Someone has removed videos, most of them being music videos, from the majority of blog posts from this, "Bane of My Existence." After a lot of careful thought, I've decided I concur with that action. My rationale for posting music videos was that they reflected the mood or theme of what I had written. I got that idea from watching such modern television classics as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Mad Men in which songs were used for that purpose.
But! There is one important difference between my blog and those shows. They paid for the use of that music. What? You think they dole out that shit for free? Take the episode of Mad Men in which Megan shared the Beatles' Revolver album with Don and told him to play "Tomorrow Never Knows." Matt Weiner and the team paid, like a gazillion dollars to use that. I mean, it was The Beatles for shit sake. This wasn't incense and peppermint crap, it was the foremost quartet of The Ages. So what kind of upstart do I think I am, inserting the Beatles, Stones or Sinatra? Sure I don't have the budget of a TV show produced on HBO, AMC or Showtime. I'm just a poor, struggling bastard with about five diehard fans.
But it doesn't matter.
Right is right and wrong is always wrong. If I was in violation of some copyright law, then it's only right that my (oh sorry, it was so arrogant of me to use that word, "my") videos be taken down. Removed. Prohibited. It's only the karma police, man. It's like my friend Kim who used to run a cafe where she occasionally featured live performances by musicians. But what if one of those musicians, in tuning their instruments, played a lick from Led Zeppelin? Uh-oh. That's when the copyright police come calling. "Well I guess I can't even sing Happy fuck'n birthday?" she said. That's right.
I rationalized my use of videos by saying, "Well, they're already on YouTube. And there's the capability to share videos on Blogger just as there is on Facebook and Twitter." But my silly, self-serving rationalizations don't matter. We should all respect authority and if some authoritarian force bars me from posting music on my site, it must serve a good purpose and like the 16th century philosopher Hobbes believed, authoritarian power is a good thing.
My point is the same principle applies to the unauthorized use of music videos. And when you get right down to it, does music matter that much anyway? It's not everything. You can have culture without it. Do I really need it to bolster my writing? You didn't see Charles Dickens sticking music with his voluminous 19th century collection of novels. Is music all that great anyway? I once dated a girl who didn't like music. Except country-pop princess Patsy Cline. She liked her. But that was where it started and stopped. She didn't need a bunch of ear candy for her sustenance. So as you can see, it's a good thing I've turned over a new leaf and committed to no longer sharing music. It ain't that great anyway.
Okay, you got me. April Fool. I may get five days in the stockade for this, but here they are -- Radiohead. And by the way, let's not everyone get stoned.
"Nobody Does it Better" -- Radiohead
