Have you ever seen a movie that ends with an explosion? Not just any explosion. Picture a renegade cop driving a truck full of explosives into a B-17 brimming with cocaine ready for shipment to the drug-hungry U.S. populace. Jumping out and rolling to safety at the last second, he utters the words 'put your tray table up, LeJaques. You're about to hit some turbulence,' while silhouetted against the enormous fireball rising from the wreckage of the crippled jet.
Scenes like this have been a staple of recent American cinema, where Hollywood studios have shied away from the age of archetypal Casablanca-esque classic films and embraced a fast food approach to the art. Running parallel to Hollywood is the popular music scene, where record companies sell image instead of a sound. When your average 12-year-old girl gets mommy to drive her to the Britney Spears concert, she is greeted with a series of pyrotechnics and dry-humping, capped off with a musically illiterate blonde girl from Louisiana mouthing the words to songs she never wrote. It's a wonder it took the corporate bourgeoisie this long to profit in the perversion of what once was our culture.
Coldplay's newest album, X & Y, is the perfect example of what the bloodsucking music industry can do to talented pop artists. After missing several deadlines, pressure from their fiscally troubled patrons EMI Records caused these previously respectable musicians to release a record that is little more than a grown man weeping clich??d drivel into his microphone with some background instrumentation that isn't fit for an elevator.
According to an interview with Chris Martin on launch.yahoo.com, 'Some of the stuff that comes along with being a big band isn't necessarily that healthy for creativity,' and 'In trying to reinvent our wheel, we realized we actually quite liked our old wheel.'
Translation: We were spent creatively. We tried the best we could to release a record that wasn't a steaming pile of formulaic excrement, but you can't force art.
Before the solution to this problem is presented, it should be noted that there has always been a division between high culture and pop culture. What makes today different is that people and information move much faster and easier. Hollywood and the pop music scene both evolved as a result of artists in these industries (and the lawyers and businessmen behind them) getting together and deciding that they can attain great wealth by trying to please everyone at once. And the only way to please everyone, they decided, was to find something that everyone has in common: a craving for sex and violence.
But fear not, for every disease has its antidote, which in this case is the recent surge in digital file-sharing. The solution to this problem would be to remove the money from these industries, thus letting them revert to their pre-globalization state. To extract the money, all that is necessary would be for the government to turn a blind eye to file-sharing and pirating. Patent laws may not be that important in the arts, not even an army of lip synching pop stars can rid us of our humanity.
The big problem is that the reason patents exist is for industries like pharmaceuticals, where no patents means no new drugs. America is an entrepreneurial nation, and we love our money, but gosh, wouldn't it be worth it? The Hollywood executives and lawyers would flee Los Angeles like it was being overtaken by a cloud of poison gas. The music industry would run out of money and grow a conscience while coming out of their century-long cocaine binge, which of course would lead to mass suicides. Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson would find honest work in the adult film industry. And on that glorious day, we'd all find a few reasons to be smiling.
