“Most stories about one’s past could fairly and adequately be told in a single sentence, and a short one at that: Everyone did the best they could.”

- from David Carr’s brilliant, harrowing memoir ‘The Night Of The Gun’.
 

…‘Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science’ turned out to be the book I was hoping for, a stimulating, smart, entertaining read for the innumerate. I was rarely in a position where I was able to disagree with Wheelan about anything, so I was grateful when he turned his attention briefly to the subject of illegal music downloading:

“Imagine a world in which you spend all summer tending to your corn crop and then your neighbour drives by in his combine, waves cheerily, and proceeds to harvest the whole crop for himself. Does that sound contrived? Not if you’re a musician – because that is pretty much what Napster did by allowing individuals to download music without paying any compensation to the musicians who created it or the record companies that owned the copyrights….”

There are several differences between farming and making music, but the most obvious is that an album is not a finite resource, like a field of corn: if someone steals one, the musician still has an inexhaustible supply to sell. (One reason why people – OK, evil people – feel it’s OK to download, say, a Jay-Z album without paying for it is that there are few outward signs that Jay-Z is suffering as a result.)  Or is the record company the farmer, in Wheelan’s analogy? Well, if the farmer had spent decades overcharging grotesquely for corn, and spending his inflated profits on cocaine and loose women, then perhaps the thieves would have been cheered all the way to the bootleg farmer’s market.

 ‘Naked Economics’ was first published in 2002, and since then music downloading has followed such a peculiar economic model that even a thinker as lucid as Charles Wheelan would be baffled. Look around on the net now, and you can find millions of free, legal mp3s, to the extent that if you decided never to buy music ever again, you would still not be able to get through everything you downloaded in the course of a lifetime, or even a week. Try archive.org, for example, which offers over fifty thousand free concert recordings by nearly three thousand bands, most obscure, some not. (There’s a great Little Feat concert on there – the 1974 Ultrasonic Studios show, which used to fetch a lot of money when it was on vinyl back in the day. And if you like that sort of thing, there are nearly six thousand Grateful Dead recordings to choose from.) And there are sites like Daytrotter, where bands with contemporary currency offer specially-recorded versions of recent album tracks, and mp3 blog sites like Aquarium Drunkard, where bands and record labels have clearly colluded in making free tracks available. And many artist sites are giving away songs like there’s no tomorrow: check out lauracantrell.com, or the Go! Team’s website.

 In other words: sometimes the farmer is happy for you to pick a few ears from the edge of his crop, stuff that’s still green, or misshapen – Laura Cantrell’s downloads are mostly songs she recorded for radio sessions.  Sometimes he’s happy to give you a portion for your dinner, in the hope you’ll come back for more. Sometimes (see Radiohead) he leaves out a bucket, and you can pay what you want, or nothing at all, if you feel like it. Sometimes he sells the entire crop to a neighbour, who gives it away for free in an attempt to get you to buy what he’s selling, as Prince did when he gave his last album to the Mail on Sunday.

  A couple of weeks ago Paul Westerberg was selling an album’s-worth of material as one big, indivisible mp3, for 49 cents. Ben Folds has just leaked a fake version of the real album he’s releasing in the autumn, bashed-out tracks with the same titles as the official release, but with different tunes and lyrics. Nobody knows what’s going on any more, least of all economists, but many musicians are having a great deal of imaginative fun with, and in, the confusion.

…back when I still reviewed books regularly, I wrote about Jerry Wexler’s autobiography, ‘The Rhythm and the Blues’, for the Sunday Times. And a few weeks after the review appeared I received a letter from Wexler himself. I’m looking at it now, because of course I kept it safe. Gerald Wexler invented the phrase “rhythm and blues”. He is responsible for Aretha Franklin’s entire career. He produced Bob Dylan, and ‘Dusty in Memphis’. You wouldn’t throw a letter from Jerry Wexler away.

 “Dear Nick Hornby,” it begins. (Actually, he used a colon instead of a comma at the end of the salutation, but when you co-found Atlantic Records, you can do whatever you like with punctuation.) “Hell yes I read it and enjoyed it. (The unappeasable rage for approbation.)” He went on to wonder whether I was a fan of Frederick Exley’s work (I was – ‘A Fan’s Notes’ was an inspiration for Fever Pitch) and to defend Delaney and Bonnie, about whom I’d been mildly disparaging in the review, in a vain attempt to demonstrate that Wexler’s tastes were not infallible.

 And every now and again he’d write to me about a book I’d written (he was a voracious reader), or to send me an album that he thought had been unjustly overlooked; he would sometimes include a profile that someone had written of him. Jerry died on August 15th, aged ninety-one, and it’s hard to imagine a richer life than the one he lived. I still can’t quite believe that he wrote to me.

…my entire adult life, I have believed – or rather, never really questioned – what generation after generation of pop-culture writers have told me: that the dizzy idealism of the 60s was punctured by the bad-trip nightmare of Altamont, which prepared the way for the disillusion and solipsism of the 1970s, etc. But the more I read about post-war American politics (after finishing Thurston Clarke’s inspiring book about Bobby Kennedy, ‘The Last Campaign’, I’m now ploughing through Rick Perlstein’s razor-sharp ‘Nixonland’) the more I see that this reading of contemporary history is itself solipsistic, or at least impossibly cosseted. The sixties were great, I suspect, if you were in a band, or at an Ivy League college with a draft deferment, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and hitch-hiking to see Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival. But if you were an African-American, a policeman, a member of the American working class eligible for Vietnam, a politician, or just about anyone else, then the 1960s were insane -  insane as in psychopathic, rather than insane as in zany. For millions of people in US cities, the decade was violent and scary, obscured by a fog of incomprehension and genuine foreboding.  Those protest songs were written because there was a great deal to protest about, but somehow it’s the songs themselves, sincere and decent and hopeful, which have come to represent the times. We remember “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”; somehow, the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll doesn’t seem quite so meaningful. 

…became Prime Minister in 1996; Arsene Wenger became manager of Arsenal in 1997. Blair saw off four Conservative leaders: Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith, and Michael Howard. Arsene Wenger has seen off six Spurs managers: Gerry Francis, Christian Gross, George Graham, Glenn Hoddle, Jacques Santini and Martin Jol. Of course, Wenger is not directly responsible for the failure of these managers in the way that Blair defeated his opponents, but Wenger’s success made Tottenham’s underachievement in the last decade or so even more galling for Spurs fans, and both Christian Gross and Jacques Santini were undeniably intended to be in the Wenger mould. Arsene’s shadow has cast a gloom all the way up Seven Sisters Road for quite a while now.

 Christian Gross was Tottenham’s Iain Duncan-Smith, and not just because they were both bald – they were both hopeless, too.  (As a baldy, I would have taken a secret pride in either of them being any good; instead, they merely reinforced the unconscious association of baldness with haplessness, at least when it comes to public office.) Martin Jol was William Hague, with his likeable ordinary-guy routine that, in the end, wasn’t quite enough.  And George Graham was their Michael Howard, the old-school hard-man who was supposed to win through cracking the whip and telling everyone to get back to basics. My big fear, as an Arsenal fan, is that Spurs might have found their David Cameron in Juande Ramos, not least because economic circumstances are affecting Wenger in the same way that they’re affecting Gordon Brown: the ruinous cost of the Emirates Stadium looks every bit as damaging as the credit crunch. Worse, really. We don’t seem to be able to buy the footballing equivalent of a bar of Dairy Milk at the moment, let alone a four-course meal at Nobu. Ramos’s Sevilla team was dazzling, and if he can achieve a similar style at White Hart Lane, it might just be enough to push Arsenal out of the top four. A lot of Arsenal fans, me included, have enormous faith in Wenger, but this season he seems hell-bent on playing an entire Premiership season with a whole squadful of seventeen-year-old inside forwards, and that faith is going to be tested to the limit.

…I went to talk to fifty-odd teenagers who’d gathered at the Roundhouse to take part in various activities laid on for them by the Spinebreakers website. These young people had been writing and making films and music and God knows what else, and it seemed to me that they’d been having a great deal of unfashionably constructive fun. They were nice kids, too. They listened politely when I read, and asked scores of intelligent questions during the Q and A.  They weren’t from Bedales or Hogwarts, either: they were, as far as I could tell, from all sorts of different backgrounds, although I didn’t speak to anyone who seemed staunchly middle class, and the racial mix was both striking and heartening.

 And on the way home, I read Derek Malcolm’s review of the new teen rom-com ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’ in the Evening Standard, and came across the following line, in the middle of a general complaint about the film’s lack of authenticity.  “…These kids are so unlike the beastie boys and girls of tabloid imagination that you scarcely recognise them as modern children.” I’m sure Malcolm would concede that this isn’t the most cogent sentence he’s ever constructed, but even so, the logic here is baffling: he first concedes that these beastie boys and girls are mythical, and then faults the film’s realism on the grounds that its characters don’t resemble the myth. One doesn’t wish to underestimate the problems currently facing our teens, especially in London (where the film isn’t set, incidentally). But it’s important to remember that Gurinder Chandha, the director, has chosen to make a film about the majority of our young people, the ones who aren’t stabbing each other while pregnant and drunk on Bacardi Breezers, not some weird, phoney, goody-two-shoes subset.

Work update:

- I’m about a third of the way into a novel, with the working title ‘Juliet, Naked’.
- I’m editing, with Eli Horowitz,  a ‘Best of McSweeneys’ book for Hamish Hamilton, publication some time next spring, I think. (This is a lovely job – I’m discovering great young writers I’d never heard of several times a day at the moment.)
- I’m adapting ‘Slam’, for DNA Films
- A friend and I are still messing around with a radio comedy, although the messing around at this stage consists mostly of trying to persuade the BBC that it’s funny. Or comprehensible. Or something.
- I’m working with Airside Studios on an idea for an animated film.

Film update

 -  Cindy Chupack, the screenwriter on the project, has just delivered a third and hopefully green light-triggering draft of ‘How To Be Good’.
 - There’s not much happening with ‘A Long Way Down’.
 -  ‘Slam’ – see above. That’s ‘above’ in the ‘work update’ bit, as opposed to ‘There’s not much happening’. There isn’t much happening, but that’s entirely my fault.
 - ‘An Education’ is in the final stages of editing.

A couple of years ago, two Americans came to my office with a thousand blank book pages for me to sign. They occasionally made chapbooks, beautifully-designed and printed pamphlets that interest collectors, and they wanted to make one from the Thunder Road chapter of 31 Songs/Songbook. They were going to print and sell a thousand exquisite Thunder Road chapbooks, and give the profits to TreeHouse. So I sat there and signed a thousand pages, and they went home with them, and that was pretty much the last I heard from them until last week, when one of them finally conceded in an email that the project had ended in disaster. The two friends are now no longer speaking to each other – there may even have been an actual fist-fight -  and the best guess for the pages is that they are lying in a warehouse in Arizona somewhere.

 If they’d torn the pages up in front of my eyes a couple of minutes after I’d signed them all, I would have been pretty irritated. But those guys had a plan, and they came to me in good faith, and now the story just serves as a useful metaphor for the sort of thing that happens frequently in my profession. People have ideas that don’t work out,  and to refuse to engage with any of them on the grounds that they might turn out to be a total waste of time is to miss the point, and usually quite a lot of fun as well. I’d say that in the above list, only the two books and ‘An Education’ have better than even chances of seeing the light of day, but that doesn’t mean that the rest aren’t worth doing, or caring about.