Why Wilco Is the Future of Music (1 Viewer)

stunning

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Here's Lawrence Lessig's latest Op-Ed piece from Wired.

( more at www.lessig.org )

Why Wilco Is the Future of Music

Great things happen when a band and its audience find harmony.

By Lawrence Lessig

On February 13, thousands of musicians from around the world will
gather in Los Angeles at the Grammy Awards to celebrate music circa
2005. But the celebration won't hide the war that's going on. Record
labels are threatened by technologies that give fans access to music
in ways no one ever planned. They plead with Congress for more laws to
control the fans. Activist organizations such as the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge (on whose boards this
columnist sits) are fighting back. They (we) demand an end to the war,
and the attack on innovation that it represents.

Yet there's something hollow about the earnest rage on both sides of
this debate. Hollow, as in inauthentic. It is artists who make music,
not the industry that markets it or the technologies that take it. But
artists independent of the industry have been as rare in this debate
as kids who don't file-share music. Of course, there are the "rebels"
- those who have made it in the old system and who call for something
new. But they know, as we all know, that they will be fabulously
successful, regardless of what they do now. They risk nothing, and
thus their message means less.

The band Wilco and its quiet, haunted leader, Jeff Tweedy, is
something different. After its Warner label, Reprise, decided that the
group's fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was no good, Wilco dumped
them and released the tracks on the Internet. The label was wrong. The
album was extraordinary, and a sold-out 30-city tour followed. This
success convinced Nonesuch Records, another Warner label, to buy the
rights back - reportedly at three times the original price. The Net
thus helped make Wilco the success it has become. But once back in
Warner's favor, many wondered: Would Wilco forget the Net?

We've begun to see the answer to this question. Wilco's Net-based
experiments continue: the first live MPEG-4 webcast; a documentary
about the band in part screened and funded via the Net; bonus songs
and live recordings tied to CDs. Its latest album, A Ghost Is Born,
was streamed in full across the Net three months before its commercial
release. And when songs from it started appearing on file-sharing
networks, the band didn't launch a war against its fans. Instead,
Wilco fans raised more than $11,000 and donated it to the band's
favorite charity. The album has been an extraordinary success - and
was nominated for two Grammys.

I got a chance to ask Tweedy about all this before a concert in
Oakland, California (that's the weird thing about law professors
hanging around Wired - you get to go to the back of the bus). What
struck me most was his clarity. He was a man called to a war that he
couldn't believe had to be fought. Yet it isn't ideology that drives
him. It's common sense.

"Music," he explained, "is different" from other intellectual
property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But
neither is it just "a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread." The artist
controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the
rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it
live. "We are just troubadours," Tweedy told me. "The audience is our
collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not
treating them like thieves."

He uttered this with the passion of a teacher explaining the most
fundamental truths. Words echo in this poet's mind many times before
they are spoken. These words had echoed many times before. But when I
asked him to explain the extremism in this war, passion faded and
disbelief took its place. Commenting on a court decision to ban all
music sampling without a license, he said one word: racism. And he
seemed genuinely confounded by those who use the courts to punish
their fans. "If Metallica still needs money," he almost whispered,
"then there's something really, really wrong." He would protest this
extremism, he explained, by living a different life. By inviting, by
creating, by inspiring music, and by ignoring wars about plastic.

If this war is to end, it needs authentic voices. We have had enough
preaching. The outrage is beginning to wear thin. It will take bands
like Wilco, who live a different example and whisper an explanation to
those who want to hear. Peace takes a practice. One that only artists
can make real.
 
Wilco are Wilco. That is the highest praise I can bestow upon them. Thanks for this thread by the way. Among other things, it has made me realise that I haven't listened to the boys in wayyyy too long! Did anybody catch them at Witness last year? Un be leevable.
 
Tombo said:
Wilco are Wilco. That is the highest praise I can bestow upon them. Thanks for this thread by the way. Among other things, it has made me realise that I haven't listened to the boys in wayyyy too long! Did anybody catch them at Witness last year? Un be leevable.

Yeah, bfenby and I were there. Ran into Mr. Dip and we watched the thing with him which was lovely.

Glad you like the thread.

Come to the Hoot Night, its even better than this thread. :)
 

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