I’m a pretty begrudging late adopter of the music blogosphere; someone deeply skeptical about its grandiose claims of revolutionary potential like that embodied by Perez Hilton. At this point, it appears little more than an en masse, passive, bitchy decimation of one particular group’s intellectual property rights. The technological ease of the theft has made the debate all the more quaint, because technology often demands moral imperatives where there are none. The disembodiment of the internet makes the discussion all the more surreal.
If I could find the technical means to steal a bunch of Cindy Sherman’s original photographs, few people would hail me as somehow changing the paradigm of a consumerist society, robbing all those evil corporate, um, artists. Just as the internet gives all fat people “swimmer’s builds” (i.e., floats in water), it also provides a home to philosophical fantasy and ugly displays of the id. No insult is too impolitic, no opinion too stupid to utter, no thought too thoughtless. The MP3 is not an actual CD in your hand and the person you’re calling an asshole is not sitting in front of you bearing your brunt.
Which is why I find the morphology of Perez Hilton to be a fetching snapshot of the music-stealing revolution. On the one hand, I can appreciate a good scam. I love televangelists and Ryan Phillippe. If I’d thought of Hilton’s signature photoshopped jizz on celebrity photographs first, I would have done him one better and used the real deal and scored an NEA grant with heralded works like “Money Shot Hasselback”.
However, if all these prominent bloggers want is better paying jobs in the industries they’re economically undermining, what revolutionary content is left in the act of releasing an album early or parlaying your cum stain photography into a Hot Topic line of John Hughes casual wear? Worse still, is Paris Hilton’s idea for his record label. Don’t we remember how evil those people are? They never gave artists enough money anyway, so it’s so much better to provide them with absolutely nothing by stealing.
Paris Hilton’s project is designed using the most regressive corporatist model. His unpaid minions send him music, and he does the hard work of clicking through the stuff he didn’t find. Then, he gets to brand himself as a tastemaker. That makes sharecropping look like Whole Foods.
What of his discoveries? Mika? He forgets that the excesses of the blogosphere have created an environment where the consumption cycle is accelerated to the point of instant incineration. How can he shepherd these dubious “discoveries” through the old label system and make them profitable before they are irrelevant?
Perhaps I’m picking low-hanging fruit in knocking Perez Hilton. He has never seemed more than a nakedly honest opportunist trying his hand at the celebrity alchemy of making something from nothing. Yet his example makes me doubt much of the talk about the unprecedented and new world created by online file sharing and its curiously concurrent revival of vinyl sales.
As Tricky once said, “Brand new, you’re retro.” All of this talk of revolution makes me think that there are many dislocated liberal arts majors like myself looking for an angle in a movement with no collective, a revolution in resume padding.