Leslie (icehouse@redshift.com)
Tue, 27 Oct 1998 16:08:05 -0800
Surely it is the heirs to the estate of Jimi Hendrix who are responsible for licensing the utilisation of his music for commercial use rather than the Madison Avenue troops or even the Product manufacturers such as Pontiac etc. It would seem to me that it is the trustees of Jimi's estate who are seeking to cash in on his legacy, possibly because the royalty streams have slowed over the years and the heirs want to cash in while they can. While on the one hand I hate to see this sort of crass commercialization taking place, were I an heir of this sort I might view the whole matter quite differently, especially if the estate had been largely mishandled over the years and I felt that I had somehow been shortchanged, which seems to be the situation in the case of Jimi's heirs. On the other hand, having Jimi's shit coyly working it's way into the everyday consciousness of folk might not be an entirely bad thing.
There seems also to be a trend amongst trendy Dj's to re-cycle so much these days. Although I am a Dj myself, I am a purist in that I like to let the music I play stand by itself without worrying it to death by mixing in every sort of imaginable sample, from spoken words to muggy wildebeest grunts and regurgitated 70's fusion pap. I think this trend adds to the notion of using any piece of sound/music possible for effect and that this makes too much that is good and worthy of respect available for plucking by Madison Avenue types who are eternally searching for attention grabbing sounds, just the sort of attention they are getting as evidenced by the discussion here. While I do appreciate the Invisible Skratch Pickling-type mixing, I shudder at some of the stuff I am hearing that incorporates anything that can be grabbed off any old piece of vinyl, acceptable just because it happens to be on an old piece of vinyl. The advertisers are going to lurch and grab for anything that is getting attention and the re-cycling of older music is in full swing, why else would some of these old farts like Aerosmith be enjoying their current success? They are cashing in as well.
It seems to be the sound of money to me, I do not love Jimi's music any less and I hope a few more people get to listen to it now and appreciate it. I am positive that Pontiac had nothing whatsoever to do with selecting the music, they just approved what the eager advert-sellers were promoting and they were probably just baby-boomers selling out and, yes, cashing in while they can. We might not personally do something like this, unless our jobs depended on it and the mortgage payment was due next week.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed Oct 28 1998 - 01:20:49 MET