Bands That Don’t Exist

This is, I think, one of the most puzzling images in any music video. It’s hard to think of any two bands more different in philosophy between Bauhaus and 1980s CE Chicago. It could be seen as a representation that it’s all just marketing and everything is vapid posturing, just for listeners with different musical tastes. There’s bound to be a lot of tension between artists and the companies they’re in contract to (I almost wrote “in contrast to” there, which almost makes more sense). Nevertheless, on being confronted with this image of Peter Cetera of Chicago in the mid-’80s video ‘You’re The Inspiration’ wearing a Bauhaus T-shirt. Bauhaus is a highly pretentious and pseudo-intellectual semi-Gothic art rock band, of which every member was an art student, and it very much shows. I had a conversation in about ’85 about Bauhaus once with someone who despised ‘The Sky’s Gone Out’ because he thought they’d “lost it” by then and any fans staying after that were obviously sell-outs. This is the usual thing one used to hear from hard core fans of particular groups. Well, I did like ‘The Sky’s Gone Out’. It’s one of the few albums I bought for myself and I don’t actually care much about whether it makes me pretentious and pseudointellectual because opinions like that are just power games. Chicago, by the point it made that particular track, seems to have become a completely different band as a result of the success of ‘If You Leave Me Now’. I have been known to enjoy later Chicago and the only earlier track I’m even aware of is ’25 Or 6 To 4′, which is also fine but sounds like it was recorded by someone else. I even liked Five Star at one point, which appalled a certain friend of mine. I’m not a musician. I actually used to put a lot of effort into not being one but nowadays it coasts along on its own momentum. This means I’m always commenting on this as an outsider. People who have actually been in bands might look at this differently.

I actually think it does make sense that Peter Cetera wore that T-shirt. It can be looked at two ways. The worse one is the one I suggested above. The other is that he may have lost control of the creative process and admired Bauhaus for not having done so. He wanted Chicago to be like them, not in terms of style or image but in actually having their own vision and originality. It’s similar to the artist formerly known as Prince writing “SLAVE” on his cheek as a protest against his record label, though possibly not as confrontational. I’d be interested in knowing if there’s anything on record about why he did it. There is a sense, though, in which Chicago had become a fake band at this point. Chicago as it had been known had ceased to exist in about 1976. I’m guessing, because I’m not that familiar with Chicago in any form.

Chicago and Bauhaus were also opposite poles in another way. Bauhaus had fairly recently “sold out” in some fans’ opinions, or at least that bloke’s talking to me at a party, but they could still be seen as cool, but Chicago had either sold out or been sold out almost a decade previously. Any cool era they might’ve had was over by the time this guy was about eight or nine, so in a sense they were as dead as disco. Chicago in particular can be seen as a particular example of a category of bands which didn’t exist by that point. This made me wonder which categories of non-existent bands there are. Some of them might be in more than one, and there seem to be about eight of them.

Category I: Chicago

The first category I’m going to call Chicago. It probably also applies to some extent to Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship and Starship. Bands in this category have in some sense lost their way due to commercial pressure. It’s unclear if they found success and decided to exploit it themselves, their contract has coerced them into it or the record company has persuaded them to move in that direction. In some respect, then, the band has ceased to exist in its original form even if the personnel are unchanged. In Starship’s case of course, there was also quite a big shift. It might be fair to look at this process as the band trying to look after its future financial security.

Category II: Starship of Theseus

Starship went through a different process as well, which is another way in which a band can cease to exist, and I’ll call this the Starship of Theseus. I’m not going to pass judgement here because, as I say, I’m no expert, but as I understand it, Jefferson Airplane were a psychedelic rock band founded in 1965 with a lineup of up to eight members in the first year after their formation but actually probably six. There was then a lineup of six, some of whom were new, lasting for four years. This was followed by some changes, but two people, Jorma Kaukonen and Paul Kantner, were in the band throughout their history up until at least mid-1972. Of these people, seven reunited in ’89. Then there’s Jefferson Starship, formed in ’74 by six former members of Jefferson Airplane and a seventh the year after. This band persisted until in ’84 the last original member left, at which point the event widely agreed to be outrageous and horrific by original fans took place. Kantner, one of the founding members, left on the grounds that the music had gone in the wrong direction and now had nothing in common with its original style or vision, there was a legal case which resulted in the removal of the word “Jefferson” from the band’s name and the new incarnation became Starship. A new band called ‘Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation’ was founded in 1992. A number of other things went on, including a drunken rant on stage, a lawsuit beginning in the ’60s and ending in ’87, and a car accident. The whole process is like a wave, with no component parts persisting but nonetheless appearing to hold together in some sense and still being identifiable as a kind of movement. A lot of it in this case isn’t pretty and it also spawns a number of other bands.

Black Sabbath are somewhat similar, but one member, Tommy Iommi, was in it throughout. As far as I can tell, Yes are another example but I may be wrong, and some of the members have been in and out of it.

Category III: Small Core + Session Musicians

This is probably the first one I noticed and found rather disillusioning. A good example of this is The The. Although they did apparently spend some time as a band, most of the time they were just Matt Johnson plus session musicians hired for individual tracks or albums. By the time they actually became a genuine band, I’d moved on from being interested in them as they are very much a teenage angst plus progressive politics band and although I didn’t lose the second I did lose the first. There’s also a small pattern here because the Eels are similar. E, also known as Mark Oliver Everett, who I have to mention is also the son of the person who came up with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, is the core of the Eels and everyone else is a session musician. Their mood is oddly similar to The The although their style is quite different, making me wonder if as people Matt Johnson and E are insufferable or individualistic in a way which accords with their ideas and creative process. Another example seems to be The Fall, whose Mark E Smith is the central member. Then there’s Steely Dan, who were Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, again with session musicians. In a way this category is an accelerated version of the Starship of Theseus.

Category IV: Manufactured Bands

It’s easy to identify examples of these, although there can be different degrees of honesty involved. Category III bands are not always obvious but can be found out easily simply by reading record sleeves and noting the absence of any persistent lineup. These are more subtle, and include The Monkees, The Archies and The Partridge Family. This can also have degrees of honesty to it. The three I’ve just mentioned are from the same era and were tied closely into television shows. The Monkees in particular seemed to escape from and transcend their origins. Another example, though, is Milli Vanilli, speaking of whom these are a successor to Boney M. Both were created by the same German producer and did not form organically. The former in particular are infamous for being accidentally absent from stage while their music played on one occasion. As I understand it, the Spice Girls are similar. There’s also the phenomenon of bands apparently being assembled via contests. I’m not sure how authentic these are.

Category V: Performance Personae

This is sometimes a source of confusion for fans or the public. It’s where an artist or band creates another apparent band which is actually an alternate persona for it. Two similar examples are XTC’s Dukes Of Stratosfear, purporting to be a rediscovered psychedelic band from the ’60s, and Blur’s Gorillaz, which to me brings The Archies to mind more than anything else and is a cartoon band with graphics somewhat similar to the Bored Ape NFTs. Also in this category I’d place David Bowie along with Ziggy Stardust and to a lesser extent his Thin White Duke persona. Bowie also created a band around himself called Tin Machine which was genuine and similar to Wings in connection to Paul McCartney. Another thing about Bowie is that he previously shared a name with “Davy” Jones of the Monkees. In connection with this phenomenon, there were formerly two Tom Robinsons, one of whom changed his name to Thomas Dolby after an agreement with the other one when he had his first hit ‘2-4-6-8-Motorway’. Getting back to Bowie, some fans believed that Ziggy Stardust’s farewell was actually his own. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band probably fits here too.

Category VI: Entirely Fictitious Bands

There are also degrees of this. These are quite straightforward, at least initially: they start out as completely fictitious bands in fictional stories. They may or may not stay that way. Examples here are Bang Bang from Aldiss’s ‘Brothers Of The Head’, Frozen Gold from Iain Banks’s ‘Espedair Street’, Sex Bo-Bomb of ‘Scott Pilgrim’, Daisy Jones And The Six from the eponymous TV series, Bad News from ‘The Comic Strip Presents’ and of course Spinal Tap of ‘This Is Spinal Tap’. There are some more more nebulous examples, but before I get to those it’s worth noting that simply because the bands don’t exist and even start off well-known without any real music, this often changes. Bang Bang, Frozen Gold and Sex Bo-Bomb all started off in print media without any audible presence except possibly in the mind of the reader. I actually did have some kind of audio image of the first two, thinking of Bang Bang as kind of punk and Frozen Gold as prog rock, which seems to be what the latter is actually supposed to be, but both of these did eventually get kind of realised in the form of a small independent film in the former case and a Radio 4 drama serial in the latter, presented as a documentary, and neither of them sounded anything like how I’d imagined them. Sex Bo-Bomb would probably have fallen into the same category had I come across them before the movie. The others are all screen-based live action productions and therefore their music came to exist, from a public perspective, simultaneously with the bands being introduced. Disaster Area just about exist, but don’t sound anything like they’re supposed to.

There’s a sub-category here, of fictional bands you never actually hear at all. There’s Douglas Adams’s other made-up band Pugilism And The Third Autistic Cuckoo, which at least has one line of lyrics, and the list of bands in the film version of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which includes Goggly Gogol and – well, here’s the full list:
Heaven Seventeen

Johnny Zhivago

The Humpers

The Sparks

The Legend

The Blow Goes

Bread Brothers 

Cyclops

The Comic Strips

Goggly Gogol

Some of these exist without the “the” (see what I did there?). Heaven 17 is the most successful band deliberately named after the fictitious one in the film, but others either existed at the time or came into existence later. Johnny Zhivago, an obviously Anthony Burgess-inspired name, was formed in the late ’90s in Australia. The others with real world counterparts are (the) Sparks, which seems to have existed already but perhaps not, (the) Legend, which is simply a probable name for a band and has been used by at least four different ones of different genres and The Humpers was also later a real band, probably inspired by the film again. I think Heaven 17 probably started this process and two of the others copied them. The others seem to have remained fictitious although to me, the Blow Goes and the Comic Strips sound like punk bands, Cyclops prog, heavy or soft metal, Bread Brothers sounds like a possible late-’60s or early-’70s band and Goggly Gogol, again quite Burgessy, is probably just not a very good name.

Rather gratifyingly, there’s an online Rocklopedia Fakebandica which lists a large number of such bands. I don’t know how many of them have real music associated with them.

Category VII – Bands Which Reinvented Themselves

There are quite a number of bands which have completely changed their style, often in an attempt to keep up with trends. Wham’s first two tracks were nothing like their subsequent output, but I think George Michael is probably a victim of his recording company. Apparently the Beach Boys tried and failed to do this at some point. Other examples are Sweet, The Damned (to some extent) and the Bee Gees. It seems to be particularly associated with disco when this happens. Some ELO fans say this happened with ‘Discovery’. Genesis has also changed quite dramatically. I’m not sure this really belongs here, but I’m mentioning it for completeness.

Category VIII – T-Shirt Bands

To be honest, I’m not sure this category even exists but just as there are, for instance, Nirvana T-shirts, I can equally believe that there could be fake logos for bands on T-shirts and even posters. If this doesn’t exist, maybe it should be invented.

Finally, there’s the fake Fleetwood Mac, which feels like it doesn’t fit in anywhere else.

There may be other categories, but those are the ones which came to mind so far. Feel free to mention others.

It might in fact be questionable to accept the very existence of real bands. They’re created by the artists and studios after all and may not be real at all. Beyond the realm of pop music usually, there exist orchestras and marching bands, colliery bands, choirs and the like, whose constitution is not centred on individual members at all, and given that it seems peculiar to get hung up on membership within it.

I feel like all this is about a kind of tug of war going on between commercialism and creativity, and that maybe it could be more widely applied, but this is all I’ve got so far. I have the system, the thought that it might be transferable to a different context, but nothing more at the moment.

Android Warehouse

I don’t do fandom properly. Although I’m keen on Steely Dan, and have to a limited extent been for a long time, having liked their singles since the mid-1970s CE, I didn’t really get into them until I was with Sarada, who has a couple of their albums. I was puzzled by Fagen’s ‘I.G.Y.’ and irritated by its apparent optimism, because it seemed so inappropriate for 1982. However, this post is not specifically about the band, although it partly is. It’s also about William Gibson, the Metaverse and NFTs, and ultimately about what could be a coming dystopia, or it might be nothing, I don’t know

So let’s start with:

Steely Dan

Steely Dan are effectively a duo with a load of session musicians, now defunct due to Walter Becker’s death, the other member being Donald Fagen. My brother holds them in complete contempt, possibly because he has better taste than I. There’s a lot to be said about “The Dan”, most of which I won’t be going into here. I’d say they were characterised by cynicism, obsessively high-quality production, a theme of sleaze focussing particularly on incest and child abuse, but also on the criminal underworld and science fiction. They also have this odd habit of name-dropping, as if they’re on the inside and the listener is looking in from some kind of outer darkness which I suspect is illusory, but I can’t be sure. They’re also quite pretentious. But today I want to focus on their early stuff, which tended to sound like Crosby, Stills and Nash, in particular two tracks: ‘Android Warehouse’ and ‘The Caves Of Altamira’.

I’ll start with the second.

I recall when I was small
How I spent my days alone
The busy world was not for me
So I went and found my own
I would climb the garden wall
With a candle in my hand
I’d hide inside a hall of rock and sand
On the stone an ancient hand
In a faded yellow-green
Made alive a worldly wonder
Often told but never seen
Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I

[Chorus]
Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn’t even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood

Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same
A wooly man without a face
And a beast without a name
Nothin’ here but history
Can you see what has been done
Memory rush over me
Now I step into the sun

[Chorus]

Many years had come and gone and many miles between,

Through it all I found my way by the light of what I’d seen,

On the road as I returned was a green and yellow sign saying ‘see the way it used to be. . .”

And I took my place in line,

Could I believe the sad design could be the very same?

A wooly man without a name and a beast without a name . . .

(The block editor has screwed me here).

The actual caves of Altamira are an archæological site in modern-day Spain into which a girl once crept and rediscovered cave paintings of bulls. The last verse, with the messed-up layout, is omitted in most versions but casts a different light on the same experience. Steely Dan have said that the song itself is about the loss of innocence, presumably of both Palæolithic humanity and the girl in question.

The odd thing about the last verse is that it can also be sung using the tune for ‘Android Warehouse’, which is particularly interesting because for some reason ‘The Caves Of Altamira’ is often used as a title for the other song. There’s clearly a tale to be told here but I don’t know what it is.

The really enigmatic song, though, is ‘Android Warehouse’ itself, whose lyrics go as follows:

Daytime you’re to proud to brag

About the badge you wore

Nighttime you’re to tired to drive

Your change across the floor

All your guns are gone I’m told

Or in the Aerodrome

Did you die the day they sold

The ones you left at home

Hold my hand in the Android Warehouse

Who’s to know if you take a dive

Ain’t life grand in the Android Warehouse

What a burner when you take off your goggles and find?

That you’re alive

That you’re alive

Did you really gobble up

The things they claimed you ate

Were you fit to swallow it

Or scared to clean your plate

Have you tried to calculate

The hours they’d applaud

I would guess it’s somewhat less

For just another fraud

Hold my hand in the Android Warehouse

Who’s to know if you take a dive

Ain’t life grand in the Android Warehouse

What a burner when you take off your goggles and find…

That you’re alive

That you’re alive

That you’re alive…

This was written some time between 1968 and 1971. I should point out that I have a very strong tendency to read meanings into lyrics and texts generally which are unique to myself. As Al Stewart once said:

And some of you are harmonies to all the notes I play
Although we may not meet still you know me well
While others talk in secret keys and transpose all I say
And nothing I do or try can get through the spell.

Steely Dan lend themselves much more to this than many other bands though. Even so, I find ‘Android Warehouse’ to be particularly startling. It’s said that the band itself were actually going to be named Android Warehouse at one point, so it seems to be more than just another song. The crucial lines for me are:

Ain’t life grand in the Android Warehouse
What a burner when you take off your goggles and find?
That you’re alive
So then: imagine an android warehouse. A place where physically inactive humanoid mechanical bodies are stacked up. And they’re all wearing goggles. Are they seeing anything through those goggles? If they take them off, they discover they aren’t androids after all, but are alive, and this shock burns them.

Does this remind you of anything?

Now the idea of the Matrix does seriously pre-date both Keanu Reeves and Steely Dan. It dates back to Indian ideas of Maya and the Western Gnostic tradition. But the idea that it was controlled by a giant machine or collection of machines is somewhat newer. It connects to Cyberspace. Note the capital.

I think ‘Android Warehouse’ is about the dehumanising effect of living in virtual reality as a metaphor for modern life in the industrialised world, and that the metaphor is quite vividly developed. In 1971 at the latest. This might be thought of as mere coincidence and reading meaning into things which aren’t there. The only thing is, Steely Dan were fans of a certain author.

William Gibson

Gibson invented cyberpunk, and I was there at the birth. As I mentioned in 1982, that year was the only one I read the magazine OMNI in, and the July edition saw the first publication of his short story ‘Burning Chrome’, which contains the first occurrence of the word “cyberspace”. Google ngrams shows the following:

“Cyberspace” is a heck of a lot more popular than “cyberpunk”. Cyberspace was originally a hacked computer called the Cyberspace 7, used to access a VR-represented version of the internet. It’s also known, to Gibson himself, as the “matrix”, described as a consensual hallucination. Its foundations look like the classic wireframe plane of squares as seen in countless CGI renderings from the 1970s, and it subjectively develops out of the phosphenes a sighted person experiences when she closes her eyes in darkness. Megacorp and military sites look like the coloured polyhedra familiar from high-end raster scan graphics of the time. There’s also ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, which are arranged as “ICE walls” to protect data in the same way as fire walls now are in what might be called the real world. This includes “Black ICE”, which causes fatal seizures. Black ICE is a precursor of the later concept of David Langford’s Basilisk, an image which crashes the human mind fatally, but that wasn’t arrived at until his story ‘Blit’ in 1988.

The Sprawl universe defines cyberpunk, and was in its turn influenced by ‘Blade Runner’, which came out the same year as ‘Burning Chrome’. The basic features of the sub-genre consist of a dystopian computerised world which many people choose to escape by living in virtual reality. The central characters are usually marginalised poor people forced to live on the edge of society. There is a strong Japanese influence on the culture and the US has collapsed but the Soviet Union hasn’t. The Sprawl itself is a thousand-mile long conurbation stretching all the way from Boston to Atlanta. ‘Blade Runner’ seems to posit a second megacity on the west coast of the former US, and I use the word “Megacity” advisèdly as Judge Dredd’s Megacity One is quite similar and seems to be one inspiration for it. The film version of ‘Minority Report’ is set in the Sprawl too. It’s very common. The use of the word “punk” is clearly inherited from the then very recent punk movements of Europe and America.

The Sprawl trilogy contains numerous references to Steely Dan. For instance, there are bars called ‘The Gentleman Loser’ (from Midnite Cruiser) and ‘Here At The Western World’, a love interest called Rikki (Rikki Don’t Lose That Number) and Razor Girls (as in ‘Razor Boy’). Steely Dan is pervasive in the Sprawl, and Gibson has himself written about them. There are characters called Klaus and the Rooster (Here At The Western World). The general atmosphere of their music and Gibson’s fiction is the same. Incidentally, I fully acknowledge the influence of William Burroughs on both, but I’m not as familiar with him as the other two.

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t stretch my credulity at all to see the song ‘Android Warehouse’ as the inspiration for cyberspace. If that’s true, Steely Dan’s impact on the world is largely obscure but absolutely enormous.

The Metaverse

“Metaverse” is a word with a history. It wasn’t coined by Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg, but by Neal Stephenson in his book ‘Snow Crash’, which I haven’t read. I could at this point post a spoiler warning for ‘Snow Crash’ even though I haven’t read it, but the problem with that is that unfortunately the real world of the 2020s is a spoiler for the novel. I do not know what possessed the people who name Facebook stuff to use the word for this, because its connotations are absolutely appalling read in context. It looks like a sick in-joke.

‘Snow Crash’ is a cyberpunk novel published in 1992. Snow Crash itself is a basilisk in Langford’s sense. It’s a computer virus which can infect and destroy hackers’ minds. Although this might not sound very original given Gibson and Langford, the novel scores on being remarkably prescient. It popularised the term “avatar” in the online sense. Second Life has an annual reënactment of the novel because its existence was inspired by one of the main ideas and settings of the story: the Metaverse. This takes the form of a virtual world comprising a featureless black planet bisected by a road 65 536 kilometres long accessible via VR goggles or cheaper black and white terminals. It’s an urban environment a hundred metres wide. Countries have collapsed and been replaced by corporations. The entire book is supposed to be a parody of the cyberpunk genre, which is probably why the central character is called Hiro Protagonist. There’s a lot of other stuff, such as the Sumerian language being the machine code of the human brain, but for now I want to concentrate on the Metaverse. It is not a good thing. It’s controlled by amoral corporations and seems to be essential to living a bearable life. The entire setting is dystopian. I’m afraid I’m letting myself down here through not having read it, but the Metaverse is clearly not a good thing.

Then we get Facebook and Zuckerberg angling to incorporate his soul-sucking demon of a social networking site, to which I and many others are of course addicted, into his virtual environment and actually calling it the Metaverse without a trace of irony! Facebook aims to build an all-encompassing VR environment over which it has total control. Past experience has shown that FB is harmful and that they know themselves to be harmful, to the mental well-being of its users, and the likes of storming the Capitol shows very clearly that it has a malevolent influence on the human race and the planet. It has itself researched the harm it does. Their position is now analogous to the likes of tobacco companies and the fossil fuel industry lobbying and paying off people in “power” (I should explain those quotes at some point) in order to defer or completely erase their bad reputation.

What this amounts to, despite Zuckerberg’s claim that he will only provide the infrastructure which other corporations will use, is an attempt to privatise reality. There is arguably no problem with a virtual space of this nature provided there is public control over it, or perhaps individual control. There most definitely is a problem with this space being owned by a multinational, because to quote Revelation 13:17 –
καὶ ἵνα μή τις δύνηται ἀγοράσαι ἢ πωλῆσαι εἰ μὴ ὁ ἔχων τὸ χάραγμα, τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ θηρίου ἢ τὸν ἀριθμὸν τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ. 

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

I am in no wise claiming that this is prophecy of this specific occurrence. I tend towards an idealist interpretation of the book of Revelation and believe that its contents can be applied to all places and times. Nonetheless I find it sinister that this seems to be a situation where you have to sell out in order to have a livable life in mainstream society. You have no choice but to be on Facebook having your intimate personal data mined and sold to megacorps. There is a reason why this Bible verse has such resonance and applicability.

In order to make the next point, it’s helpful to digress into a different high tech area. The replicator seems at first to be some kind of magical genie lamp which you can rub to wish away scarcity. It isn’t, because technological change can always be recuperated by capitalism. There is nothing special about the replicator or its real predecessor the 3-D printer which solves a political problem which wouldn’t’ve been solved by the industrial revolution or the plough in the right social climate. We have a device which can manufacture anything we want in whatever quantities we want. This is a potential hazard to the survival of capitalism, so there are two possible approaches to address this. One is just to make the raw material prohibitively expensive and out of reach of the average consumer so that only the super-rich or their money vampire machines called multinational companies can afford it. The other, and I’m not saying they wouldn’t do both, is to slap a patent, copyright or some other kind of intellectual property thing on the design of the product, then cripple the machine so that it will only produce it if you’ve got some kind of authorisation or payment for it. That way, order is restored and we can all rest safely in our beds knowing the world will continue to be completely crap forever or at least until the oil runs out.

The thing about the Metaverse is that there can be such things as virtual outfits, cars, furniture, apartments and so forth in it, all of which will have to be paid for, or if not, the free stuff will be given low status by people who are rich enough to afford the “nice” stuff. Don’t believe me? Just think about NFTs.

NFTs

Right, now we’re back in the Metaverse, where we want to buy and sell things, or rather Meta wants us to buy things from the various faceless sociopathic organisations that rule the world and damage by stealing our labour and money, also known as the ordinary world. However, any large organisation which does stuff is more likely to do bad stuff because it’s big and some of it is bound to be bad by the law of averages, so maybe it’s more an emergent property of large scale organisations. Whatever the cause, in an economy which runs on scarcity such as our own, the potential abundance afforded by the internet and ICT needs to be reined in for economic and political purposes. Bill Gates was one of the first people to realise how easy it was to copy software when he wrote his “Open Letter To Hobbyists” in 1976 regarding the piracy of Altair BASIC. His claim, from which almost everything he’s done since in the business world stems, was that piracy discouraged people writing software from putting in the work to develop it and therefore stifled information and in fact the whole burgeoning software industry. Against this lies the more abundance-based attitude of GNU, the Free Software Foundation, the original IMDb, Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, among many others, which has enabled the internet to flourish and provided us with the likes of Android (there’s that word again).

The fact is that it’s very easy to reproduce software which has not been protected in some way, either legally or by a more technology-based method, and as technology advances also to reproduce text, music, video and other media. However, our economy can’t allow that to happen, so various methods are used to restrict that. There are videos on YouTube of “rare” or “lost” episodes or pieces of music, such as Android Warehouse itself, but once they’re on YT, unless someone comes along and has a copyright strike issued, they cease to be rare in most meaningful senses once they’ve been uploaded. Anyone who wants to can listen to Android Warehouse:

If the economy was catholic, i.e. maximised the number of sole traders, there would be a strong moral case for protecting individual artists’ works in some way. Even as it stands there’s a case for it.

In the non-virtual world, rarity doesn’t have to be invented. Stamps can be misprinted, coins can be issued for a short-reigned monarch such as Edward VIII and there are unique artworks by the likes of Picasso and Dalí. The latter in particular exploited this in an interesting way. Instead of paying for his meals in restaurants, he used to draw sketches on pieces of paper and hand them over like cheques. In order for the same kind of thing to happen online, methods need to be devised to create scarcity. Although on the one hand this seems morally bankrupt and perhaps even evil, on the other we live in a world where many of us provide free “content” without any prospect of being renumerated for our labour. The word “content” used in this setting makes me think of containers into which art, music and text is poured without regard for the kine “which” secreted it and the adverse effect it has on their bodies and lives.

Photo by Matthias Zomer on Pexels.com

Enter the NFT. This isn’t the only solution. Another might be quantum cryptography, but in any case right now the NFT is a very hyped option. NFT stands for “Non-Fungible Token”, and once again I find myself in a quandary because I have no idea whether they’re well-known or not. Fungibility is more or less another word for replaceability, and NFTs are an attempt to create non-replaceable resources online. They’re based on cryptocurrency and the blockchain, specifically on the Ethereum one, the second most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.

Both cryptocurrency and NFTs are subject to being hard to understand, in such a way that they remind me a little of confusopolies. This is Scott Adams’s word for the situation which used to exist around mobile ‘phone contracts and others (e.g. utility services) where there were so many different options that many people just plump for one at random because they don’t understand the differences between them and consider them trivial. This allows providers to camouflage their deals and compete successfully because it makes it less likely that really good deals can be noticed, and it also puts people off thinking about them too hard. That repellence, and the feeling that life is too short, is a good way of getting away with nefarious activities. With cryptocurrency and NFTs an additional layer of complexity is introduced by the fact that both are currently subject to bubbles. Most people seem to be into cryptocurrencies as a means of making money rather than as a means of exchange, leading to the artificial inflation of their value, but at the same time it would be understandable if the risk to the authority of the likes of banks were to be countered by causing Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in the minds of the public. For people of my generation there could be a further layer of complication due to the feeling that anything which has been invented recently is suspect. There also appears to be a vast environmental issue with both.

Leaving all that aside, how does an NFT work?

An NFT is a single token stored in a blockchain indicating exclusive rights over an item, usually a digital asset of some kind. If you buy an NFT, you get to “own” something like an image, a URL, a film, a piece of music or perhaps an asset in a game such as a weapon, a skin or an area of land in a virtual world. These last few are what links NFTs to the Metaverse, since that’s a virtual world like Second Life or World Of Warcraft. However, they become more significant to the rest of us if Zuckerberg succeeds in his leverage.

A blockchain is a ledger held by participating computers over a wide area. Some might say “all over the world”, but I’m not sure that includes most of it. When a transaction is made, that is, buying and selling, a record of that is made publicly on this ledger which can be read by all participants in the system. This is what guarantees the security of the system and allows it to be independent of banking. This threat to the authority of banks could conceivably lead to negative propaganda and manipulation, but at the same time NFTs and cryptocurrency don’t actually seem to be good things for other reasons and those who want to profit from them benefit from talking them up.

The big problem with cryptocurrency and NFTs, environmentally speaking, is that they’re generated by carbon-hungry “busy work” on computers. The problem centres on “proof of work”. As far as Bitcoin is concerned, it works like this. Every ten minutes, the computers connected to the network do a difficult and complex calculation which proves that electricity has been used. It must not have a useful purpose. The data resulting are evidence that the work has been done. These are then submitted and the winner (it’s like a lottery) then gets to verify all the transactions done in the last ten minutes. The more electricity you use, the more likely you are to win, and this is also how Bitcoins are created. Bitcoin miners therefore congregate in areas where the climate is very cold (to cool their computers doing the work) or where electricity is cheap, which usually means a massive carbon footprint. Something like 0.5% of the carbon footprint of the species is due to Bitcoin mining and the blockchain alone.

Ethereum uses a process known as “proof of stake” instead, where a random process is still used, but is based on the investment an individual participant makes, giving them the chance to validate everything. This still makes it easier for richer people to make money but potentially avoids the concentration of power which occurs with Bitcoin. Approving fraudulent transactions brings penalties. Ethereum is also being upgraded to “Ethereum 2.0”, which aims to reduce the risk of a “majority shareholder” dominating the network, increase the bandwidth of transactions (more per second) without increasing the size of nodes and making it more environmentally sustainable.

It really bothers me that anyone would even consider inventing a new technology which automatically has a large carbon footprint this far into the twenty-first century. Ethereum doesn’t seem to have this, but it has other problems, in the nature of NFTs, which are based on Ethereum.

There are various pieces of data, some of them very large such as feature films, which are linked to NFTs. The cost of an individual NFT is usually very high. In the Metaverse one probably won’t have any choice but to use them, and at this point I am reminded of the ‘Black Mirror’ episode ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, and in particular this crowd at the Hot Shots talent show:

Will be removed on request

Don’t you just know that the skins, faces, hair and clothing of those avatars were bought at a premium rate set by the network? In 2022, and in connection with the Metaverse, all of these things are likely to have NFTs. Moreover, in this screenshot it’s clear that they’re supposed to look artificial, low-quality – somehow “plasticky”, which is what they will be. But the chances are you won’t have a choice to opt out of using crypto or NFTs.

Things may change, but right now NFT-associated property looks similarly vapid, ugly and uninspiring. Here are some examples:

Lazy Lions:

You know what? I have no clue whatsoever how intellectual property works on this or any other NFT-related stuff. You tell me and I’ll act accordingly.

Bored Apes:

Cryptopunks:

Just to choose a few random prices, one Lazy Lion costs £9 816.12 and there’s also one for almost a million quid, a Bored Ape is typically cheaper, maybe about £40, and Cryptopunks are each valued particularly highly, seeming to average well about a quarter of a million pounds sterling apiece. One of them appears to be worth £300 million. All of these appear to be arbitrarily generated by software in a lazy manner, and they all feel seriously soulless. It’s possible that at some point this bubble will burst and there will be more stuff which actually seems to be worthwhile, and this also links to the idea of artworks which are only worth something if they’re in a gallery. If you visit the websites these things are sold on, the focus is solely on investment. Nobody seems to care what they look like.

I find this rather distressing. I find it all the more distressing that I can easily see that this low-effort trash will not only continue but become unavoidable if we’re all forced to participate in the Metaverse.

Conclusion

I’m not really sure where this is going. I believe Steely Dan may well have had an invisible hand in today’s world through their song and it’s widely acknowledged that William Gibson did. Facebook, or rather Meta, may well fail in their attempt and could have overreached themselves in creating the Metaverse, which could in any case be a distraction from their other nefarious influence on society, but that won’t stop someone else from doing it. Zuckerberg seems peeved that he doesn’t have control over hardware and therefore the whole path from his central stuff to the end-user. The Metaverse is also nothing new, and is more like him nicking it from the common ownership it has currently and making it his own. Finally, NFTs may come to nothing, and are a continuation of what’s long happened in other ways, but right now, to this four-and-a-half-dozen-year-old, they look like something which would’ve happened in the last days of Rome before the Goths came swarming in, or in this case pandemics and anthropogenic climate change.

Seriously, I dunno. They changed what “it” was I think.

Only A Fool Would Say That

(c) 1972 Fagen and Becker, ABC – fair use, review purposes.

My practical criticism skills are absolutely appalling.  I have absolutely no talent in that area because I tend to make arbitrary associations whose noise crowds out the signal of significance, and consequently I am incapable of appreciating mainstream quality literature.  This applies even more to poetry and lyrics, and the stress I experience when I try to understand poetry is too much to allow me to concentrate on what might resolve this situation.

Nonetheless it’s sometimes possible to get things under this radar, which can happen in two ways.  One is through song lyrics, which is why I’m fine with Ben Jonson’s ‘Ode To Cynthia’:

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
State in wonted manner keep.

Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia’s shining orb was made
Heaven to cheer when day did close.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart,
And thy crystal-shining quiver,
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever.

Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Bless us then with wished sight
Thou that mak’st a day of night.

So much so, in fact, that I’ve even named the Moon after it.  The other area in which I don’t encounter problems is sacred literature, because I have faith that, as Chrysostom said, “God has given man [sic] the capacity to understand Him [sic]”, and therefore that poetry in the Bible and Qur’an must be within the grasp of most people, at least with the right cultural background.  Therefore I take it on faith that most people can understand ‘By The Rivers Of Babylon’ for both reasons, and accept that it doesn’t literally condone infanticide.

This brings me to Steely Dan, whose lyrics are often double-edged and sometimes just there to prop up the melody without any intended meaning.  Two songs in particular spring to mind here, the first of which is ‘Only A Fool Would Say That’ from 1972’s ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’:

A world become one
Of salads and sun
Only a fool would say that
A boy with a plan
A natural man
Wearing a white stetson hat
Unhand that gun begone
There’s no one to fire upon
If he’s holding it high
He’s telling a lie

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that

The man in the street
Draggin’ his feet
Don’t want to hear the bad news
Imagine your face
There is his place
Standing inside his brown shoes
You do his nine to five
Drag yourself home half alive
And there on the screen
A man with a dream

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that

Anybody on the street
Has murder in his eyes
You feel no pain
And you’re younger
Then you realize

I heard it was you
Talkin’ ’bout a world
Where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that

solamente un tonto diria eso

(c) 1972 Fagen and Becker, fair use (review)

As I said, I make arbitrary associations, and to me this song is ambiguous, as usual.  The mainstream interpretation seems to be something like this.  “You” are imagining a hippy utopia where the sun is always shining, everyone’s vegetarian, nobody has to toil or pay for anything and there’s world peace.  Everyone’s a goody in this world, so everyone wears a white hat, the world has become one and there’s salads and sun.  Unhand that gun, be gone, there’s no-one to fire upon.  And so on.

However, to the contingent of people actually involved in the daily grind, this idea is completely out of touch with reality and reflects a privileged background which those who toil have never had access.  Even the belief that it’s possible reflects the folly of the people holding it, which arises from their cotton wool wrapped lives, possibly reflecting a wealthy background.  Therefore, “only a fool would say that”.  And there is no empathy or mutual understanding here.  “It just couldn’t be”, according to the man in the brown shoes, slaving away for a pittance, lifting sixteen tons to get another day older and deeper in debt.  These ground down people remind me of the ones who voted for Trump, so maybe the reality tunnel is older than we think.

However, there is another take on this.  This world is not doing well.  There is starvation, humdrum or soul destroying work, poverty for the hard-working, war and all the usual woes of the world, no better today than in 1972, and it could be said that this very cynicism contributes to its continued existence.  “It just couldn’t be, and only a fool would say that”.  In other words, it’s foolish to take this attitude because that’s why the problem exists.

The reason I’m able to read the lyrics in this way is that I make arbitrary and unjustifiable connections and interpretations as a matter of course.  Nevertheless, I don’t commit the “intentional fallacy”.  This is the idea that authorial intent is all there is to interpretation – that authors hide meanings in their work which readers are supposed to puzzle out, and that’s what practical criticism is about.  It isn’t of course.  I don’t know what it is about, because of the blizzard of associations which snow my understanding under whenever I read a canonical novel or poem, but whatever it is, it isn’t that.  This can be illustrated quite simply:  Shakespeare didn’t put sexism and conservative attitudes in his plays deliberately so that we could find them four centuries later.  They simply reflect who he is, when he lived, his social surroundings and so forth.  The same applies to any creative artist.

Instead of that, when I read something or listen to a song, I project my own meaning onto the lyrics unintentionally, and I get meaning from it but I don’t do this as a conscious act.  It just happens.  To that extent I am as much the creator of my own private, subjective piece of work, doubtless of inferior quality, as the author.  To quote Al Stewart, “While others talk in secret keys and transpose all I say / And nothing I do or try can get through the spell.”  Presumably it’s quite a common process or he wouldn’t have put it in a song.

All this means that one can still create, and that creation may harmonise with someone reading, seeing or hearing that creation, but what they do with it is not under your control.  It also means that there’s no reason why a creative artist should be any good at interpreting anyone else’s work, or even their own.  Isaac Asimov once wrote a story where William Shakespeare is brought forward in time and enrolled in an evening class about his work, which of course he fails.  There’s no reason why this shouldn’t happen and it’s a criticism neither of literary criticism nor Shakespeare and his works.  It’s just how it is.

Nonetheless, only a fool would say that a world become one, with salads and sun, just couldn’t be, because the world might not be at all unless something like that happens.

A second, solo work by Donald Fagen came along ten years later, entitled I.G.Y.:

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we’ll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there’s time
The fix is in
You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we’ve got to win
Here at home we’ll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure time for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free.

When I first heard this in  1982, it really annoyed me, mainly because my take on it was superficial.  I assumed it was trying to paint a utopian world as described straightforwardly in the lyrics, and since we were in the era of Thatcher, Reagan and the Falklands Factor at the time, that seemed most distasteful because we were so far from this vision and moving away from it at speed.  The title, incidentally, is important, but I’ll come back to that.

What I didn’t realise was the irony and cynicism of the lyrics.  The idea is not that this is how things would be in the future, but how people in 1957 thought things would be in 1976.  The reference to that is clearly to the American Bicentennial.  At the time it puzzled me that there would be a juxtaposition of IGY – International Geophysical Year – and these lyrics.

The International Geophysical Year was a collaborative international scientific project where scientists from the Warsaw Pact and Western developed world nations would work together on a series of earth science research programs over a period of about a year and a half.  Sputnik 1 was launched as part of this project, although looking back on it, that’s been reinterpreted as the start of the Space Race, which is quite a nice illustration of the intentional fallacy.

The song IGY, which makes a lot more sense in the context of the album ‘The Nightfly’ is in fact written from the perspective of someone looking forward two decades from 1957 and imagining what a beautiful world it would be when social problems were solved via technical fixes, and optimistically expecting that to be inevitable.  In fact it was only four years before the start of Reaganomics and machines were definitely not making big decisions by then at all, nor were they programmed by fellows with compassion and vision.  They were actually monitoring for the risk of foreign cruise missiles and regularly mistakenly detected what appeared to be their launch from the other side.  On one occasion in 1983, a nuclear holocaust was only prevented by a Soviet soldier disobeying standing orders, and for a long time, though I’m not sure this is still the case, every year that passed involved a larger number of errors of this kind, which were fortunately all picked up on, explaining why we’re still here.

Nonetheless it’s a seductive vision.  The reason it hasn’t happened, of course, is the same reason it didn’t happen in Ancient Egypt or Babylon – there’s a political power structure which stops it from happening and forces us all to act against our long-term and deeper collective interests and even survival.  It has nothing to do with technological or scientific progress.  In fact, the Egyptian pyramids weren’t built by slaves at all, but by poor workers who were honoured for their sacred work and interred with reverence.  In other words, the idea of progress from slavery to freedom is largely mythical, and it wasn’t necessary for anyone to be enslaved to build the pyramids.  This is not to say that Egypt was by any means a utopia but it does serve to illustrate that technology is not the issue when it comes to oppression.

As I said, I make arbitrary interpretations of creative works and am unable to filter.  This means that I am capable of seeing the positive side in situations which others see negatively.  It often works the other way too, as with the last scene of the film adaptation of ‘The Graduate’.  I won’t spoil that, but my understanding of it is dramatically different from Sarada’s.  However, this does also mean that although I’m cynical, I can also be insulated from cynicism and believe that people are acting in good faith with the best of intentions even if I can’t perceive them.  After all, the alternative is that everyone is malevolent.  And only a fool would say that.