout line tabloid prattle now comes to us piped through fiber optic lines at speeds previously unthinkable just twenty years ago. It's hiding in our daily action planners right now, lurking inside our CNN news feeds, and playing tricks on us in hot button subject lines as we check our collective emails each day. At one point it happened, though and we hit the supermarket saturation point for tabloid content... and now you don't have to pay for a copy of who has 'the best and worst bikini bodies' or find out 'what celebrity is on the rocks this week.' Now those types of thought-provoking articles can come to us courtesy of free access email or a simple net browser... whether we want them to or not.

Overall this makes the creative marketplace fall prey to something it has been in danger of succumbing to since the advent of talkies; complete irrelevancy. Simply put, we've got more people on this planet than at any point in it's history... or as a roommate I once had use to put it... "you know the babes of those babes who are having babes of their own... (nods approvingly)... well those babes are having babes now." There's more people, and each one of those people has a corporate decimal point attached to them in terms of potential revenue. It's the ultimate irony that when you consider, as people, we have unlimited potential in terms of how we fill our lives with meaning and sustenance. This is an industry that's aim has been creating your needs and then fulfilling your wants based on those needs. It's all about what they're selling:

*you can't be beautiful if you don't have this...
*You need this product to be happy...
*This product will enable someone to accept for who you really are....
*Having this product will change your life...
*Using this product will help attract that perfect match...

It seems everything that they're selling you makes no mention about one glaring fact... that you, yourself cannot possibly overcome all these problems and issues alone. This creates a marketplace based on being better and more perfect in areas of aesthetics than it does fostering a place of inspired inner nourishment. We're ushering in a society of co-dependent offspring who more adept at creating an online persona than actually representing themselves with the sort of integrity. The culture inherently makes people less self reliant and more prone to going back again and again to their 'products.' An alarming amount is currently being directed at children. Like a pusher on a schoolyard playground, preying on the defenseless before they know any better. Speaking as a parent who's child's eyes go wide whenever the golden arches come in to view, when you start putting limits on your child's happiness based on a product or a brand, you're feeding the cycle.

It's not all bad, of course. There's plenty of positives to be found by a budding global-user-controlled marketplace. The ability to share globally self created content is at levels never before witnessed in the span of human history. This leads to a saturation of the market, meaning people have more options, more choices, and a more diverse marketplace with which to feast on a never-ending palette of potential. An artist dabbling in any sort of creative avenue can share it instantly with the world... if the world so chooses to tune in. Music went from being a dominated corporate fixture in the 90's to being all but non-existent in this new era. The corporations have had to branch out, with many labels now owning billboards, venues, and smaller record labels which they can give more of an 'indie' presence to... another brush of the market's brush in attempting to craft a product.

The internet has brought us all sorts of new categorically challenged celebrities, but it's also brought us a host of other options for being able to detach ourselves from the all the extracurricular hype. The marketplace use to be dominated by corporate selections, and if you were wanting current or modern music your choices were a lot of similar sounding bands unless you were brave enough to step into the world music genre... which is ironically where I found such names as Ani DiFranco and Keller Williams roughly in 1993. The landscape of music now is unprecedented, with limitless options and places to track down something new and unheard of to tap your foot to... and it's growing by the day.

So while the industry does as the industry has always done, we the people have to realize that the industry shapes itself around us. It may do so by trying to bend and shape us in it's own image, but the simple bottom line never changes... without people there is no industry. You can't round people off as decimal points, when in fact there is no one supporting your product. The internet has brought a quick turnaround time in terms of public opinion, and almost more importantly, the public's perception of that opinion. The way things currently sit, we're still learning to walk through our infancy. Now we've got mass protests in almost every major city being organized online in grassroots style campaigns, and likewise pro-corporate lobbyists in Washington are able to utilize the same tools.

In the end, though it comes down to people and not buying power and interest rates that make up the grand design of artistic expression. The ideas will be there long after the money stops flowing, besides you can't really have a sustainable corporate monopoly on the act of human expression. You can't charge for the air you breathe so long as they can tax you for the land under your feet. The lesson from life I've learned the most is that regardless of how things end up, it's the journey that truly matters the most. Looking at the journey inspired by the corporations, the end point is the bottom line... which is what matters to them. Do the ends justify the means, it's up to the individual to make that choice, not any corporate entity. In the past we often had to cater to them. Now, though it's a different world. We have more choices, more people, and more options... and thus more content without having to subject ourselves to the homogenized or sterilized environment of having to pick from the same bands with the same sounds. We've cut the leash on their creative control, and as evidenced by the current marketplace, we've taken off running.