Bringing Back the Front Porch

WE HUMANS sure do love sensing highly organized man made air vibrations with our ear drums, then sending those vibrations to our brains, which interprets them. We love doing this just about as much as we love doing anything else, in general, I reckon. We love listening to music. Music apprecation is so universal its almost as if everyone should be intimately involved in it, both listening to music, and making music. So common place is music naturally that you might think it would always and forever be free to all, without there ever being any consideration of the financial value of it. This is the way it once was, and this is the way it is, in a healthy culture. Everyone makes music, and everyone listens to and enjoys music. And music is free for all. But leave it to the American free market system to find a way to make music a purely corporate matter, owned and controlled by the wealthy few at the expense, and to the exploitation of, us, the unwashed masses. It all began the very moment Edison read Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" raspily into a machine which recorded and reproduced the sound of his voice on a cylindrical play back machine, 'long about 1890. Edison, ever a corporate guy, went to whatever trouble it took to profit from his inventions, and after world war two, with the country starved for war free entertainment, music became big big buisness. Corporate money financed recording studios, and the "Star System" was born, in which popular musicians were funded and marketed so heavily that most of the public's demand for musical entertainment was soaked up by a relatively few corporations, studios, and musicians. The musical art form came to be dominated by superstars, the Elvis Presleys and The Beatles of the world, with wildly fantastic popularity, getting the same atttention which otherwise might be distributed among a thousand front porches with a thousand unknown talents. But now all that may be changing. Cassette tapes, CDs and CD burning, and the internet seem to be combining to make access to free music easier, thus bringing down the price. Are CDs selling for fifteen dollars anymore? Not as many of them, probably. Free music, in our current legal system, is illegal music, but that may have to be changed,if easy access to free albiet illegal music cannot be hindered. Its hard to imagine how it can be brought back under corporate or governmental control, which in America are the same thing. But dont put it past 'em to find a way... We may be on the verge of an era in which if it isn't worth the trouble for a musician to make money by asking for it at live performances, it isn't worth making music at all. The days of fabulously lucrative recorded music for the for the benefit of the few and at the expense of the many may be over. We may be on the verge of an era when any musician who wants to be heard can be heard, and many more musicians are heard, not just a few handpicked corporate sponsored superstars. The front porch may be coming back. If so, it may prove to be quite a breath of fresh air.