(part 250) MY OPINION

photo by Schatzberg

I have not written the way I want to for a long time now, so that will change with this post. This will be unedited and unrestrained, so if my commas and thoughts fall short, so be it. I have spent too much time worrying about your approval. No one but a handful of people approve of my position and rhetoric, so knowing that as I do, there is no reason for me to be concerned about what I say here. This is the Bobby Jameson blog. It belongs to me and was started as a place to post facts, as I see them, know them, and have lived them. Your opinion is yours, mine is written here in these pages.

After four years of doing this, the one overriding fact is that nothing in my life has improved as a result of what I have done. This is a reality I have to contend with daily, you don't. When I came to the internet I had nothing. No friends, no lovers, no job, no health, and no money. With the exception of a very few individuals, I still have no friends, no lovers, no job, no health, and no money.

One would think that after all this time something would have improved, if not only slightly, but that is not the case. My main gripe is that way too many bullshit historians of music and record collectors, turned record sellers, thrive on inaccuracy and a deeply embedded sense of self-justification for what they do. Much of what is written is flat out wrong, and people who collect and/or sell records fail completely to understand that they are trading in the dreams and misery of those who created, what are now no more than collectable artifacts, used for amusement and/or profit.

There is no real understanding, by so-called music historians and collectors, that there are and were, real people involved in the creation of what is now merely written about, traded, and sold. The emotional detachment of many of these self-serving assholes is staggering, to say the least. They remind me of people who collect and discuss body-parts of dead soldiers, while their insipid eye for detail and fact is breathtaking.

The glorification of works, coupled with the shallow views and opinions by some, about those who created the works, has and does piss me off in a way that mere words fail to make clear. To elaborate on the failings of the human beings who gave their hearts and souls to create these works, so assholes can write about it and or collect and sell it, is pretty much repulsive to me. I for one, am a living breathing example of this shoddy practice, and stand alone as a vocal critic of this crap, which is justified only by those who practice it.

I have found, and reject entirely, the lame indulgence of those who talk about someone as a friend, but do nothing that a friend would do to be a friend; I find that this practice runs rampant throughout my entire experience on every part of what exists on the internet. The two bit soothsayers and slap you on the back phonies, personify the personality of music and friendship on the web, while in reality what goes on here is nothing more than a business and social whorehouse where some benefit on the backs of those who are harmed, cheated, and demoralized. As well, the zit-faced, low-ball punks, who pound out their criticisms on a keyboard in the safety of their bedrooms, is proof enough, that the truly useless have found a paradise to inhabit.

There is nothing good about the music business, and there is nothing good about the ever expanding profiteering of people's work who are not allowed to share in those profits and benefits. The smaller reissue labels, for the most part, are no more than the beginnings of another round of "fucking over" the artists, writers, and musicians who created the products being sold.

The glaring arrogance and compartmentalizing it takes, to do what is done, under the guise of legitimate business, by those who do it, is akin to human trafficking for profit. To heap, yet more misery on the backs of those already harmed, simply in the name of making available "good music" to those who want what is sold by these pricks, is now as common a practice as slavery was, prior to the American Civil War.

Whether you like me or agree with me at this point, is no longer of any importance whatsoever. I am taking back my right to have an opinion, which I somehow managed to lose track of in the last year or so...or as in the words of Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone "When you got nothin, you got nothin to lose."