[lbo-talk] why Prince is right

[Carrol Cox]

Perhaps popular music will simply disappear and not be produced any
longer. The world  changes. I don't like change, but most of the posters
to this list do like it, so why shouldn't we just say, it was nice while
it lasted and forget about it. If you can sing and play, sing and play
for your neighbors and take up a collection. If some commercial interest
reallly needs popular music, let them figure out how to get it and pay
for it. Shag's "Fuck you, pay me," is neither an economic nor a
political statement; it is a moralistic  self-expression. 

Rock music has had nearly a 60 year run. That's not bad. Will the world
come to an end if no more rock music gets produced?

I think the problem you are wrestling with is that of superfluity, of
too much of everything. That has been gathering momentum for about 3 or
4 centuries. There have been various futile efforts to 'stop' it: the
Battle of the Ancients and Moderns; Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical
Ballads; Matthew Arnold's attempt to mark off the best that has been
thought and felt, coming up to a contemporary poet of my acquaintance
saying that the only modernists who he thought were much good were Mina
Loy & Elizabeth Bishop. No Yeats. No Frost. No Pound. No Stevens to
read.

Capitalism is unique among social systems in creating endless  & more or
less uncontrollable change (and in making the majority of people thin
that is a good thing). Newspapers, popular music, best sellers, thick
ad-rich magazines had a nice run of nearly a couple cneturies. I imagine
business enterprises will go on figuring out ways to make profits under
the new conditions and people will learn to live under them. So it goes.

Carrol