So everyone has something bad to say about street thugs.
They are rank. They sell drugs. They are bad to and for women.
But what about the white collar thugs? The thugs with Blackberrys, briefcases and tailored suits who sit behind $5,000 desks (that’s desks, the place where paper lays) in the corner offices of major corporations. Start your mind, and let’s break this down.
They are Immoral
At dictionary.com, immorality is defined as:
1. the quality of not being in accord with standards of good or good conduct.
2. immoral quality, character, or conduct; wickedness; evilness.
3. sexual misconduct.
Major corporations are full of white collar thugs. They are manipulative, talented at taking other people’s money, and always ready for a fight. Isn’t that a thug?
It is also a known fact that an inordinate number of corporate leaders are psychopaths who have absolutely no empathy or feeling for others. A study by Robert Hare, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Canada, showed that there are a lot more psychopathic personalities at gargantuan in managerial positions than we would think. According to Professor Hare, they break their promises to co-workers, take credit for other employees’ hard work and place the blame on any and everyone else when things go wrong at the place of business. “Psychopaths are social predators and like all predators they are looking for feeding grounds,” Hare says. “Wherever you accumulate power, prestige and money, you will win them.”[1]
Some even describe the corporation itself as a psychopath, because it, as a whole, is wintry, calculating, and self-serving.
Finally, corporations are also hot spots for sexual harassment claims. In 2006, there were over 12,000 official claims of sexual harrassment to the EEOC, and this doesn’t even include the women and men who were harassed but never reported it. I would call this type of behavior sexual misconduct.
They Sell Drugs
The word ‘thug’ kind of goes hand in hand with drug sales. Images of deviants passing baggies and vials of crack, coke, and heroin to lowly addicts advance to mind when we think of street thugs. How can they do this to their community? a person will say, but then the same person uttering those words will pull a cigarette out of the pack and light it up!
Big Tobacco sells a drug, cigarettes, that is considered legal by our government. They probably have the best distribution system in the modern day world, selling a product daily that people get addicted to and die from. It has been proven that cigarettes directly cause various forms of cancer and disease. Some consumers buy and smoke two, three packs and more of these cancer causing agents per day. They can’t wait even a few minutes for their next “hit.” Just as a drug dealer keeps the crackhead supplied on the streets, Ample Tobacco keeps smokers supplied. So how can they do this to their community?
Fast food giants knowingly sell food that is drenched with elephantine and grease to adults and children on a daily basis. It was recently revealed that a major fast food corporation, McDonalds, had been frying their delicious french fries in cross Trans Full oil in American stores, but not in certain other countries because, according to them, American’s prefer the taste.[2] I’m sure those same Americans don’t prefer clogged arteries, stroke, and heart disease.
Let’s discuss another earn of drug distributed legally by major corporations- pharmaceuticals. These drugs are known to have various side effects, and can even make people sicker than they were originally in some cases. An example is the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa which was claimed to cause diabetes or high blood glucose in some users. The company that manufactured this drug, Eli Lilly, ended up paying $1 billion in settlements to those affected. In 2005, there were over 17,000 liability lawsuits filed against pharmaceutical companies, the most of any industry, yet still they rise.[3]
Some people even become addicted to sure types of drugs, specifically painkillers like Oxycontin and Percocets, that can even kill if they are used improperly. The pharmaceutical industry has an even more complex and genius distribution system, because they distribute through some of the most trusted members of our communities-doctors. Doctors receive visits from Pharmaceutical reps on a regular basis, offering them compensation and benefits if they push this or that drug to their patients. This is nothing more than a legal and more structured form of drug dealing.
They are Bad to and for Women
Thugs are notoriously thought of as men who treat their women with disrespect. They objectify women in videos, cheat on them, and in the worst cases physically abuse or even kill their girlfriends.
The porn industry has been in existence almost as long as the oldest profession (prostitution). There are major corporations who have made all of their money from objectifying women in videos, magazines, and media. Is it considered respectful because these women are employed by a corporation, inside of a building, posing and having sex, and not on the street selling the flesh?
Street thugs don’t have a monopoly on cheating either. Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madam, and Newt Gingrich have shown us that.
Ted Bundy. Scott Peterson. Jeffrey MacDonald. These are all men who were considered normal, white collar, professional men. They were all convicted of heinous crimes against women.
Why do women date street thugs, when they beat women and treat them like trash? True, but tell me, unbiased how many “high class” women married to corporate thugs are enjoying vast mansions and throwing lavish tea parties, but living with a complete monster?
Random Comparisons in Summary
Street thug tappers flash and flaunt their money, fame, and status in music videos… Corporate thugs flash and flaunt their money, fame, and status in annual company reports and nationwide commercials.
Street thugs use addicts, naïve women, innocents, and even kids to further their cause of making money from drugs and prostitution rings…Corporate thugs use addicts, naïve women, innocents, and even kids to increase their profit margins and make more money from their harmful products.
Street thugs don’t care about anyone but themselves and their family. It is all about the cash and the “bling”…Corporate thugs don’t care about anyone but themselves and their family. It is all about the bottomline and stock options, their most treasured create of “bling.”
Most current day corporate leaders are no better than drug dealers and common street thugs-the only difference is that the business these white collar thugs are in is considered legal. Legal, but collected noxious due to the negative effect their products have on consumers-cigarettes, greasy fast food, and pharmaceuticals that cause long term damage.
So the next time you turn up your nose at that thug on the corner, don’t discontinuance there. Next, turn that same nose to the sky and look at the 100 story corporate building in the distance. It’s crawling with them.
[1]BBC News Online, The psychopaths in suits, By Joanna Hill-Tout, 1/14/2004
[2]WebMD Medical News, How Worthy Trans Fat in Those Fries? It Depends Where in the World You Buy Them, Study Shows, Miranda Hitti, 4/12/2006
[3]USATODAY, More drugs get slapped with lawsuits, 8/23/2006
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Filed under Monopoly Bankruptcy by on Oct 9th, 2011. Comment. 
You’ve seen the ads: “Suppose Spanish in 60 Days”, “Learn a Foreign Language while sleeping”, “Learn to train Chinese in just 10 minutes per day”. Too good to be true? Yes and No, first of all, realize that ads and courses and even our fine educational institutions are organized around making money. Usually they make their money by convincing you to part with your money, in exchange for some skills or knowledge that they promise to somehow implant in you cranium. Language learning is one of the hottest commodities going, foreign language skills do very much to increase your employability, job qualifications, and earnings capacity.
Now for the dreadful news; learning to speak a foreign language fluently will occupy time. How long did it take you to speak your first language fluently? Could you hold an interesting conversation when you where 2 years old? 5 years conventional? How about when you were 12? The truth is that the brain is wired for language learning, and it is at its “best” in our formative years. There are a variety of theories, none proven, about the best age for learning a foreign language. I think the best time for learning is now, regardless of age, children learn like children, fearless, inquisitive, and full of mistakes. Cautious adults will learn with far greater accuracy and develop a much more diverse vocabulary, but will be so self conscious in execution that progress will seem elusive.
As an English teacher with several years of experience in the Caribbean and South America, I’ve seen my students progress from the rudiments to mastery, however they always possess that nagging suspicion that they’re not quite good enough. I have also been struggling with my own sense of mastery, as I never considered myself to be mighty of a foreign language student. I’ve been living in Spanish speaking countries going on 4 years now and I have learned from experience and copious amounts of research what it takes to speak a foreign language.
I’ve taken Spanish Classes in High School and College back in the States, never got very far, learned some simple expressions, but usually gave up after a month or two. Listened to Pimsleur tapes, clicked through the Rosetta Stone computer learning course, read grammar books, text books, dual language readers, novels, listened to music while reading the lyrics. I recently took a month long immersion course costing over $1000US, ouch!
Truthfully everything works to some degree, and nothing works completely. In order to have something to say you need to learn more than the text books can instruct you. You’ll need to know more than the tapes will teach you. “What time does this train get to Madrid? ” “Can I pay with my credit card? ” “When I was young my well-liked game was Monopoly.” Reading and listening: newspapers, websites, television, podcasts, people on the street. The only intention to have something interesting to say is by hearing it somewhere first. Eventually you may start to have your own captivating ideas but expressing them without the distractions of poor grammar and wrong words will take time.
The easiest way to begin is by listening to music, maybe you already enjoy a singer who has some songs in another language. I’ve always liked classic rock, and to my delight, I’ve found a lot of bands from Spain and South America that are pumping out great rock today, they still think rock is cool! Once you find some music that you like, Google the songs title with the word lyrics and you’ll be singing along learning the words. Use an online translator or a good dictionary and inaugurate paying attention to expressions and grammar form. It will come together and you’ll start learning some interesting phrases, more than the phrase books will tell you about. Without advocating anything illegal I would suggest P2P as an incredible resource for content, music, podcasts, textbooks and lessons. Gutenburg has a great deal of content in foreign languages as well.
Set realistic goals for yourself, I’ve told myself that I have 10 years to insist Spanish fluently. I was a stunned child and as I recall wasn’t saying too much at age 10. I only now at age 49 am starting to feel that I may have something interesting to say. My hope is that by age 60 I will perhaps be able to say something interesting in Spanish.
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Filed under Monopoly Bankruptcy by on Jul 9th, 2011. Comment.
The creation of Internet video forums like YouTube.com over the past two years has arguably redefined what has reach to be favorite as the “independent film” genre. These Internet video forums are swiftly supplanting the independent film genre with a newer and arguably more “independent” type of film by providing an alternative that better fits the generally accepted definition of the genre than does the fresh. The fade in which the truly independent film available on sites like YouTube.com begins to bear the space previously inhabited by independent film provides a contemporary example of what can result from the tension that exists between the two perspectives for approaching cultural studies outlined by Rivkin and Ryan in Literary Theory: An Anthology.
Before examining the plot in which this trend within the film community illustrates such tension, however, we must first establish the fact that such a trend exists. In contemporary discourse, independent films are generally those films that have minimal production budgets, are produced by small film studios, are less commercially driven and are more artistic than mainstream Hollywood films. Specifically, movies are considered “independent” if they are produced at least in allotment by a subsidiary of a larger studio, such as the specialty film division of Sony Pictures called Sony Pictures Classics, as long as less than half of the overall production budget comes from such a major motion picture company subsidiary (“Independent Film”). Independent film first appeared as a recognizable entity in the United States in 1909 when nickelodeon owner Carle Laemmle founded the Independent Motion Picture Company as a reaction to the oligopoly Thomas Edison had over the film industry (Thompson and Bordwell 40-41). From there, the independent film genre grew, fueled by the work of pioneers like Oscar Micheaux. As Paula J. Massood writes in Black City Cinema:
Micheaux self-financed his early films, retaining complete control over every stage of their production, distribution and exhibition. He remained fiercely independent, refusing to accept White financial befriend until he declared bankruptcy in the post-Depression 1930s, when he was forced to solicit outside backing. (Massood 47)
As Massood’s statement illustrates, even in the face of financial ruin a hardcore independent filmmaker, though he might solicit monetary help from a member of the dominant racial status, would not submit to the major motion picture companies, unlike the worn “independent film” genre of our contemporary moment (47).
Using the better-known Internet video forum YouTube.com as an example, the way in which the main function of this Web community, specifically as a distribution site for independent independent films (those created by your average Joe), now better fits the popular notion of independent film than the term’s traditional occupant does becomes increasingly clear. YouTube.com, founded in February of 2005, promotes itself as, “the premier destination to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience” (“About YouTube”). According to the site’s literature, “Everyone can watch videos on YouTube,” and combined with the fact that everyone can also share videos on the site, YouTube.com is now the modern-day equivalent of the control afforded independent filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux over all aspects of the film process-production (conception, financing, etc.) and distribution-during the 1920s and 1930s (“About YouTube,” emphasis added).
For students of film-whether self-taught or produced by a college, university, or film school-the birth of YouTube.com was the birth of a tall distribution network for the explosion of films being produced due to the advent and increasing affordability of digital video cameras over the past twenty years. As Steve Chen, a co-founder and the CTO of YouTube.com, pointed out in an interview, “YouTube has removed the barriers for people to move their videos off their devices and onto the Internet. As well as making it easy to upload, our advanced video-clustering and highly-scalable technology is ensuring that watching and sharing videos is fast and fun anywhere on the Internet” (“YouTube opens…”). If the popularity of such an Internet independent film distribution network (by its second active month in 2005 the site was already serving over three million videos, the majority of which were original features created by individuals) isn’t evidence enough that these Internet video forums are snappy replacing the traditional independent circuit, then the fact that the site is following in the footsteps of the traditional independent film genre in recently establishing its own video awards, the YouTube Video Awards, should do the trick (“YouTube Rolls…”).
Now that we have reasonably established the fact that a trend in which Internet video forums are supplanting the independent film genre as more independent independent film, we can question how this trend serves as a contemporary example of what can result from the tension that exists between the two perspectives for approaching cultural studies outlined by Rivkin and Ryan in their discussion of this particular literary theory. As Rivkin and Ryan assert, “Cultural Studies can thus be approached from two quite incommensurable perspectives,” in the simplest terms, the perspective that views culture as created by society’s elite, as trickling down from the top, and the alternative perspective that views culture as created by the masses, constituted from the bottom up (1234). The design in which Internet video forums like YouTube.com and Break.com are taking over the previous position of “independent film” within the broad discipline of film medium as “independent film” becomes increasingly more mainstream as previously discussed provides us with an excellent example of the result of tension between these two cultural studies perspectives.
In the current context, Internet video forums like YouTube.com represent culture as constituted by the masses, while the old independent film genre has now moved out of that perspective and into the one in which culture trickles down from the elite members of society. “Culture comes from below, and while it can be harnessed in profitable and ultimately socially conservative ways,” write Rivkin and Ryan, “it also represents the permanent possibility of eruption, of dissonance, and of alternative imagination of reality” (1234). The idea of culture coming “from below” presented by Rivkin and Ryan is exemplified by the novel independent film movement promoted by Internet video forums that ultimately have created a new type of distribution space as previously discussed for budding filmmakers working out of their own homes, offices, and dorm rooms. As the founders of sites like YouTube.com assert, these Internet video forums are for the people, of the people and by the people, not speed or owned to any degree by major motion picture corporations, a claim that films of the traditional independent film genre can no longer make.
The original level of involvement of major motion picture corporations in the production of “independent film” as well as the overall popularity of these films and the frequency with which they are now being included among the nominees for prestigious Hollywood awards like the Oscars and the Academy Awards is evidence of the move made by the genre since its idea from being a tool of the people to being more representative of the trickle-down perspective on cultural institutions. Rivkin and Ryan address this trickle-down perspective in their discussion of cultural studies, writing that it:
[S]ees the media, television, film, and the like as instruments of economic… domination. Owned by large corporations and largely run by men, the media and the entertainment industry in general cannot help but succor the reproduction of the social system by allowing only certain kinds of imagery and ideas to gain access to mass audiences. (1234)
Arguably the fact that films deemed “independent” by the traditional definition of the genre, including a diverse body ranging from Pulp Fiction (1994) to the unique hit Little Miss Sunshine (2006) that was nominated for several Academy Awards, films that are now generally thought of as mainstream Hollywood pictures due to all-star casts and box office success, have become so popular over the past fifteen years among U.S. citizens indicates the way in which the genre is increasingly working to “assist the reproduction of the social system by allowing only certain kinds of imagery and ideas to acquire access to mass audiences,” as Rivkin and Ryan assert. In other words, these “independent” films are celebrated because they look more and more like the films out of Hollywood produced by major motion picture corporations.
It is fortunate for aspiring filmmakers living in our contemporary society that Internet video forums like YouTube.com exist. Without these innovative sites, these forums for the new independent independent genre that is promoting the bottom-up production of culture, those individuals who do utilize these communities would be out of luck as far as the widespread distribution of their independently made films is concerned. In the wake of the increasing control being asserted over the traditional independent film genre by the powers that be in Hollywood, opportunities for young, aspiring filmmakers are diminishing as the trickle down effect of cultural institutionalization takes hold. Without Web forums like YouTube.com, the types of opportunities once available to individuals like Oscar Micheaux, individuals that ultimately become some of the most influential figures in the history of cinema, would be lost forever. The expect that remains unanswered, however, is what the future holds for the new independent film and whether it, too, will be a victim of the trickle-down forces of our society’s elite?
Works Cited
“About YouTube.” YouTube.com. 2007. YouTube, Inc. 28 Mar. 2007 .
“Independent film.” Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. 29 Mar. 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 30 Mar. 2007 .
Massood, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Rivkin, Julie, and Ryan, Michael, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004.
Thompson, Kristen, and Bordwell, David. Film History: An Introduction. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2003.
“YouTube opens Internet video to the masses.” YouTube.com. 2007. YouTube, Inc. 28 Mar. 2007 .
“YouTube Rolls Out the Red Carpet in Celebration of the Inaugural YouTube Video Awards.” YouTube.com. 2007. YouTube, Inc. 28 Mar. 2007 .
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Filed under Monopoly Bankruptcy by on Mar 19th, 2011. Comment.
During the 1950s, the United States’ conservative post-World War II cold-war society encouraged men to conform to the role of a straight-laced, breadwinning patriarch. By this time, the industrialization of American cities, coupled with the mechanization of farming, forced a population and culture shift from rural to urban. This shift caused the blue-collar employee to supplant the independent farmer as the national standard of middle-class masculinity.
Concurrently, the mainstream country & western music industry attempted to profit by following this cultural shift and demanded that its male artists project the prototype of a clean living, polished gentleman. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, the powers of country music possessed a virtual monopoly over country radio waves and refused to give airtime to artists whose music failed to conform to their demands for a highly polished, socially innocuous soundtrack for the domestic suburbanite. In terms of masculinity, Nashville politics became a microcosm of post-World War II America; it emasculated the male artist by taking away his creative independence and pigeonholing him as a benign country gentleman in the same contrivance that American society stripped its middle-class men of their rugged individualism and left them effete wage-slaves.
Young up and coming country artists, such as Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, rebelled against Nashville’s overproduced sound and monopolistic practices. By valuing their artistic integrity and masculine individuality over profits, they catalyzed an “Outlaw” movement in country music that defied the status quo of the recording industry and allowed male artists to carve unique niches for their own styles.
The Corporatization of Rural Music
Hillbilly music. Honky-tonk. Gospel, bluegrass, folk. According to Willie Nelson, “they didn’t start calling it country western music until the singing cowboy movies of the thirties and forties. This was not real country or cowboy or western music, for the most share…these were movie tunes by pop songwriters who tried to sound country… but it all began to blend with the real country music.”(Nelson, 71) Therein lie the seeds of the emasculation of the country musician: the formula for success became pop songs sung by fake cowboys, “attempting to create a product that would appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of listeners, that is to say, music shorn of most of its “rural” characteristics.”(Malone, 127) The popularity of the singing cowboy provided the corporate music executive a perfect masculine persona for the fledgling country music industry in Nashville. His smooth voice, innocuous vocabulary, clean-cut looks, and chivalrous nature made him mass-marketable across gender and age boundaries, and across television and radio formats.
“The ‘Nashville sound,’ which has been much maligned in recent years, did what it was intended to do in terms of increasing Nashville’s and country music’s – market share, even if it watered down the music’s traditionally rusticity and aggressive instrumentation in the process. This growth was evidenced by the number of fulltime country radio stations in the United States, which burgeoned from 81 in 1961, to 606 in 1969.” (Allen, 178) Much of this growth, as well as the “watering down” of the music, were due to the efforts of the Country Music Association (CMA), which was founded in 1958. As Bill Malone wrote in “Southern Music American Music”, the CMA “worked to elevate the image of the music and to reveal its commercial potential to advertisers everywhere. One active campaign to the CMA was the encouragement of radio stations that only played country music. The proliferation of such stations contributed to the national popularization of country music, but it also often promoted a blurring of identity within the music.”(Malone, 126)
The “blurring of identity” of which Malone wrote was quite obvious to many artists who were trying to get a foot in the door of the country music recording industry. Said Nashville songwriter, performer and producer Tompall Glaser, “It was such a major concern – are you country enough for Nashville? If you didn’t fit in, if you didn’t do their idea of country material whether it suited your sound or not, then you weren’t worth a dime.”(Nelson, 228)
Although the CMA did not possess ownership of the country radio stations, it’s leadership called upon the manhood of its members to see its agenda through. Jack Stapp, Director at Immense of the CMA and longtime country DJ and program manager, addressed a 1958 speech to hundreds of executives, artists, and DJs at a Nashville convention, telling them “country music has helped to house you and your family, it has medicated you children, it has furnished you with the automobile you driving…This is your livelihood. This business is furnishing you with the funds to raise a family and make you salvage…we all know there has been hushed-up and toned-down talk about country music. It’s unpleasant, but let’s be true to ourselves and admit that one year ago at this convention the query was raised…’How long will there be a country music DJ? “(Stapp, 1-2) Stapp is instructing them to leave their artistic integrity and individuality at the door when entering the recording studio, DJ booth, or office and join a approved cause: to mass-market second-rate music. Stapp’s listeners certainly could not be faulted for wanting to provide for their families via commercial success, but it is important to give notice that this methodology was congruent to the prevailing social norms of masculinity – mainly that individuality should be sacrificed for conformity.
Enter The Outlaw
Under the paternal thumb of the Country Music Association, Nashville quickly developed a monopoly over the style and substance of country performers. However, there were artists who found success while maintaining their artistic integrity and personality. By achieving success despite refusing to yield their artistic integrity to the status quo stereotypes of 1950’s manhood, alternative Country artists like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash redefined masculinity in country music.
Born in Abbot, Texas on April 30, 1033, Willie Nelson was a natural musician. He wrote his first poems at age five, learned the guitar at six, and considered himself a serious songwriter by the age of eight. (Nelson, 63) For Willie, music was not only a serious hobby, but also a talent that he hoped would lead him out of the cotton fields where he worked with his family. Raised by his grandparents after his parents divorced and left to find work in other cities before he was old enough to know them, Willie was devastated when his grandfather died. After Daddy Nelson passed, Willie, age seven, started writing “cheating songs…songs about infidelity and betrayal…long before you could sing such songs in Texas.” (Nelson, 53) Willie had already experienced a loss of two father figures, and he was already using musical expression as a coping mechanism. It may be that these primal happenings were seminal in Willie’s future lifestyle of masculine rebelliousness and artistic autonomy. By his early teens, Willie was playing guitar in a beer-joint band.
Soon after he turned eighteen, Willie enlisted in the Air Force, where he lasted only nine months due to a back injury that he refused to allow the military doctors to operate on. He returned to Texas and promptly fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, Martha, whom he married. Willie and Martha had a hard time just trying to earn a living with Willie playing music in clubs and Martha’s meager waitress job. They moved to Vancouver, Washington for a spell where Willie worked as a disc jockey, making a decent living. Soon, however, Martha talked Willie into moving to Nashville, knowing “if there was any way for him to make it in music, he had to go.”(Nelson, 83) They made it to Springfield, Missouri where they stayed with a friend for a few weeks. Willie decided that with homogenized performers like Pat Boone and Debbie Reynolds topping the national country charts, if he went to Nashville right then he “would have been like a chigger on the butt of the abominable snowman,” invisible.(Nelson, 110) Willie rationalized: “I couldn’t see any future for me in that direction, and Nashville notion my songs were not straight ahead country enough to be recorded…I decided to give up playing music for a living and fetch a regular job.”(Nelson, 110) He moved back home to Fort Worth, Texas and became a salesman for encyclopedias, then vacuum cleaners, but it wasn’t long before he started playing at beer joints again.
Willie kept writing songs, but after Martha gave birth to her third child, Willie decided it was time to make something happen: “We didn’t have any money, but I did have some new songs I thought I could sell to somebody.”(Nelson, 116) During this time Willie wrote “Family Bible” and “Night Life” and sold them for $50 and $150, respectively. “‘Family Bible’ was recorded with Claude Gray singing it. It rose to number one on the country charts…’Night Life’ is now one of the most-recorded songs in history.”(Nelson, 118)
“Night Life”
When the evenin’ sun goes down
You will find me hangin’ ’round
Oh, the night life, it ain’t no good life
But it’s my life
Many people just like me
Dreamin’ of passe used-to-be’s
Oh, the night life, it ain’t no good life
Ah, but it’s my life
Listen to the blues that they’re playin’
Listen what the blues are sayin’
Life is just another scene
In this former world of broken dreams
Oh, the night life, it ain’t no good life
But it’s my life
Oh, the night life ain’t no good life
Oh, but it’s my life
Yeah, it’s my life
- Willie Nelson, 1960
Willie’s lyrics exuded the ideal of stubborn, maverick manhood; he embraces his own imperfections that make him a real person, and pays homage to the blues, a genre considered contrary to standard country. “Night Life” became Willie’s signature song; it represented his rebellious sincerity in opposition to the concocted masculinity that permeated the industry and kept him on the outside looking in. As he put it, “when you open your heart to an audience, you share your deepest feelings with them. They want to find love in your heart. They don’t want to see that it is nothing but a bank vault.”(Nelson, 14)
Willie did not get much money or credit for his new hit songs, but their success motivated him to finally give Nashville a real shot. Willie wrote of the move, “When I went to Nashville in 1960 as a young songwriter with ambition to be a singer, it was because Nashville was where the store was. If I had anything to sell, it must be taken to the store. Nashville, New York, and L.A were the big stores. There was hardly any examine for me or my music outside of Texas, and I knew if I was going to be recognized widely I would have to earn it in Nashville.”(Nelson, 140) Willie left his family behind in Texas and headed to Nashville.
Fame and fortune did not come easy for him there. Tompall Glaser, a successful Nashville songwriter and producer said of Willie: “When I first met Willie at the Grand Ole Opry in the early sixties, it was a very frustrating period for our business. Nearly everybody realized how safe Willie was, but he people who ran the music industry in Nashville would honest keep saying, “Well, I don’t know if Willie is country or not. Is Willie country? Because if he ain’t country, then this stuff he sings won’t get played on the country music stations. If he don’t get played on the country music stations, he won’t make no money for us. And if he don’t earn money for us, the hell with Willie Nelson. Who needs him? “(Nelson, 228) Again, Nashville’s stereotyping prevented the creative cream from rising.
Willie’s attitude offered a firm counter to his lukewarm Nashville welcome, and he eventually received a recording contract “by perseverance, determination, sincerity, devotion, dedication, tenacity, willpower, self-assertion, firmness of spirit, ruthlessness when necessary, obstinacy, even selfishness. In other words, “Fuck ‘em if they don’t know its valid…Being true to the heart of your own self puts you way ahead of the game no matter who thinks they’re keeping score.” (Nelson, 136) Willie made it big by retaining his sense of self and maintaining all along his flawed, Texas hillbilly exterior.
Willie still ran into problems tantalizing his looks, which steadily evolved from basic redneck to decidedly hippie-cowboy. As show promoter Larry Trader noted, “it wasn’t all that easy to book Willie in the late sixties and early seventies, particularly after he grew his hair long and wore and earring. People were timid to death of him. Club owners would say, ‘we love Willie, but we can’t hire a guy with long hair and tennis shoes.’”(Nelson, 186) Eventually, the club owners, along with the rest of the country & western industry, relented; Willie didn’t.
“One thing I’ve learned about Johnny is that you don’t tell him what song to sing.”
-President Richard Nixon (Cash, 286)
Johnny Cash was born into a poor cotton farming family in Kingsland, Arkansas on February 26, 1932. As soon as he was physically able, he began picking cotton and working other chores around the farm. From a very early age, Johnny was enthralled by the music he heard over his family’s radio, his only way of hearing new music. In fact, the pop, blues, and gospel he was listening to on the radio “became the best thing” in his life. (Cash, 68) His father downhearted Johnny’s obsession with radio music, telling him “you’ll never do any good as long as you’ve got that music on your mind.”(Cash, 69) Johnny’s mother, however, was musically inclined and had faith in his talent. She took on extra work to pay for singing lessons, each of which cost her a whole days work.
During Johnny’s third lesson, his teacher made him sing to her without accompaniment, in his own style. He sang her a Hank Williams song and when he was through, she said, “Don’t ever choose voice lessons again. Don’t let me or anybody change the way you instruct.” Then she sent him home. (Cash, 72)
This series of events apparently influenced Cash’s masculinity, as he would spend much of his career disregard the advice of the patrician Nashville producers and making his music his own way.
When Cash reached legal age, he had a hard time finding work outside of the cotton field. He briefly worked at an auto factory in Michigan, before enlisting in the Air Force as a radio intercept operator. He was stationed in Germany for three years, where he bought his first guitar and began fooling around with a tape recorder he bought at the Post Exchange. When he returned to Arkansas in1954 after his four-year enlistment was up, he moved to Memphis and took a job as a door-to-door appliance salesman. He was a terrible salesman, but his boss saw his music potential and sponsored fifteen-minute radio segments during which Johnny would sing and plug “Home Equipment Company.”(Cash, 94)
While stardom was a tall mountain to climb for Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash gained his much easier and earlier in life. Cash was seemingly at the right set at the right time to get his voice and songs recognized:
“In the mid-1950s, in Memphis, 200 miles west of Nashville another very lively and very different musical hybrid was alchemizing out of the seemingly disparate forces of country music, bluegrass, hillbilly boogie, and old-time blues. This was music that had little or nothing to do with mainstream Nashville, yet which would indelibly change the face of country and pop music alike and soon give rise to the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. This strange, wild new music was called rockabilly, and its most interested acolytes were young Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins.” (Allen, 178)
The main catalyst for this Memphis uprising was Sam Phillips, owner of independent record label Sun records who, Cash wrote, “always encouraged me to do it my design, to use whatever other influences I wanted, but never to copy. That was a great, rare gift he gave me: belief in myself, right from the start of my recording career.” (Cash, 107) Thus, at the commence of his career Johnny Cash was allowed to express himself and his rough masculinity in his own way, and he was highly successful. Johnny had some of his biggest hits with Sun Records with his rockabilly sound, however when Sam Phillips refused to allow Cash to record a gospel album, he decided to leave the label and signed with Columbia Records in Nashville. Cash insisted that his move was not motivated by money, saying, “I’m thankful that money is not my god, that for me it’s a means to an end.”
In Nashville, Johnny sensed that he was viewed was an outsider: “Some people were suspicious of me, since I was one of those rockabillies from Memphis.”(Cash, 379) This didn’t stop him from experiencing huge commercial success through most of the sixties. His career took a downward swing when he became addicted to amphetamines. During the height of his addiction, Cash became dangerously hyper-masculine, acting with a near total disregard for his career. He crashed every car he had in those days, high on a concoction of pills and booze (Cash, 223). Publicly, his addiction came to a head when during a guest appearance at the Colossal Ole Opry he broke all the footlights with his microphone stand, creating a spacious controversy amongst the conservative Nashville audience and earning him banishment from the biggest stage in country music (Cash, 224).
When Cash sobered up, he had a hard time regaining Nashville’s approval, feeling the “cold wind of exclusion blowing” his way. “The ‘country’ music establishment, including ‘country’ radio and the ‘Country’ Music Association, does after all seem to have decided that whatever ‘country’ is, some of us aren’t.”(Cash, 17) Cash was convinced by Columbia to make an album, John R. Cash, that he did not contain in. The music for the album had been pre-recorded by studio musicians in Original York City, and Johnny just sang over the tracks. “I wasn’t pleased with either the process or the results, so I decided I wouldn’t do any kind of thing again-that is, I would never design any more music I didn’t want to originate. I’d never just cave the plan I did on John R. Cash.”(Cash, 337) Cash’s rebellious masculinity was coming back strong.
In the late 1960s, Johnny decided to play prison concerts, a move that was viewed as very rude class by the Nashville executives of the time. Cash followed his creative heart, knowing “My own version of my music’s success or failure is a little different from that prevalent in ‘the industry.’”(Cash, 263) From this era came his signature song, “The Man in Black,” in which he expressed his own, self-suited idea of manhood:
“The Man In Black”
Well, you wonder why I always dress in dark,
Why you never see intelligent colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through esteem and charity,
Why, you’d think He’s talking straight to you and me.
Well, we’re doin’ considerable fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin’ cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought ‘a be a Man In Shadowy.
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred exquisite young men.
And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen’ that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen’ that we all were on their side.
Well, there’s things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin’ everywhere you go,
But ’til we start to make a move to produce a few things right,
You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.
Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything’s OK,
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.
-John R. Cash, © 1971 House of Cash, Inc.
The important idea of this song is not what the color black represents, but rather Cash’s perception of his believe duties as a man in society. Cash said of his black attire, “it means something to me. It’s still my symbol of rebellion – against a stagnant plot quo, against our hypocritical houses of god, against people whose minds are closed to others ideas.”(Cash, 86) This is Cash’s ultimate protest song, calling for the righting of wrongs and recognizing the plight of the of the Vietnam War soldiers. Even if he was not wearing gloomy, he would still the “The Man.”
The Change of the Guard: Mainstream goes Outlaw
Both Nelson and Cash have had experienced international fame beyond that of their conformist peers. They did not finish this by singing the prettiest songs or by cowering to the music industry residence quo. In fact, their style of “do what you want to do” rugged masculinity proved to be just as stable a marketing tool that the domesticated cowboy in a fancy suit that Nashville pushed on the country music audience in the 1950s and 1960s.
Johnny Cash found it “ironic that it was a prison concert with me and the convicts getting along just as fellow rebels, outsiders, and miscreants should, that pumped up my marketability to the point that ABC view I was respectable enough to have a weekly network TV show.”(Cash, 271)
The “Outlaw” country movement was the culmination of rebellious efforts by country singers who would not sacrifice their manhood to the altar of profits. According to Cash, “country Music changed a lot in the 1970s, beginning with the Outlaw movement, a kind of revolution by Nashville’s most creative people … I was never publicly identified with the Outlaw movement, though in both spirit and practice I was closely aligned.”(Cash, 338) Although Cash was not an official “Outlaw” in the early 1970s, his style had an do upon many outlaw artists such as Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, JR., and Waylon Jennings. The rockabilly spirit that Cash helped form was a definite force in the movement. Cash eventually participated in the outlaw quartet, The Highwaymen, with Nelson, Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson.
The popular success of the Outlaws enabled them to change Nashville’s monopolistic business practices that stifled creativity and withheld monetary reward from the artists. “By 1975, Nelson had signed a new distributions deal with Columbia/Nashville, which enabled him to record his own lone star label with complete artistic autonomy.” (Allen, 216) “It really took the Outlaws to break through Nashville’s country-pop gridlock. What artist like Jennings, Nelson, and Hank Williams, Jr. were really fighting for, was something that most rock artists had long been taking for granted: artistic autonomy. That is, the right to produce their own records, to write (or at least choose) their own material, to pick their own studio personnel, and to basically chart their own musical courses. Ironically, these were the sort of decisions that in country music had traditionally been reserved for the producer, rather than the artist.). In short, they were fighting for their own imaginations, as opposed to the purblind musical agenda foisted on them by some second-rate record company-appointed producer.” (Allen, 214)
Country & western music endured many changes in the 20th century. As people moved from farms to cities early genres of rural music, such as hillbilly, honky-tonk, gospel, bluegrass, and folk were blended with pop sounds and mass-marketed to the new suburban middle-class. Part of this marketing effort was to restrict artistry to a highly innocuous standard. This practice led to the patently fabricated “country gentleman” image of domestic masculinity that Nashville forced upon male country performers in an exertion to maximize profits over artistic integrity.
During the 1950s and 1960s, artists such as Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash succeeded despite their refusal to kowtow to the diminished depiction of manhood demanded by the recording industry. Thanks to the stubborn self-belief and self-reliance of these legal “country folk,” an authentic model of manhood infused mainstream country & western music. By the 1970’s the “Outlaw” country representation of masculinity, which was just to the artists’ nature, became highly popular and commercially viable.
Bibliography:
Primary Sources:
Cash, Johnny. Cash: The Autobiography (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1998); 432p.
Johnny Cash. The Sun Years (Rhino, 1990); Audio CD.
Nelson, Willie. Willie (New York, NY: Cooper Square Press, 2000); 368 pages.
Willie Nelson. The Essential Willie Nelson (Sony, 2003); Audio CD.
Stapp, Jack. Typescript speech from 1958 CMA Conference (Country Music Association Sales & Marketing Programs, 1958); 25 p.
Secondary Sources:
McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. A Boy Named Sue, Gender and Country Music(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); xxiv, 232 p.
Malone, Bill. Southern Music American Music(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); x, 203 p.
Allen, Bob. The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Country Music(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994); viii, 411 p.
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Filed under Monopoly Bankruptcy by on Mar 14th, 2011. Comment.
Understanding economists is where this discussion has to commence. There are more than one kind of economist. Economists set specific values in space before drawing their charts. These preconceived values they plug into their formulas always determine the outcome. Some schools of economists believe that social or religious beliefs are the core values to plug in and other schools believe that profit margins or businesses is really what matters. This is why people are so confused when economists become expert witnesses on televsion and contradict each other. Almost everyone knows it is best to ignore the economic forecasts of all economists or they should.
The issue of the government needing to completely regulate the financial industry gets to be very absurd even when it is pumped up as the best of ideas by some economists. The reason is sure. When financial derivatives and complex instruments like credit default swaps were developed virtually no one in any government agency knew what they were. Now after the fact the government is hungry to create jobs to regulate what they tranquil do not understand. The reason for complex instruments was primarily government regulations and specifically taxes and the need for credit grows in reaction to government produced inflation. Expectations of inflation helped remake the financial markets after the last grand government push into finance which yielded it’s own boom bust cycle. The great crash of 2008 was not devoid of government involvement and the US markets were the most regulated anywhere in the world.
Then the truth came out about Bernie Madoff . The SEC reviewed Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme several times and did not have a clue that he was running what others tried to tell the SEC was an obvious Ponzi intention. The government had all the regulatory power in the field and turned out to be absolutely useless!
This is why we need more regulation? With the social good economists having taken over the unpleasant news air in the news media these people are promising a new eden in finance. Then we get to look at the details and we spy that the government is already trying to grab control of the financial industry and turn it into a monopoly like the post office or otherwise give the biggest leaches on wall street an oligarchical monopoly. Either way we were reminded again recently that the US post office is completely broke. As expected the reason the government is trying to grab wall street is that it is broke. The clues are there to read because it is not unbiased the post office. The social entitlements like social security and Medicare are in dire straits and cannot necessarily be financed with the bubble of baby boomer’s all getting on the dole at once.
Is Obama and Geitner this shimmering to be thinking ahead about such things? No. They are not even addressing the obvious. Government debt borrowing is what gives us the clues we need to see that government is broke and in danger of reacting to that crisis by obliterating your rights to own private property of any kind. There are too many historic examples to ignore. The present Obama administration is acting more like Louis the 16th of France than Stalin. At least Stalin had slave labor. France was doing what the Obama administration seems to be building up the failed intuitions that should have been replaced. Pushed too far the American people will also go the way of a revolution. If the US Post office,Bankrupt king of the public private partnerships, that President Obama is telling us is how we want our financial system to be, watch out below!
The straight dope on financial banking and real capitalism: It will go on regardless of what monotonous regulations the government makes. It will move off shore. It will find away around dealing with government. Just because mutual funds were regulated did not prevent the invention of hedge funds! Hedge funds will now be regulated with Obama acting like they were doing something unjust and unreasonable in haughty condemnation. OK, so the government will take over hedge funds now and do the same thing they old to do because government resolves the sins by taking them over! It is a sin for anybody but immense government to make money in finance? Why are people taking president Obama seriously? He sounds like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela taking over first the oil industry and next everything else and saying his government and inner circle fiends are the ones who need to profit instead.
Same old story. But here in America?
Fair now the world governments have banded together to stop the abuses off off shore secret banking. The problem is they are already too late. The computer programming whizzes have already made it possible for a completely encrypted online financial banks to exist that no government agent can hack into. If someone can create a spot online like face books and become a billionaire just imagine what can secretly be created on wold computer networks. The whole world banking system has become an encrypted virtual reality. Bank insiders and others can totally abuse this system the way ordinary identity theft hackers can and worse. It can be systematic and it can be possible to have a secret bank account that is on the books of ordinary bank, government computers and corporations of any kind which will compose secret sage off shore banking a thing of the past. Probably already has. Government might not catch on for 30 years.
There are also predictions that people will abandon government money and start to take a virtual online currency more seriously. If you think that is crazy beware it took objective a few years for Internet banking to become very serious big business. By the time the government takes over the US financial system and over regulates their completion capitalism will be free and vigorous and either a gray or black market. My prediction is that the way the government is acting is that we can expect the US government to be more broke than our banks and the currency of the US to be trash. Buying into the fiction that government is fixing anything is popular now but reality is that if government is controlling the banks and creating double digit levels of inflation then the economy will be in even worse shape than ever imagined. Deflation and the temporary lack of credit will seem the better alternative. In the past the interest rates were in reaction to inflation if government controls the banks there is no way out of being decimated by government stealing one’s assets in their inflation. This happens in places like Buenos Aires, Mexico City pretty often. The US will not be a world financial capital when it happens here.
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Filed under Monopoly Bankruptcy by on Feb 26th, 2011. Comment.