Work: Surviving the Arts

Exploring issues of sustainability in the arts.

~by Scott Pinkmountain

 

Don’t You Know Me?

 

 

“I’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done,” read the bottom of the plastic bin where I placed my cell phone, wallet, pen, gum, loose change, pocket lint as I passed through security at JFK airport this summer.

Actually, it said:

“I’ll be gone 500 miles when the days is done.”
– City of New Orleans, Arlo Guthrie

It was part of some quasi-inspirational marketing campaign by an unnamed outsourced agency trying to garner my affection for an international commercial transportation depot. Or something. Except instead of affection, it filled me with anger, sadness and defeat.

“City of New Orleans” is a song about a train. The chorus is written in the first-person voice of the train itself. It’s a song about America. It’s about the disappearing past. I like the song. It was not, as the plastic bin asserted, written by Arlo Guthrie, but by Steve Goodman, who died of leukemia at age 36. He was not famous. Arlo Guthrie, who recorded the best-known version of Goodman’s song, is.

This immediately implied one of two things. Either the marketing guy (you know he was a dude, approval-starved in his tomb-sized midtown doorless cubicle, wet-looking hair, leased Lexus, X-approaching-infinity thread count sheets, reptilian inclinations, borderline fraternity-personality) was so lazy and incurious as to not bother learning who actually wrote the song he quoted and had printed on 50,000 plastic security x-ray conveyor bins, or he knew precisely who wrote “City of New Orleans,” then made a conscious decision to disregard this information and incorrectly attribute the song, presumably because the more famous name of Arlo Guthrie would have greater “message resonance” or “cognitive payoff” or “brand saturation” or “passive internal stickiness” than some short Jew from Chicago who died in relative obscurity 30 years prior.[1]

Either scenario is condemnable and arguably kind of evil. So first I felt anger for Goodman being erased from the history of his own work. Then sadness for the state of the world where lack of fame and money equals your voice being extinguished. Then defeat, because there’s really nothing that can be done about this. Then I trudged onto an overcrowded, semi-sanitized airbus surrounded by corporates squeezing in their final texts, tweets, updates, posts and emails before we took off, and felt grief for the lost country that Steve Goodman memorialized in his song. Goodnight America, indeed.

 

But after time and distance, the greater takeaway for me is a freedom, a lightness.

Yes, on one level, this is about cultural theft, appropriation, how the winners – or the ones with the more powerful copyright lawyers (i.e., the rich) – get to write and re-write history. They get to control other people’s messages. They get to benefit from association to the labor of those who sometimes reaped little to no benefit from that labor in the first place. Or even if those makers did get paid or received attention for their original work, it’s now used to sell orange-colored soda (“Good Vibrations,” Brian Wilson), luxury cruise packages (“Lust for Life, Iggy Pop), or lifestyle accoutrement vehicles (“Pink Moon,” Nick Drake). One of the most egregious appropriations I’m aware of is the use of Janis Joplin’s ironic anti-materialist spiritual blues, “Oh Lord Won’t You Buy Me A Mercedes-Benz,” to shill the titular automotive. The meaning of the song – which is the last thing Joplin recorded, just a few days before she died, as in, it was her final statement on this plane of existence – is not just steamrolled, but directly inverted in the ad turning it into a “sincere” plea for god to deliver the goods.

The freedom I speak of feeling comes from recognizing how absurd it is to be concerned for even one second about what happens with my work (or with anything, really) after I’m dead. The acceptance of this absurdity can make me more conscientious about what I do while I’m living, both with my own art, and respecting that of others. I don’t know which of my artist friends is going to be heralded for their work or totally disrespected after they die, so I should give proper respect to their work while they’re still around. Likewise, I don’t know who that guy or gal in front of me on line at the supermarket is. They may be a future or past MacArthur winner, and not just the painfully slow coupon cutter who still can’t figure out ubiquitous digital payment processes. If I assume that the bland stranger beside me on the airbus is a far better artist than I will ever be, then maybe I can learn something from them?

And as for my own work, I get the freedom to not care what happens to it. I don’t overtly think about the post-mortem perception and use of my own work, and I often say that what matters to me is making work in my lifetime and being present for its consumption and reception. But my reaction to this dubious appropriation of Goodman’s song made me realize that I care about the issue in general, as a matter of fairness. Getting upset about things being unfair, while perhaps righteous and noble, does little to change the world. I suppose it’s a start.

Che Guevara set out to change the world, and maybe he did, but now he is a t-shirt.

My getting upset about what I deem misappropriations of a dead person’s life’s work is ultimately just about me, my relationship to that work, and my perception (projection) of that person’s values. Maybe Janis would have gotten a kick out of her song being used by Mercedes-Benz? Maybe she believed that the power of her music would ultimately cut through and undermine Mercedes’ attempt at co-opting it? Maybe Steve Goodman would have been overjoyed to know that the message of his song was reaching thousands of travelers a day, regardless of whether they knew who really wrote it? Maybe he wasn’t as big an egoist as my indignation forces me to realize I am? In 1975, the television show, Good Morning America, took its name from the chorus of “City of New Orleans.” I was unable to find evidence of an angry lawsuit on Goodman’s part.

Someone recently drew my attention to this heinous cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars,” by Madonna. I connected to Elliott Smith’s music. That is an extreme understatement. I know people who knew him, and have picked their brains extensively, abusively. This is to say, I’m pretty sure Smith would have been grossed out big time by Madonna’s shtick. Which is really to say, I, and everyone else – even his close friends – have no clue what Elliott Smith “truly” thought or felt, and even less of a clue how that might have changed over time. Forty-five years after Bob Dylan started making records, he suddenly came around and let someone use his music in underpants ads.

If the Elliott Smith estate had the money or wherewithal to be controlling and protective like the Charles Ives or John Cage estates – it could go around shutting this kind of shit down, but even that has its limitations. It’s still people, other than the artist, deciding what the artist would have liked to happen with their work, which, who knows other than that artist, and even he doesn’t know, since he’s (hopefully) going to change some of his thinking over the course of his lifetime. Even my partner, the most invested, best-intentioned person in my life toward me, is going to get my innermost thoughts and desires wrong from time to time. Why would I imagine that someday an employee born many years after my death working at a foundation created by my heirs would better serve my intentions?

So again, the point here being, I don’t ever need to worry about posterity, I just need to worry about making work today.

If I’m going to think about the future at all, it should in the context of examining my thought for any traces of present-centric biases and ridding them from my work. This is less about concern of how I’ll look to the future, and more about my responsibility to the world to contribute something with the potential to positively affect people’s lives. If I step back and try to view my work from the future, then I can maybe scour it of some of its unconscious assumptions, its inherent prejudices, whatever accepted lazy vernacular of oppression has embedded itself into our collective daily fabric. So much historic work, even much of what we consider great, contains ignorance, hypocrisy, stereotypical reductions from our current perspective. We like to believe we’re beyond that now, but of course there’s further to go to rid our culture, our ingrained beliefs, our very linguistic systems of oppression, ugliness and plain stupidity.

Maybe some glib jokey aside I made about tribal tattoos and blown out earlobes – or Lexus driving ad-men – will seem glaringly narrow-minded of me in the future. I’m fairly certain it will, actually. Rather than be concerned about how it will reflect on me as a person in the future, I can be concerned with not putting that kind of negativity into the world in the first place, regardless of who it’s attributed to after I’m dead.

If I’m standing at the security check point, fuming about the injustice of it all, scanning for someone I can register a complaint with, and the mercenary derivatives trader behind me in line picks up that plastic bin, starts whistling Steve Goodman’s song and heads to his gate in a slightly improved mood, then it’s obvious I’m the one with the problem here.