REVOLVER: BRIAN BOYDon music...
As A Town Called Malicedoes its wondrous thing in the background, a series of pencil-drawn figures of The Jam and a solo Paul Weller are used to illustrate the story of one man's climb out the punk ghetto and into a less restricted music world. The video – called Music Matters: The Jamand available now on YouTube — tells Weller's musical story. The film details how The Jam were at the forefront of the 1970s Mod revival and how they took their influences from The Small Faces, The Who and The Beatles. It goes on to explain why Weller broke the band up at the height of their popularity. Conflicted by their success, he found the punk movement that spawned the group to be overly "blunt, anarchistic and overly rejecting of musical refinement".
Weller was all about rhythm and blues, beat music and soul, and to continue writing “energetic and bracing explorations of modern British life” without repeating himself, he had to move on. The video ends with the message that The Jam’s music continues to inspire today.
Nowhere in the video are the words “downloading”, “illegal” or “file-sharing” used. It’s all about the music that inspires people, that makes them pick up a guitar in the first place, that makes them join a band. It’s about where the music leads you and how. It’s about how, once, Weller took from other artists, now others take from him.
The people behind the videos (Weller’s is just one in a series) are a new body called “Music Matters”. Made up of various industry figures and musicians, they don’t have an agenda as such. They’re not there to shout and scream at you for illegally downloading/file-sharing; there’s nothing about morals, ethics, criminality or thievery. No talk of “killing music” or stark images of prison cells.
Music Matters’s mission is to remind listeners of the significance and value of music, to assert it’s non-monetary value. The stories in the various videos emphasise the richness and cross-fertilisation of the music scene – how bands formed, how they shaped their sound and how they continue to influence and inspire.
Alongside The Jam video, there are also mini-documentaries (all beautifully produced) on Blind Willie Johnson, John Martyn, the Fron Choir, Sigur Rós, Nick Cave, Louis Armstrong and Kate Bush (particularly good). All of these are now up on YouTube.
Since Shawn Fanning shook the very foundations of the music industry when he uploaded the first track to Napster in 1999, the response to the free digital availability of copyrighted music has been scandalous. All we seemed to hear from the industry were meaningless abstracts – “this will destroy the music industry” – while multi-millionaire rock stars such as Metallica threatened to come around to your house and rip out your hard drive if you dared to file-share one of their tracks. Governments threatened (and are still doing so) to “turn off” the broadband connection of file-sharers – an idea as absurd as it is unworkable.
Never in the past 11 years has anyone talked about the value of the thing being abused. To its credit, Music Matters realises that repeatedly using the word “illegal” means nothing to today’s net-savvy generation who can work around any obstacle put in their way in about 10 seconds flat.
And it’s not as if Music Matters has been set up to appeal to reason or conscience. That sort of blather (which is all it ever can be) is kept out of the equation; instead we’re given a series of artful musical vignettes. And because of all of this, people will want to see the Music Matters videos – they are appealing, engaging and don’t preach in any way. And if that has a drip-drip effect, it can only be a good thing.
Music Matters has also initiated a series of “kitemarks” — seal- of-approval symbols that will adorn legal music sites. Spotify, We7, iTunes and MySpace and many more have all already signed up.
However, it’s the latest online venture to sign up to the kitemark that you should be watching. Due to launch in the UK in the middle of April (with Ireland soon after), mFlow is the latest, greatest, most up-to-datest music model that aims to leave iTunes, Spotify and the rest in the dust.
A genuinely exciting development, we’ll come back to mFlow once they’ve been washed and brought to our interview tent. You can see a bit of what they’re about at mflow.com.
whymusicmatters.org
