RTP-area local music and culture

[grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>]

Duncan Murrell wrote:
> 1.  Affordable health plans for practicing artists

Why stop there? Affordable health care for everybody. And by 
"affordable" I mean "universal". Or we can just keep having benefits 
anytime anybody we know gets sick, which works great if the doctor bill 
is under $800 or so. Everybody take yr vitamins!

Do indie-rockers vote? Would it matter, since even 95% of Democratic 
politicians can't get over their fear of Clintonism/rejection by the 
insurance industry long enough to come out & say what most normal people 
realize: the government builds roads because they're vital to commerce, 
and difficult to make profitable, but for some reason it thinks it's 
preferable to stay out of healthcare, even though it's vital to commerce 
(not to mention life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc) and downright 
*immoral* to provide at a profit.

> 2.  Affordable rental housing, in general, especially near where they  
> work and/or practice their art.

Welcome to Durham!

> 3. SBA or private loans/bridge loans/lines of credit to finance  
> intense periods of art-making (touring, completing work for an  
> exhibition, working on a story/book that needs some dedicated  
> attention.)  Yes, there are grants available, but they are few;  
> universal access to supplementary money (within reason) would help  
> the creative community, and the rest of the community would reap the  
> benefits ultimately. It would also put a few people into debt, I'm  
> sure, but no artist makes a breakthrough without taking a risk.

I was thinking about this yesterday while in the throes of that, ahem, 
"discussion" with Glenn. Most artforms carry at least some level of 
public support & public assumption that such support is both necessary 
and appropriate. That's rarely the case with "rock music," even when the 
"rock music" is every bit as anti-popular as the "fine arts" ;-) .

One of the things bugging me about that earlier conversation was the 
inherent assumption, on both our parts, that somehow the "free market" 
was an inherent & necessary factor. Glenn's saying "don't charge too 
much for CDs lest market forces drive your audience to extra-market 
alternatives" (the irony being that there's nothing particularly "free 
market" about ripping/downloading CDs for free). Whereas I'm saying 
"overhead has gone up dramatically, so it's to be expected that the 
prices of the product should go up as well," as if bands were 
corporations (well, apart from PiL), and as if any of the ones we love 
had much chance/hope of ever breaking even anyway.

I mean, shit, we're both wrong. Into which column do you put "thousands 
of hours of free labor" at practice, and "the spaghetti dinner those 
kids made us in Akron" and everything else that adds up to the fact that 
it's hard to propose a market-based solution to an extra-market problem?

Best way to support artists? Brainwashing: make 'em think they're 
stockbrokers. They'll be fine.

xo

Ross