Politics and Morality

During a very recent discussion it came to light that there are allegations of sexual misconduct against Gandhi, the man who brought freedom from the British Empire to India and set it on a path of democracy. I admit that these allegations were news to me and I was directed, during my conversation, to a webpage that detailed the allegations. Now I don't know the truth of the allegations, what the evidence is for them, who the accusers are or anything like that. But for my purposes here today none of this really matters. My subject is to be the intersection of politics and morality which might raise a belly laugh in some as they ask what morality has to do with politics. Our politicians all seem to have feet of clay, overactive dicks and lots of friends happy to look the other way, you will probably say to me. If they are not abusers themselves then they are people who know things but say and do nothing. They are "enablers" in the parlance of our times. And its certainly not restricted to Gandhi. Martin Luther King was at least accused (some would say smeared) of sexual misconduct. In Britain numerous past and present political figures are mired in variously disgusting sexual accusations. Most famously, the two current presidential nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, are completely mired in sexual allegations. Trump boasts that he can just grab any woman he wants "by the pussy" and, what's more, they will let him because he's famous whereas Clinton, it has been alleged, has actively covered for her husband Bill's many indiscretions and even taken action against those he's accused of being involved with to shut them up.

Now, hearing all this, some people despair. I understand that reaction. There are those who think we need standards, moral standards, and that these things should not be voluntary and left to the whims of individuals. For these people standards are not things you abandon when it suits you. Morals, for such people, are not things you forget when its the person who is on your political side that's being accused. Take Trump, for example. There has been widespread condemnation of his recently released tape where he boasts of forcing himself on women and his fame meaning they won't stop him. And yet tens of millions of Americans and many high profile Republicans still support him. They either deflect criticism by saying "But look what Bill did!" or they try to dismiss it as just "locker room talk". Neither of these excuses works though. Trump also has active court cases in progress against him alleging sexual assault and worse and has, or had, friends who are now convicted pedophiles. Can we be sure it is "just talk" in his case? Trump is a man who has a history of sexual misconduct accusations against him and his "locker room talk" does nothing to discourage outsiders or casual observers from believing them. But my point here is this: what if it were Obama who had been caught on tape? What if Obama was accused in court documents of sexual assault and even rape? The same people who sit on their hands or defend Trump now would be demanding impeachment and incarceration! Their morality is not absolute: it shifts with the circumstances.

For some people this is wrong: morality should be absolute. But is it ever? Really? Is it really so beyond your experience that you might give a little leeway to someone you know or support, leeway you might not give to someone else? I submit to you that you recognize this possibility and may even have done it yourself. Of course, you may argue that rape and a casual attitude to sexual assault are so serious that we cannot allow personal preferences to come into play. Whilst in no way wanting to excuse either crime here (and they are both CRIMES) I would say its easy to pronounce from the outside. But its altogether more difficult when you might be the one with consequences. Some of you might read this as me trying to excuse or explain away sex crimes. I'm not. I'm saying the stakes are very different when it is you in the firing line and that morality, like it or not, is changed by the relationships between those involved. I'm saying that if your husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, father, were accused of such things you wouldn't see it as you do when its some political hate figure you only know from the TV or the media. There has been recent criticism of so-called "situational" morality but I'm afraid that I have to blog here today about why I cannot but see that morality is exactly that.

Morals are a personal choice inasmuch as we can say that anything is a choice at all. You and I, we would like to think, both get to decide what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. This encompasses both a set of general beliefs about these things but also an ability to triangulate cases on the fly as the general principles are applied to specific cases. It is integral to this understanding that you and I need not agree on these rights and wrongs either in general or in any specific case. It can be said that we would even value this ability to think differently and come to differing points of view. This is because if I am forced to agree with you, or you with me, then morals and values are not volitional anymore, they are not free. And we hold it as possibly in the highest esteem that we must all be free to come to our own conclusions without coercion. This, of course, risks the possibility that I may hold a set of moral values I judge much higher than yours. It also risks the possibility that I may choose to hold values much lower than yours or even have very few values at all. But, it seems, we judge the freedom to choose as more important than the consequences of the freedom of choice we esteem so highly. This freedom allows Donald Trump to think its in order to grab women by the pussy and it allows many other politicians throughout history to justify a litany of sexual misdemeanors. It also allows their supporters and opponents to take sides accordingly.

Now I am certain that I make moral choices every day, and have values that, if you knew about them, you would think less of me. In the political sphere this is obviously true as well because we have case after case, year after year, where people resign or are forced out of various offices due to the public perception of their choices. (This is to ignore those who try to "tough it out" regardless.) But what can we do about it? I've already pointed out that we hold freedom of choice in the highest esteem. Can we, somehow, make people more moral? Can we, as was recently suggested to me, expect more from people in public office? I don't honestly see why. People in office are just people. They are prey to the same temptations and vices as anyone, potentially, could be. They are members of the same moral or immoral societies as we are. "But I am not a person who wants to commit sexual assault" you may, correctly, reply to me. I accept that and it is not my argument here that we could all be horrible people if we really wanted to. What I am saying is that our standards don't bind anyone else. Our choices are not mandatory for others. We could impose absolutes on public office. We could say no one with any allegation against them could be eligible. We could suggest that only candidates who are whiter than white could stand. But could we say that every candidate's thoughts, beliefs and values must pass some quality threshold? Could we hold their morality to account? And, if we could, what then has happened to that freedom of choice we formerly held in such high esteem? We may want to stop Donald Trump from actually grabbing women by the pussy but do we also want to stop him thinking, in his private thoughts, that he thinks its ok? Do we want to start living in the world of Minority Report?

In action, morality is basically a belief or a value we can justify with reasons. Its nothing more than this. When speaking about a moral choice or a value all we do is say why the choice was a good or bad one or the value is a value worth having, what makes it important. This is all rhetorical. Some would want to argue that morals and values can be absolute. I'm not one of those people. For me, this is just rhetoric too. I am not a moral absolutist for I can find no way to ground morals in anything other than people's views about them or their consequences. Morality for me is always a matter of consequences, of perceived goods and bads and of the reasons given for seeing things in certain ways. So, to give a concrete example, I cannot say that grabbing a woman by the pussy is an absolute bad. I do not believe in absolutes. But I can give a reason why grabbing a certain woman's pussy might be bad, and, I think, it would be hard to imagine a case in which it wasn't bad. The important thing here is that I can give reasons for my choices. Morality is a matter of choices that can be justified even if that is only to yourself. (It will often, if not usually, be to some social grouping, however.) In politics this is much more public. You routinely have to justify your choices and values publicly for your electorate will want to know if they share your views or not. And its because of this that I cannot see how there can be any higher standard for the practitioners of politics, the politicians. Let me explain. 

I wrote earlier in the year on my blog about "the shit sandwich conundrum". Basically this is when you have two political choices and they are both, well, shit. Trump and Clinton are, in my estimation, such a choice. Both are equally shitty without redeeming features. Both, in addition, are immoral figures as I judge them. Both are venal, mendacious and self-serving amongst a litany of other "sins". Should we have some kind of morality test for these people? I say no. Let them be whoever they want to be, holding whatever filthy, degrading and disgusting values they choose. But let them be exposed to the voting public so that these views not be hidden away only to be revealed in secret. Let us really know who these people are. Let us know they lie and cheat. Let us know they cover things up. Let us know they regard women as things to fuck and discard or embarrassments to be covered up. My argument is that you cannot impose a moral test upon politicians but you can submit them to other people's morals. And it may be that this is what they fear most. Of course, only in a world where people stopped caring at all, stopped having morals, would this test not work. But then, I suggest we'd all have a much bigger problem than Trump's out of control libido or Clinton's desire for corruption. Indeed, it may be argued that this is the case right now. The problem is not that Trump is a "mutt", as Robert de Niro so eloquently put it, or that Clinton wants to turn the world into a corrupt, corporate hell, its that our world itself is a self-serving, immoral chaos of unjustified beliefs, base urges and gut feelings.

When talking about both politics and morality it is as well to remember that there is no perfect answer or universally acclaimed choice. We should also remember that one person's justice is another's injustice. At any one time there will be people free others say should not be free and those pronounced guilty who others swear are innocent. This is all to re-emphasize, yet again, that this is all rhetorical, a matter of reasons and persuasion. We should be consistent in our judgments, people say. But this is only true until we reach a point where making an exception seems to be supported with better reasons than the consistency we formerly found holding the best of the arguments. If morality is about reasons and reasons are a matter of persuasion then there can be no absolute value, only the most persuasive one supported by the best reasons and providing the most sought after consequences. In that context the most I think we can ask for is exposure, light shone upon our public representatives. We cannot invade their minds and bend them to our will. Whose will would that be anyway? Mine? Yours? But we can force them to be as open as possible. Then, if the public choose a pervert or a sex pest, at least we will know. Democracy means a free public choice not the tyranny of the public.

And, of course, there has been an elephant in the room of this discussion all along: POWER. But that is a blog for another day...

World Mental Health Day

Were I a more courageous man than I am then we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be dead, my life taken by my own hand. Lucky for you, then, that I don't have the required level of courage. It leaves me here to write blogs for you to read.

Today, I learn, it is World Mental Health Day. Apparently, this is on October 10th every year. I chuckle a little because only last night I fired off a sarcastic tweet about "every day being something or other day" these days. Lots of those days are mere advertising campaigns and none of them are really official days for anything. Its marketing and you are being sold something. But then, irony of ironies, the next morning World Mental Health Day turns up. If today is the day that mental health is being sold then I'm all for it because today I'm here to tell you that lack of mental health is no walk in the park. 

And I can speak from some considerable experience. I can't say exactly when my life began to go out of shape. Maybe it was as early as age 10. Maybe even before. But certainly by ages 14-16 I was disturbed enough to have appointments with an educational psychologist. I treated it as a game in which my task was to convince the doctor that I was a normal boy feeling fine. I guess I did a good enough job because I only saw him a few times and no further action was taken. But one morning when I woke up, aged 19, I thought, genuinely and completely, that I was about to die and then I might have wished that there had been some more rigorous investigation at an earlier stage. I was experiencing my first full blown, thorough-going panic attack. I was leant over the kitchen sink, cold tap running, sweating like a pig as I dry heaved. I really did think I was going to die. My head was racing. I had no idea what was happening. I felt terrified for my life. When the moment passed, as I've learned through multiple episodes since it always does, I spent the rest of the day a drained zombie, unable to think or eat. 

That first panic attack was over 28 years ago. And I'm still very aware as I write today's blog for you now that I could have another at any time. One does not become immune to them. I did, for a time, have a few good years in the intervening period when the fog that descended on my personality with that first attack cleared a little and a bit of sunshine shone into my life. But circumstances change and you can find yourself back at square one. In that intervening period I learned many things, not least that the attack I'd suffered and repeated many times since was not just about "external circumstances". It was quite likely very much something to do with who I am physically as a person too. There is a history of mental health problems in my family and so its more than possible that I was vulnerable to such problems even from my very birth. Since that first attack I've had many more. I've found myself terrified on trains, buses, planes and just out in public. Its worse if I'm in public because people might see me and stare and wonder if I'm mad. I've seen the look in their eyes as they shy away. But I'm not mad. I'm just scared and asking myself "Why is this happening to me?" And sweating like a pig.

Having such anxiety problems changes your life. When told you've been invited to a party, for example, you might be thrilled at the idea there's fun to be had and laughs to share. I would be worried in case I felt a panic coming on. I'd be asking what I might do if I started to feel bad. I wouldn't want anyone to know. Probably best I make up some excuse not to go, I'd think to myself. That solves all the problems that I'm imagining and anticipating in my head. And experience would back this up because I've been in so many places at so many times sweating my balls off and not wanting to be there, a rising fear filling my mind, my guts churning, just wishing I could get out, run away and escape. Because I know if I could only step out of that door and leave this situation the symptoms I'm experiencing would disappear just like that *snaps fingers*. But, knowing all that, it turns you into a person who takes the easy path all the time, the path of least resistance, the path that doesn't lead to horrible feelings and mental struggle with yourself. Could you really blame me for becoming a hermit, a recluse, one who just wants to live without the gaze of others?

But there's more. Life doesn't stand still. I read in an article for World Mental Health Day that "mixed anxiety and depression is the most common form of mental disorder in Britain". I can well believe it. I suffer from it. I can feel it now in the regular headache I've developed over the last 12 months. (I'd never had a headache in 47 years before that.) I've become so very attuned to every twitch and burble of my body. I've become over-sensitive. Every pain I fear might turn into an agony. Every twitch might become another problem. I live daily in fear of pain and agony and physical struggle. Each day is turned into a waiting for something bad to happen. Imagine just that burden on your mind besides anything else you might have going on in your life. And its this sense of always having things "on my mind" that becomes a problem too. I'm never free. There are few moments in which care is abandoned and the moment becomes one of enjoyment. You become a person who is constantly monitoring themselves, always on watch, forever on the lookout. "When is the next bad thing going to happen?" is always on your mind. You try to negotiate your life around all the perceived problems of being yourself in the world. And there's never an off day from this job. Its 24/7/365. And the question keeps rearing up in your head "How do you escape a problem when the problem is you yourself?"

This blog is not really about me and its certainly not to say "Poor me, look at me, have sympathy for me". But I think that sharing personal thoughts and feelings is helpful because maybe it jolts one or two people into realisation to know that people suffering from mental health issues might feel this way and, for some others, it will make them realize that there are other people out there who feel this way too. Mental health issues are not uncommon, whether temporary or of the more permanent kind, and the Mental Health Foundation estimate that 1 person in 6 likely experienced a common mental health problem in the last week alone. Expand the time frame and more and more people will know what it is like to have experienced such things. One of the immediate thoughts people have having experienced a mental health issue is that they are alone and no one else understands how they feel. Having once sat in a support group for people with similar issues to mine I realized that's not remotely true. Indeed, what I realized is that many people might feel a hell of a lot worse than me. I sat down in that group with people who could barely walk without shaking, people who seemed terrified to exist and locked in a prison of the self. I myself have lain in bed unable to stop shaking and it wasn't because I was cold. It was because in some way it seemed like my soul was mortally terrified of the conditions of its existence. Such is life for some of us. We can become prisons for ourselves with only our own painful emotions for company.

But, of course, its one thing to recognize this and another to do something about it. For some people, people lucky enough to have someone who cares enough to take the risk of stepping in, doctors and possibly pills and therapies will help them. I'm glad for them but I also think that's not the case for everyone. For some people, lucky people, a friend is enough, should they be lucky enough to find one. That's good too and it goes to show that caring about somebody in a genuine way really can and does make a genuine difference to someone's life. But, again, this may not be true for everyone. My experience of mental health issues is very narrow and limited to my own experience. But there are many kinds of mental health problems and they aren't all experienced as the same and neither do they necessarily have the same solutions. Or, indeed, any solutions. However, I do struggle to imagine one in which no one giving a fuck about you as you suffer with it will help. Of course, as I've tried to show, with some common mental health issues it can cause the sufferer to isolate themselves as a defence mechanism and this can give further opportunity for their afflictions to attack them all the more. That said, I personally would respect anyone's right to deal with their situations as they feel able to. I have certainly isolated myself out of self-preservation. If trade offs have to be made to accommodate myself to the things I must suffer then to suffer them without outside interference seems a reasonable trade to me.

So today is World Mental Health Day and if you were someone who thought that you didn't know anyone who had mental health problems, well, now you do: me. But I would wager someone more close to home than me whom you already know does too. The purpose of this blog is really just to say "be aware". We really do not know what goes on in the minds of others nor what they have had to suffer or how it affects them. Maybe you or someone you know is that person who avoids things "in case they feel bad". And maybe the feeling that motivates that response for them is something more than just not liking groups of people. Who knows? We are complex beings who react in diverse ways to things. The events of life affect us all differently and, for some, become problematic and even a life-long struggle.

Be aware and have a little understanding. Help if you can. For some people its life that is the hell and death that will be the blessed release.

I, Pixel

In the course of a day several artistic enterprises will scroll down my various timelines and, at random, I will choose to partake of them. Most often these are music but, like most other people, if I know something of what I might expect from the people concerned, I usually let it pass on by unless what I am expecting in some way might satisfy my current mood. This, of course, is a terrible thing and an example of something I hate: knowing too much. I hate the fact that we think we know things, that things have been put in a box in our minds and, forever after, stay in that box and affect our judgment about them. Of course, one answer to this would be if creative people were so varied and imaginative that they could be surprising rather than creatures of habit that turn out more of the same thing again and again. That is an artistic fight I try to take on. But I cannot speak for others and their motives. More fool them, I say, if they are happy to be in the box.

However, it is best of all when something comes along that has no box, that is, in some sense, contextless and therefore innocent of our knowing. Then we can enjoy the pure thrill of appreciating something that comes with no baggage and about which we do not know too much. Such a thing came into my timeline yesterday. It was a 7 minute video called "Pixelate" and you can watch it HERE! 

                                     A still from "Pixelate"

A basic description of the video is to say that it is simply 7 minutes of ever-changing pixels. But that would be like describing the film "Jaws" as a film about hunting a shark. It is but its much more than that. From the moment I first watched "Pixelate" until now, after several watches, I've found the video to be both therapeutic and intellectually challenging. The surprising thing to me on first watch, as I enjoyed that virgin experience of the first time, something that can never be repeated, was that I started to ask questions about what I was seeing. First of all I asked myself "What does this mean?". This wasn't really a question of intention either. I wasn't asking myself what the author of the piece, Ian Haygreen, thought it meant. I wasn't asking after his purpose in making it. Indeed, I don't know the answers to these questions nor do I think I need to. Instead, I was asking myself if there was any meaning to be found in the shifting landscapes of pixels as they moved around in various chaotic patterns. In a way I suppose I was an observer observing myself observing as I did this too. I was asking myself about what I was asking of the video. And so it became natural to ask why I was asking myself what the pixels might mean.

The patterns of pixels on the screen were very chaotic and most of the time they shifted and changed at quite a speed. It became a hypnotic experience. The rather quiet and atmospheric ambient soundtrack played a part in this too, I'm sure. The effect was a kind of unobtrusiveness which could work its way into your consciousness unannounced. As the pixels shifted and changed I continued to ask myself the meaning question. I asked myself about the relationships of one pixel to another, whether it mattered what colour each pixel was. I imagined the pixels were people. Now, with these pixels representing people, it was a question of asking what meaning there was in all these people running around in their immediate relationships one to another like the ever-shifting pixels on the screen. I wasn't sure it mattered what colour the pixels were. But does it matter what colour the people are? There was a sense of ambiguity. What if all these pixels were just symbols for people? The pixel fields just changed. No one had more priority than any other one. Make them people and does anything change?

The hypnotic effect of the pixels changing, without commentary, guidance or context, became quite nihilistic. It seemed to be saying "Things just happen. Stuff goes on as it will. You can attach whatever meaning you like to these events but its not fixed or binding. Or even necessary."  It occurred to me that within the changing pixel landscapes I could look at them as if they were moving left to right across the screen. But then, with a change of concentration, I could make it seem as if they were going the other way too. And, thus, I had power over history and events. I could say in which direction they were going and I could look at things as if they were indeed doing that. The pixels were powerless to stop me. The pixels were just material for my interpretive apparatus to get to work on. And I considered once more that other things, things that might be taken to be more serious, were just the same as these pixels. The example of Brexit came to mind. To one group of people this is freedom and taking back control. The direction of travel is a new and glorious future. But to some other observers it is disaster and xenophobia and leads directly to the dark ages. Who is right? Both and neither of course because you can see the pixels moving however you want.

I started to ask myself if the meaning question I was asking was the right question to be asking at all. It occurred to me that asking the question "What does this mean?" is a question we often ask of many things, if not everything, but that, maybe, a lot of the time we should just step back and not ask it. I am aware that notable psychologists, such as the inventor of Logotherapy, Viktor Frankl, are of the view that people have a need of meaning in order to exist. Frankl's academic and therapeutic work in the area of psychology strongly suggests that people are simple meaning-making factories who generate meaning as a means of survival. Frankl himself personally survived Nazi concentration camps (including Auschwitz) while most others in his family did not so we can understand how he reached his conclusion. But, nevertheless, it still begs the question of whether we need to be asking questions of meaning at all. These pixels I was staring at could easily have been regarded as simple meaningless and ever-changing configurations. There were, it might be said, no consequences from regarding them as meaningless. But when it comes to other things we find it much harder to believe this. Yet why? Aren't the events that go on around us, the relationships we make and build to other things, equally as meaningless in the end? Why not let go of our attachments, created always by us and for us, and just see everything as pixels?

I saw the pixels here as representatives for other things. I saw them in ever-changing relationships to the other pixels around them. This made me replace them with other things and wonder if anything had really changed. Life just goes on, I thought. Existence takes its path of least resistance always being in relation to other things yet never having any necessary binding relation to other things - unless we make it so. Nothing has to mean anything. Meaning doesn't work like that. It is plastic and some other, contrary, meaning can always be ascribed to the same events - just as I made the pixel stream change direction. (It's not even clear the pixels were in a stream actually so maybe I created the connections between the pixels and made them a stream too.) I slowly became a pixel myself and realized that that could mean both everything and nothing.

Pixelate was created by musician and, apparently, filmmaker, Ian Haygreen who is on Twitter @IanHaygreen

Musical Frontiers

A couple of days ago a message popped up in my Twitter timeline, a suggestion for a blog. It went like this: "Are there any musical frontiers left?"

I thought about this question and rolled it around in my mind. It wasn't a question I immediately liked or one I had any immediate, instinctive thoughts about and that bothered me because, usually, I will have some mental starting point to go from that comes immediately to mind. But not so with this question. So I went to sleep and let it slide for a while. Thoughts will come when they may and there's no use forcing them. The next day I thought about it some more but, still, I wasn't really overflowing with thoughts on the subject and it became clear to me that if I was going to have an answer to this question it probably wasn't going to be on the terms it was asked. That, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps the answer to the question is to re-frame it and give, instead of a straight answer, a new angle of view from which to approach the subject. What follows is going to be my attempt to do this and my reasoning as to why I need to.

Another way to ask this same question is to ask if anything is really new. Clearly, at some points, the answer to this is yes. We do, for example, sometimes create new genres of music or new sounds. When human beings discovered electricity, for example, it opened a door to electronically amplified sound and, later, electronically engineered instruments. The electric guitar and the synthesizer are both 20th century developments. These instruments have opened up new musical frontiers. And yet, I assume, both of these instruments have their limitations. There is only so much you can do with them realistically. OK, maybe with a modular synthesizer with mixed modules (the more the better!) you maximise your potential for a wide and varied selection of sound creation. But music is not just sounds, its structure too. Even where that structure is a deliberate lack of it. My point here, though, is that technology is one thing that delivers musical possibility. Just as in former centuries manufacturing skill led to the creation of the instruments of the orchestra, giving birth to orchestra music, so the 20th century (and beyond) heralded music made by electronic means or even in new ways made possible by technology. Before the computer music had to be played. These days many people simply draw it and a machine renders it into a coherent whole.

So it seems clear there have been new forms of music, new tools to use and new ways to go about the whole process. Yet my question raises the prospect of this coming to an end. How do I feel about that? Personally, I must express ambivalence towards it. I have have no crystal ball and I cannot tell what someone might invent next. I'm much more of a reactive person here. When I make music I evaluate what resources I have and then I allow myself to be expressed through them. I am not trying to cross a musical frontier or break a boundary into some new musical uplands. My line of sight is not to where human music-making might go next. In fact, I don't see myself or music in such generalized, global terms at all. And this is why this question is somewhat annoying to me as a question. I don't like the way it is expressed and it grates somewhat on the person I am and the understandings I have about the world. These are not at all bad things! New insights, rubbing against opposing viewpoints and scenarios, is what should help the intelligent person to develop and grow themselves. But, even so, I want to answer the question a different way.

Music, in my understanding, is a matter of personal expression. Now I know that not everyone agrees with this. John Cage, for example, would vehemently disagree. But much as I have read, enjoyed and nodded along with much Cage has said, I just feel instinctively that when I make music it is a personal thing, a matter of personal expression. This is what I think and feel I am doing. I might even go as far as to say that my music is a personal statement or validation of self. For some, and I'd include myself, it is even a kind of therapy, a way to help ease our existence in the world. If this is even partly true, or true for you as a music maker, then I fail to see how this connects particularly with the idea of a generalized musical frontier. To go along with this type of understanding is to say that musical output is linked to individual people - as a necessity. So, in that case, even a desire to "cross musical frontiers" would be, at base, just the desire of a particular human being. It would be a personal mission. This in itself, of course, does not completely annihilate the idea of a generalized musical frontier and I've already agreed that our human history is one that includes opening up new kinds of music and new sounds. But, nevertheless, it does seem somewhat at odds with such an idea. It raises the question "What is your music about? What is it for?"

But concentrating on this idea of music as something inspired by and through particular human beings raises another possibility. This is that there might be music that wasn't made by human beings at all. Indeed, only yesterday I remember seeing a couple of references to some piece of music (which I now can't find!) that, so it seemed to suggest, had been entirely composed by a computer. And this seems to me to be a frontier: the human contemplation of music that humans did not make. But something else did. This raises lots of philosophical questions of course. I assume the computer that made the music did so without any feeling at all. It would not know what it felt like to make music and could have no feeling to put into the making of the music. This would be very different to the experience of many music makers. (As I sit here typing I hear a crow cawing outside, nature's music?) But it would still be music if appreciated as such by human listeners. Could one new frontier be, in a generalized sense, that in future music will be something technology generates for itself and we humans just listen to it? But if that were so it would also open up the possibility for humans to "jam" with machines, musically creative machines. In my random thinking I've gone and found a frontier! But is it a welcome one? I also seem to have offered a rider to my belief that music for some is personal. It need not be if an impersonal machine that doesn't even know it is making music can make it too.

But this raises an intriguing question: if machines could make their own music (totally undirected by any human impetus or prompting) then what music would they make? It would be silly and arrogant to think it might be anything like human music since we know that even humans make music in genres and sub-genres that are birthed from specific enculturated contexts. Indeed, I find it hard to theorize how we could even expect to understand machine music as music. Human music, for we must admit there could be non-human forms, is based on human experience of life. This primarily means our physical experience of the world which is limited to a narrow bandwidth of sound (generally taken as 20 Hz to 20 kHz). We know there are sounds that occur above and below these frequencies but they are not a part of our music because we cannot physically perceive them (but we can use them as modulation sources, for example, as an LFO in a synthesizer). This serves to set human music in context as human and to show that others forms would and could be possible. No doubt we will get entirely non-human music and it will be fascinating to hear (if we could hear!) what this sounds like should any of us live long enough to hear it. This would be genuinely new.

But yet I must come back to my own uneasiness with the original question. Although I have now found one possible new frontier I feel within myself that there is a more important point to make. When approaching the question in general we are aware of the broad scope of music, more than any one person has ever made themselves. And this, I think, is my point. For whilst the question of generalized human musical frontiers might be, for me, somewhat moot, when it comes to a personal application of the question it certainly is not. For any musician has only ever really scratched the surface of what they could achieve musically when compared with the whole of their species. There will be so many genres of music, styles of playing, instruments used, sound palettes worked with, that they have just never even tried. This is important because it means that any one musician, or group of musicians, will have what I perceive to be a vast array of possibilities to hand. Its as easy as setting a new course, entering a new musical landscape and saying "Let's see what I can make of this!" And that is tremendously exciting because not only does it mean you can put anxieties about new musical frontiers to one side but it also means that you don't need to worry about them because you personally are always going to have somewhere to go anyway. Have you tried making jazz music? Rock? Funk? Gabba? Electronic Body Music? Working with just percussion sounds? Just flute sounds? Just static noises? Just voices? How many different time signatures have you used? Etc. You can see the list will be endless and as large as your imagination.

I admit that these are the only musical frontiers that I am really interested in and this is because they are the only real ones that practically apply to any actual musician. It may be that in this experimental attitude to music, one I would actively promote, I create something that someone else regards as new. If so, then so be it. But I tend to think this will be achieved more by accident than deliberation. I tend to think you should worry about extending your own range and experience and let the rest take care of itself. It may be that you yourself operate within a fairly limited set of circumstances. Maybe you always use the same sounds or things and just reorganize them in different ways. Well don't!. Stop doing that. Think about new ways to use or apply old things. Determine that your next recording will use a completely different sound set. Even go so far as saying you want it to sound like something using sounds you have not yet made. Use only sounds that you made yourself so you know that each is unique. One thing I can agree with Cage on is that every new piece of music is an experiment, a personal experiment. And while this is so for you as a music maker then every day will be the breaking of a new personal boundary and the crossing of a new personal frontier.

Its Time To Talk About Synthesizers and Sound

A few things floating around in the atmosphere prompt me to write today's blog which is to be about synthesizers and sound. Within the community of folks interested in these subjects there are all kinds of people. Some of these people are worth listening to and many are not. Just as some simply want to be popular, others are more thoughtful and purely artistic. Now the website Sonicstate.com recently published an article called Synthesis Innovation: Are You Sure We Can Handle It? in which the writer made the point that its not actually that easy to design a new synth that breaks new ground. We are, so the point was made, trapped in our conventional understandings of sound and synthesis. And, then again, if someone did make something new we might not like it... because its new and unfamiliar. People, in general, like what they know. This is very true in music and very relevant to Sonicstate.com which publishes a lot of gear reviews (mostly synths) and often the opinions given of anything new or a bit different are critical seemingly, to my mind, because the reviewer is a bit set in his ways. He wants something he knows it seems to me. Yes Nick Batt, I do mean you.

But regardless of the trials and tribulations necessary to create a new, groundbreaking synthesizer, something most of us will never be involved in anyway, there is a further question about new sound. And in the comments under this article the discussion turned more towards that. This is something I'm very interested in both as a music maker myself and as the host of the Electronic Oddities Podcast in which I often purposefully look for music no one has ever heard before and make a podcast out of it. I am greatly satisfied by doing this because, first of all, its exactly about finding something I've not heard before. Its about the refreshment that comes from something new. And I love this feeling that this music I'm hearing is not familiar, not using all the hackneyed old tropes and not something that could be played on TV or radio outside a dedicated show called "alternative" or something like that. A lot of this music is never going to be popular and certainly not mainstream. But that is its attraction. Its the attraction of the different. Its a counter culture. It is here you go if you want new, different, other, wild, crazy, alternative or strange.

But yet when discussing this with regular folk such as one might find in public forums I become very frustrated because most people do not think this way. To most people music is a tune about 4 minutes long with singing involved if possible. This is the kind of music that is "commercial", the kind that "pays the bills". But, I ask myself, what has music got to do with paying bills? Well for some people, I admit, it has a lot to do with it. But this isn't necessarily so. Music is just arranged sound and silence at the end of the day and money has nothing to do with it. One respondent to the article I mentioned talked about the stock sounds that come with synthesizers and made the point that such sounds are used by "successful producers". But is being a "successful producer" a musical ambition or a commercial one? The two are not the same thing. Being a "successful producer" is what I would call setting the musical bar as low as humanly possible. There is a reason most successful musical acts are not known for their musical innovation. Of course, a few slip through the net. They manage to combine innovation and creativity with popularity. But mostly not. They are the front for a bank of producers and 15 song writers. In my view most really exciting and interesting music has barely even been heard. And you have to find it yourself.

Now synthesizers are merely devices for making sounds. But it seems that often they make the same or similar ones. Of course, this problem will get exponentially worse as time passes because people will have more opportunity to make noises with them and they will, inevitably, tend to go down similar paths. There is a whole conventionality about this that I have already referred to and this becomes an issue if you want something new or different. Its for this reason that I have been a fan of modular synthesis, especially the Eurorack format, because here the building blocks of sound are broken down into hundreds of possible individual modules. No one manufacturer has any idea to what use you will put their creation or with what other elements you will combine it. The very format itself is, thus, pregnant with sonic possibilities. So I tend to think that when a new or "groundbreaking" synth is being discussed or pined for on synth forums that maybe people are missing the point. This new synth you want is right in front of your eyes. You just need to build it. It can be made of whatever is out there and these elements can be combined in any way you please. The results will be, at best, a fantastically exciting world of possibility. You just need to make the effort to create it. Surely this is an area in which "new" sounds can be discovered?

           A custom modular synth made by Latvian company, Erica Synths

I don't know what kind of music you regularly listen to but in the music I listen to, so-called experimental, noise, various kinds of ambient, avant-garde, IDM, etc., (all electronic) I hear lots of new, different and interesting sounds all the time. I firmly believe its not that there are no new sounds left to find, its that most people are just conventional, boring and totally unimaginative (music makers and listeners). "New sounds" generally won't be found in pop songs, chart music or things for general consumption. So if this is your musical diet I suggest you look elsewhere. And let me say that here "noise" is only a tiny part of what I'm talking about. "Sound design" is what I'm really talking about, the creation of atmospheres, ambiences and textures. Such music, and it is music, is as old as commercial synthesizers. I can refer you to records from 1969-1970 using synthesis to do just this. Those who read this blog or listen to my podcasts will know of examples of it that I've referred to before. Some synthesists, those I would characterize as at the more artistic end of the spectrum, have always wanted to make such music. You will note, of course, that in synthesizer music history there are instrumental synth albums that have sold in 8 figures (such as Oxygene by J-M Jarre). But then we need to remember never to confuse "good music" with "popularity". I make a weekly podcast of electronic music that showcases lots of never heard artists happy to just make their own thing unconcerned by popularity, fame or "what music makers want from instruments" which is a shorthand for the needs of boring, gigging musicians who wouldn't know creativity or originality if it left teethmarks in their backsides. If you produce for a mass market then you are inevitably compromised by that same market. Popular artists who make their "experimental" record often experience a dip in popularity as a result. And then go back to their formula for popularity.

The problem here is that nearly everyone is happy to reproduce something that they heard before. Very few are unhappy with that and want to be completely different. I've lost count of the unsigned bands and artists who say they sound (and often advertise themselves as sounding) like somebody else you might have heard of. I sit there thinking "WHAT?" If you sound like somebody else then I might as well go and listen to them instead. Its fair to say that originality is not often in vogue with many. People are too conventional to be different. We see this also with the sounds that are put into synths, both the hardware and software varieties. These get used by multiple people so that the sounds become known. This is not necessarily all bad if you happen to like the particular sound but music is something, I think, which always needs to keep being refreshed. It is a human failing that it is all too easy to be lazy but in music it can also be rewarding to do everything yourself. Anyone who has a synthesizer has a device that can be used in multiple ways with the sole purpose of creating sounds. And these devices do not necessarily have to be used as intended either. The whole genre of Acid House comes from a use and abuse of the Roland TB-303, for example. This device was originally put out by Roland as a relatively tame accompaniment device for people who played other things. It allowed you to not have a bassist. But in the hands of inventive people it became the lead instrument for bass heavy dance music. These same inventive people, I think, are drawn to modular synthesis too because such people are driven by an artistic desire for the new or different. Their polar opposite, to my mind, are those who want to design a patch memory system for modular synths which, up until this point, have no way to save the sounds you make on them. Once the patch cords are removed your sound is gone. THAT IS A GOOD THING!! The problem is that even new things eventually become ossified over time. Roland itself now remakes its old instruments in digital format (including the TB-303 now reborn as the TB-03) and sells them as a standard.

You are probably getting my point here that this comes down to a matter of mentality. It comes down to what music is for you. If its to make a career or to appease people commissioning music well then you have to give them what they think they want. These are limitations and, depending on your attitude to these things, maybe ones that are too much for you. But if you have more artistic freedom and a mind to wander then you are free to roam wider, disconnected from the need to appease anybody or anything but your own desire to roam across sonic landscapes and textures. This is what I do when I make my podcasts. These are good because they are not reliant on one person or their creative impulses. You can mix and match the tastes of many. But I must warn you Spotify-infested hordes that finding something new or different takes effort. It can't just be served up to you by some commerce monkey in a playlist. A big problem with this is how music is heard in the first place. You can search for yourself, a time-consuming process, and you will certainly find new, different and interesting things. But the vast majority don't search at all. They want to be spoon-fed whatever the mainstream gives them. Then they complain there's nothing new. Well of course there isn't! Those who make money out of selling music do so by serving up the same, the safe things, what people know. They wouldn't offer you something new and avant-garde. So my point is its up to listeners to seek out new and interesting music. It is out there.

People, of course, have differing tastes. They always will. And none of this matters. We should know by now that there is no "good music" and no "bad music". There is only music I like now and music I don't. And even that may change for people's tastes can change. Those tastes are also not coherent or logical. I like glitchy IDM music but my childhood has also bequeathed me a love of some of the hits of Englebert Humperdinck (ask your parents or grandparents). I didn't choose to like any of this music. I just did. The fact is it doesn't matter what you like or why. There is nothing special and nothing to be gained by liking one thing over another. Its all just music. That said, the whole point of this blog has been that if you want new, as the original article I referred to was about, then you will only find new sounds as a music maker or new sounds as a music listener by either making them or searching to find them. There is no shortcut. You will get out in proportion to what you put in.

You have only yourself to blame.

Postscript

One man who I think knew all this was the recently deceased synthesizer designer and engineer, Don Buchla. He created many instruments, beginning in the 1960s, which were aimed to create new types of electronic music. He did many unconventional things at the time, such as not attaching a musical keyboard to many of his instruments, which forced their users to go a different way about creating electronic sound. He was a man who refused to compromise design for popularity. (Bob Moog, who was also a pioneering synthesizer designer, did add keyboards to his instruments and received many more plaudits - and sales - as a result.) He inspired not only many electronic musicians but many electronics engineers who now incorporate designs he inspired into their own electronic devices and so his legacy of innovation continues today beyond his own life span. He will be much missed. RIP Don.

Music and Genre

Generally speaking, I am not a fan of genres in music. This is a silly statement. For I can say that I like ska music, the acid sound, EBM, kosmische music, sound art, and some other things and these are all genres of music. Genres are musical sub-cultures that share some recognizable features, helpful ways to group certain sounds together and hopefully in a descriptively useful way that cuts some ice and actually helps the users of the term to know what is being talked about. The problem, however, is that often this isn't the case at all and especially if you haven't experienced a musical genre from the inside. Another problem is that genres can become more narrowly and narrowly defined. What, for example, is Aggrotech and how is it different from EBM or electro-industrial? I admit to being completely at a loss. I recently read a comment talking about "Black Ambient". I have no idea what that is or how it might be different from "Dark Ambient" which is another genre label I have come across. I admit that I ask myself if any perceived difference matters. What use is a term that doesn't have wide currency anyway? Using it doesn't help because in order to understand its meaning you'd need to experience the difference yourself.

So there is an issue with increasingly narrow sub-genres. These operate more as identifiers for insiders than instantly recognizable labels for the masses. Such labels aren't always welcome either. Some musicians don't want to be nailed down to one label or genre. Recently I put up a podcast in my Electronic Oddities series formed around Electroclash music. When I do a genre show I always try to formulate in my head a compact description of what I think this genre is trying to encapsulate. I included Ladytron in that podcast even though Ladytron have, in the past, refused the Electroclash tag. But I noticed that some others regarded their sound as fitting within the genre and so I included them. The song I picked doesn't sound out of place so maybe it was a good decision. But I can understand Ladytron's point.

Of course, for some people identifying with a particular genre might be important to them. These people set out to fit in with a genre and its important to them they are recognized as this sound. One example here is Noise Music, especially Harsh Noise. This is just a noise wall with barely any variation between tracks or bands. But it is a distinctive and definable sound and some simply want to join in making it. Another example might be EDM. EDM is a very produced (some would say over produced) and polished form of dance music made with a computer. It has a recognizable sound that separates it out from rawer forms of dance music. EDM is very popular and lots of music makers who already have computers are very keen to make it. They all sound the same so its not hard to miss. But this is where my problem with genre starts to raise its head.

My problem with genre is that it is limiting. As a musician I would hate to think people can use one word to describe what it is I do. I'd regard it as an insult and myself as a failure if that was the case. I guess my own self-image is that, musically, I have more strings to my bow than just sounding one way. Now some people want to sound one way. That's up to them. I'd regard it as not overly interesting though as once you've heard a song or two what more is there really to listen to? You've heard what this person or people do and you aren't going to get anymore variety than that. This is a silly statement too. There are plenty of acts I've heard and liked in my life who really only sound one way and I have no problem with them at all. If you like a certain sound then you like it. But I'm trying to get at something more than this. There are also experimental groups that I like. These have more of an unpredictability about them and I like them for that fact. These groups avoid categorization, which is what putting musicians in genres really is, and I like that idea. I don't want to be categorized myself. "Experimental" is a good tag for this and some people use the term as a genre term too. But "experimental" tells you next to nothing about what someone is going to sound like. 

Recently I came across another genre discussion that revolved around "the modular sound". This, so it is assumed, is the sound made by modular synthesizers. This discussion was started off by the famous modular synth user, Richard Devine, when he commented in one of the first teaser videos for the new Behringer Deepmind 12 synth that it sounded "very modular". Hannes Pasqualini wrote an excellent piece about this comment and if "the modular sound" even exists and you can read that HERE! and you should read it for its an interesting discussion of if this sound even exists and, if so, what it is. In the article Devine himself was very clear that he thinks there is such a sound, its a sound that is "organic and changing constantly". I know exactly what he means by this. I myself would probably have mentioned a sound that involved constantly changing modulations, a sense of movement and a feeling of being a musical organism, you can hear all the parts working in their place but it somehow all feels as if it is a unified whole. I note, however, that in the Facebook discussion where I found reference to Pasqualini's article there were a few people quite adamant that there was no such thing as "the modular sound". They emphasized the possibilities of the machine and argued this meant there was no such sound. But if when I mentioned "the modular sound" ideas of what that might be came into your head then maybe the phrase denotes something after all. (I note that much "modular music" one may hear is brief jams that people make for videos they put online. This phenomenon itself contributes to a modular sound in that it is so-called "noodling".)

Of course, I turn all these genre discussions back upon myself for, like many musicians, I want to be able to describe what it is I do. In this connection "the modular sound" is interesting to me not least because, over the years, sometimes people have said to me that some of my music sounds very "modular" or "analog" (not the same thing of course!) when the truth has usually been that the songs they were hearing were made entirely in software. I often do set out to try and ape a certain sound though (or I just find one that reminds me of something) and so the comments that I got, quite innocently and honestly, confirmed in me some measure of success and that, yes, there are people out there who associate certain sounds with certain equipment. I often deliberately muddy these waters too because I've often lied to people who have asked me what I used to make something. This, please understand, was not from any malicious intent. It was more mischievous in that I have noticed people make judgments based on what they think you have used. I merely wanted to disrupt these, to me, invalid judgments and make the listener return once more to the sound they are hearing. Musicians, especially of the electronic variety, can be very snobbish or judgmental about equipment and I simply wish to not play that game. Comment on what you hear not what was used to make it when listening to music is the focus!

Now I think there's ample reason to say that my music is not one thing. I might sometimes call it "experimental" but this is a relative term. Experimental to who exactly? One person's experiment is another's "I've heard this before". I think what I'd actually like to be is a genre of one: "music that sounds like me". No one else can sound like me if I allow my personality to shine through what I do for no one else is me. This is my technique and I try to make music containing that spark of uniqueness, that brings that little bit of me to the fore. This, of course, will not tell you what I sound like. But, as I've tried to explain, part of me is resistant to genre labels in the first place. You get to know what I sound like by listening to me. And this is surely the point of music anyway. If it can be explained away by a genre label it removes the need to listen to it. So I try not to fit in with genre and I try to be varied so that what I do cannot be crammed into the same musical box. That said, my music has taken a turn this year in what, to date, doesn't seem like such a vintage year to me. My music often reflects the world I see around me and is, in some sense, an expression of this. Yesterday I lay trying to come up with words to describe it. I got

1. Noisy

2. Abstract

3. Atonal

4. Bricolage

Now this isn't a genre and that's good. In practice a lot of my output this year, which has increasingly used random sounds I have found online (a notable change in content from former years), has been unpleasant noise, messy and sterile. These are aesthetic judgments by me, its maker. But it has served a purpose for I have seen the world destroying itself, chaos rising and things politically, socially and culturally making less and less sense. Would not noisy, abstract, atonal bricolage be the music for a world that was like this? It seems that I have thought so. Of course, I have to be the kind of musician I am for this to be so. Some musicians, it seems, start off with an idea in their head. They then try to recreate this idea in sound. But I am not like that. I never start with an idea. Instead, I start with a musical situation. This compromises instruments, sounds and, primarily, thoughts and feelings about non-musical subjects. In effect, before I begin I collect a pool of things that I am going to use. The way I make music is then to filter the instruments and sounds through the thoughts and feelings. My music, however abstract, is always about some idea or feeling and success is articulating that in sound. So I regard my genre as sounding like me for my music is what I think and feel in sound.

I find this way of doing things much more authentic than following some genre. But there will be others who want to do exactly that and that is their choice. As I've already intimated, my thoughts on genre aren't consistent anyway - and nor need they be. There are good and bad things about genre and we aren't required to have merely one thought about the subject. What is much more important is finding your own way and finding a sound that you truly identify with (from a musician's point of view). 

The Electronic Oddities Podcast, which often features differing musical genres, can be found at https://www.mixcloud.com/DrExistenz/ 

My music, whatever it might be made with (and I'm not telling!), can be found at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

Exploiting R2-D2

A big subject amongst creative people in the digital age is the subject of piracy and, more specifically, of stealing in general. Barely a day goes past without some example of artistic theft being brought to public attention whether this be someone lifting songs from a Soundcloud account and then blatantly passing them off as their own, photographs being used or modified in an uncredited way or people being asked to use their creative gifts for free. It can rightly be said, with little hyperbole, that the creative impulses of human beings are constantly and consistently being exploited by other people for their own gain and sometimes for their monetary profit. Indeed, so insidious and constant is this tendency these days that it has become thoroughly normalized. People see artistic work as something of little worth that can be had for free. Its often pointed out that artists suffer because of this due to their inability to support themselves from creative lifestyles. Its logically possible to take the view that every act of theft or expectation of something for free contributes to this mentality regardless of how trivial or inconsequential you may regard any individual example as being. I should point out, before I carry on, that I don't have clean hands here. I live in exactly the society I've described and am prey to the same dubious impulses. So today's blog is not holier than thou. I'm just as guilty as the next person. I've also been the victim of theft. On Soundcloud my entire set of music, over 60 tracks, was stolen and put up elsewhere for money in 2010. Last year I became aware that a Russian account was routinely downloading my Bandcamp tracks and making them available on a Russian website. This is routine and normal for many.

The reason I discuss all this is because last night whilst idling through my Twitter timeline I came across someone advertising a T shirt he had made. As I sometimes but certainly not always do (I expect like everyone else), I went to have a look at the product he was selling. It was a T shirt with the image of R2-D2 from Star Wars on it. R2-D2 had been coloured in. It wasn't a bad T shirt. I can imagine that some people would want to buy it. But the question that came into my head immediately and, I admit, not at first totally seriously was "Has this image been licensed from George Lucas/Disney?" Now, of course, R2-D2 is not this guy's artistic creation. Its someone else's and certainly held by some body or entity as their's to artistically license and exploit for profit as they see fit. Of course, neither this person nor the online record label he is attached to and selling this product through had even so much as broached this question in the process of their activities. The impression I got from their responses was that there was seemingly no problem here. The artist concerned gave me the argument that Lucas and Disney were rich enough (so this somehow makes it OK) and the online record label sent back a sarcastic picture apparently intimating I was getting my panties in a bunch over nothing. So, according to these two, both of whom are seemingly reluctant to even acknowledge that this is fairly obvious stealing, there's no problem here. Stealing someone else's design is fine. You don't even need to question yourself over what you are doing.

Now, as I said last night to the person concerned, this isn't my fight. It is, in the parlance of our times, no skin off my nose. George Lucas and Disney are both indeed staggeringly rich. I don't really care more than those involved here if they lose a few dollars they might have otherwise gotten if this had been done properly. And its also true that I'm no one's moral police. As I stated above, when I started this conversation I wasn't even doing so totally seriously. I suppose I raised the issue to find out the response. It was a heuristic question to attempt to find out the attitude at work here. The artist selling the T shirt gave the reply that the creators/owners of the property were rich enough already and the record label said they would stop if Lucas or Disney complained. Neither answer is good enough and anyone reading this as well as those concerned knows it. But apparently its difficult for some to admit this even with their hands in the till and their pants pulled down on camera for all to see. As I said at the start, such activity has become ingrained and normalized. The idea "I want to use something so I just will" is there in the midst of us and its not going away anytime soon. 

However, its not always universal. I'm aware of another artistic person on my Twitter timeline who recently wanted to use some music from the artist Moby. As I understand it he wanted to do some work on a set of ambient music he had put online, I think for free ironically enough, and then put it out on his own account. It transpired that this musician had gone so far as to contact Moby or his management directly to see if he was allowed and able to do this. I admit that, when I learned about this, I flinched inwardly a little. If Moby had dumped this online for free then why ask at all? Surely it could be taken as read it was OK to use the material? By highlighting the issue with those concerned it could only really go badly if they said no, right? And, besides, Moby would likely never find out anyway. My artist friend is not the most popular musician in the world, as he himself would admit, albeit he should probably be more popular than he is. If he went and did whatever he wanted with Moby's music the chances of Moby finding out in the vast jungle of the Internet is extremely negligible. I expect this latter belief is at the heart of what the person with the R2-D2 T shirt and his record label think too. They don't expect those who really own the image will find out. No harm, no foul, right?

So why did this become such as issue for me that I wrote a blog about it? I can't really say but I think its the exploitation at the heart of the issue that tweaks my moral nipples so that I can't ignore it. What I've discussed here is blatant stealing however those at the heart of the matter want to avoid, belittle or ignore the fact. They are both in the wrong and guilty of artistic theft and exploitation. So Lucas and Disney, or whoever actually owns the image if R2-D2, are probably mega-rich and its doubtful they will miss the few dollars they might have made. But that's not the issue. I'm certainly not raising this out of concern for their bank balance. I'm raising this as a way of asking if stealing is OK now. What do you think? Is stealing OK? Does it matter? Are there consequences from the idea that I can decide for myself on a case by case basis if I should be allowed to steal? The conventional attitude is certainly "No harm, no foul". But, like many conventions, is that valid? What are the ramifications for people just deciding for themselves whether they should steal or not? Is it OK in society if we just become laws unto ourselves? Sure, this is hardly the crime of the century but, as one supermarket chain here is fond of saying, "every little helps". Every little supposedly inconsequential act goes onto the fire and helps it burn that little bit brighter. It all contributes to the mentality "Stuff is free if I want it to be". I have asked the record label concerned if its OK if I download and sell their entire music catalog as my own now. I don't expect it is but that's exactly what hypocrisy is. As I reported above, apparently the problem with hypocrisy is that I'm in the wrong for getting my panties in a bunch about it.

Now this T shirt issue would still be wrong if they gave the T shirt away for free. But at least then those concerned wouldn't be openly seeking to profit from the skill, work and ideas of others. Currently, they are. That's their choice and their problem if, by some miracle, things ever went tits up. What I refuse to accept, however, is that it doesn't matter. Its not "a bit of fun" as the record label wrote back to me. Getting money for nothing surely might be fun for them but all it does for the rest of us, in its own tiny, barely measurable way, is corrupts public morality. Maybe that doesn't matter either.

But isn't that merely the thin end of a particularly nihilistic wedge?