US Corporate Censorship of Political Statements by Artists — Pearl Jam

If you monitor the art & entertainment industry closely you’ll see how careers are often destroyed simpy by denying access to broadcast channels and the opportunity to address the public in talk shows and current affairs programs. In America such censorship is emerging in a number of different ways, The Dixie Chicks’ statements about George Bush was but one example. The most recent example is to do with Pearl Jam and AT&T. Read more

My favourite tip for songwriter’s block

I once invented a concept that has all but destroyed songwriter’s block in my life. At least, for the time being!

It’s called the tuneback. It wasn’t really created to combat creative block, but because all the members of Midnight.Haulkerton were itching for an excuse to put half-baked music out there while we worked on an album enshrined in top secrecy.

In order to ensure that minimum time was stolen from the endeavor of our precious album, we set a one hour, once a week time limit on the tuneback. It is central to the whole concept, actually. It taught us very quickly that the difference between a song that took an hour to write and record, and a song that took an hour and a half to write and record, is a very big one - and thus, that particular unit of time is very much important and influential on the sound of each final tuneback.

But what has this got to do with songwriter’s block?

I swear, it’s the pressure. I didn’t think it would work that way, but if I know I’ve got a song to write and if I don’t write it people are going to pissed, I write one. Seriously, I was a couple of hours late once, and I got a disgruntled email.

Pressure. It’s horrible for creative minds, but it works (kind of like how crack works for law students).

Ideas and their value - Support the Tuneback

I think there is such a thing as unconscionable commercial exploitation. It comes about when those who have money and power already act to take away from others the opportunity to exploit their own creations without so much as a “by your leave”.

When I heard about what had happened to the concept of the tuneback that was created and invented by my creative collaborator, friend, and colleague Joel Falconer, well I was immediately aware of the immorality of those that decided to capitalize without so much as a courteous well-mannered contact to the creator of the first tunebacks. This is what passes for “good business” today. And as the world has come to know it’s also what largely passes for the style of business a lot of American companies carry out today. Scandal, corruption, cheating, stealing, lying it’s the American Way today. An honorable person will tell you straight what is what, and when you look at it, they will be right. Not just right in a technical sense, but right in a moral sense. Read more

Midnight.Haulkerton hits 4,000 downloads with “Fallen out of love with politics”

Midnight.Haulkerton’s latest tuneback, Fallen out of love with politics pushed the band’s download count over the 4,000 mark last night, an astonishing achievement for a group that revealed its name to the public only months ago.

Fallen out of love with politics is a tribute to the work of Al Gore and the example he sets, out of office, of what a politician really should be.

The 4,000 downloads figure comes from the band’s blog statistics alone, and figures from other sites that host the songs–including the Sydney Morning Herald and CanGoogleHearMe.com–are expected to be collectively at least double that of the band site’s figures.

Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto”

The Free Articulator is in support of Creative Artists and is written and published by Creative Artists. I’m pushing to the side the arguments that Apocalypto is a poor movie because it has some ’slight cultural inaccuracies’; and getting on to reviewing a work of fiction. Mel Gibson is not a historian or an academic; he’s a storyteller and actor, directing a work of art in order to deliver a story. Some anthropologists in the middle of New York decided that Gibson had picked and chosen elements of history and culture that suited the story’s ability to build up tension and drama.

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