IED wrestles with Love-Hounds' Big Issues

[IED0DXM%OAC.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu]

 To: Love-Hounds
 From: Andrew Marvick (IED)
 Subject: IED wrestles with Love-Hounds' Big Issues

 > Hounds Of Love (alternate version) is WONDERFUL!

     Yes, it is. What's even more wonderful is playing both the original
(album) version in synch with the _Alternative_Hounds_ versiion. There're
a couple of tricky discrepancies of bar-counts between the two versions,
but once you get them straight, and providing you have some basic
mixing equipment and a way to affect the speed/pitch of the two
recordings, the result is stunning. (IED's version is extremely
primitive, but it's not really much work, and a highly rewarding
experience.)

 >     Hounds Of Love (Live) doesn't sound live at all to me. Sounds
 > like they played a tape of the song during the concert!

     Your suspicions are justified. The track you refer to is simply
the audio portion of the TV appearance that Kate made during the
1986 BPI Awards programme. The sound is typically miserable mono-TV
lo-fi. The mix is exclusive to that particular lip-synch performance,
however: Kate used the standard LP mix, but prefaced it with a
twenty-second rhythm-only introduction which otherwise can only
be heard in a different context in the _Alternative_Hounds_ 12" mix.
It is _not_ a live performance.

 > Why does this guy like Kate Bush? Or does he?

     This is mean. Notice that nobody saw IED putting all those 200-odd
bands' names in quotation marks. Forbearance and toleration are IED's
watchwords, as everyone knows.
     Doug Alan writes, in re the issue of Kate's potential profit-loss
from bootlegs and fans' tendency to buy such merch.:

 >First of all, it almost certainly wouldn't be profitable for Kate to
 >release all this obscure stuff anyway -- it's only the kind of thing
 >that the dedicated fan would buy. None of this stuff would have any
 >mass market appeal.

     This is probably not true. There are many variables, including the
nature of Kate's and the labels' promotional strategy. Also, Doug
is underestimating the _size_ of even the "dedicated fan" market. There
is no doubt in IED's mind that a well-made collection of early Kate
demos would sell _at_least_ a few thousand CDs. Since the break-even
point for many CDs in the classical and jazz fields has been admitted
to by various labels as being as little as 750 unit-sales over two years,
there can be no real question that Kate and her labels stand to make
money from any such release(s). "Mass market appeal?" Maybe not. Enough
appeal for a real profit? Of course.

 >Secondly, Kate's never going to release this
 >stuff, so it can hardly been seen as being at her finincial expense.
 >It costs her nothing, and she is losing no profits because of it.  And
 >even if she did lose some money off of it, the amount would be so
 >miniscule compared to how much she makes that it is hardly worth
 >considering.

     Typically arrogant comments by our Pseudo-Moderator. How does
_Doug_ know that Kate will "never" release any of her early recordings?
He doesn't, and _she_already_has_! There's a perfectly real possibility
that Kate might some day (five years from now, ten years from now,
twenty years from now) agree to put out some more of her early
material--after all, she already _has_ put out _Passing_Through_Air_,
and played part of _Maybe_ on British radio.
     Secondly, the fact that her potential profit from such a release
is small compared to her overall income doesn't make such profit "hardly
worth considering". Who is Doug to decide what part of Kate's potential
income is "worth considering" or not? Just because a bunch of fans
feel that such acts of theft through patronage of illegal
bootlegged recordings are "insignificant" because they're only depriving
the artist of "a little" of her potential profit rather than "a lot"
doesn't give their position any legitimacy. IED strongly objects
to Doug's predictable attempt to convince people (and himself) that
somehow it's morally OK for dealers to be marketing and fans to be
buying all kinds of unlicensed, unreleased Kate Bush material. The fact
is, it's _wrong_. Anyone can see that it's not fair to Kate, and though
IED doesn't lose sleep over it, he at least is honest enough to admit his
complicity in what amounts to a genuine injustice to his own favourite artist.

 >The real objection has nothing to do with money matters, it has to do
 >with the fact that Kate doesn't want this stuff heard.  She's
 >embarassed by it, or whatever.  This objection would hold just as well
 >if the stuff were *given* away.  Of course, historically, this
 >argument seems to be given little respect.  If Bach's secret diaries
 >were to suddenly be found and they containing new snippits of music he
 >never wanted anyone to hear, do you think they would go left
 >unpublished.  Of course not.  Such is the price of being a star....

     It does seem to be true (at least for the time being) that Kate
doen'st want this stuff heard. It's also true that the privacy of dead
artists like Bach is seldom respected. Kate is not a dead artist,
however. She would be perfectly within her rights (and fully
justified) if she decided to bring legal action against bootleggers
of her material. The fact that the public routinely raids the
privacy of public figures--even during their lifetime--doesn't
make such actions somehow "right". Sure, it's a fact of life,
but it's an ugly one, and not something which we should try to
kid ourselves into thinking is perfectly OK. It's not. IED
continues to buy things like _The_Cathy_Demos_ because he's
addicted to Kate Bush material, and his flimsy conscience is
unable to put up much of a fight against that addiction. But
he's at least willing to admit that it's a sleazy thing to do,
and he doesn't try to delude himself by evoking hypothetical
scenarios about Bach's lost letters.

 >A similar question: if I have mastered only one style but you have
 >mastered many, haven't you accomplished more than me?
 >These questions lead to possible criteria for judging musical
 >greatness, like:
 >  o mastery of various styles
 >  o making one's work accessible
 >  o invention of a new but personal style
 >  o invention of a new and widely-adopted style
 >
 > -- Glenn Bruns

     All these little formulae look sound enough, but they
leave out a mass of variables, Glenn. First, how do you
define "mastery"? Second, how does the _number_ of accomplishments
in itself have anything to do with the _quality_ of those
accomplishments? Chopin was a "master" of composition for the piano.
Beethoven wrote "masterly" piano music as well as orchestral music.
But does that have anything to do with the accomplishments of Chopin?
No. Does it make Chopin an inferior atist? Of course not. Such
comparisons are pointless. Wagner was the first master of the
Gesamtkunstwerk--incorporating a number of different media all
at once to make a new, "comprehensive" artwork. But does that
in itself make Wagner the "greatest" artist in history up till
then? Of course not! What he did was unique, and not something
that we can rank by totting up the _number_ of inventions in it.
And what makes Wagner's music great is its ability to _move_ people.
It's not its innovations alone that give Wagner's work "greatness";
rather, it's its _evocative_power_ that gives his innovations a
reason for being.
     Conversely, the "ability" to make one's art "accessible" to a
larger audience is not something to be considered a virtue in
itself. If one artist makes powerful music, but it's not popular,
he isn't _less_good_ an artist than another who makes powerful
music that _is_ popular. It just means their arts are _different_.
In other words, these criteria--number of techniques mastered by the
artist, number of people attracted to the work, number of innovations
in the art, etc.--are all far too vague and subject to other more
work- and artist-specific criteria to be of much use in comparisons.
     A far more sensible means of gauging artists' "greatness" would
be to begin with Kate Bush's work as the ideal, and to measure all
other art in terms of the degree to which it approaches that ideal.
That way, no art could be mistakenly identified as equal or superior
to Kate's. As a result, the differences in quality between all other
artists' work would rightly be recognized as an entirely trivial
and irrelevant matter, since no matter how "good" they might be, they
could never be as good as Kate's!

-- Andrew Marvick