Greetings from the height of Spring - post-May Day - and three new offerings. We start with something rather different. A timely opinion piece on how women artists in dance music find themselves at a disadvantage whenever deals are struck between the DJ-Producer and music platform. Male vocalists suffer too, but there is an ongoing legal limbo for the invariably female 'featured' singer. It is a plea, but also a challenge. Next, comes a fascinating Q & A (mainly 'A') with dark short tale supremo of forty years and counting, STEVE RASNIC TEM, as his retrospective collection 'Figures Unseen' is released by Valancourt. Finally, a review of PRIYA SHARMA's impressive debut collection, 'All The Fabulous Beasts.' Slainte...
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music.
THE GENDERED CLICK
An opinion
How male-led technology has deprived women
artists
Thirty years ago, the new dance music of house,
'rave' and techno also heralded, unseen behind the celebration, a
subtle but decisive shift in the creative hierarchy. With music
production, above playing or even performing, becoming an
increasingly accessible art-form, the producer became the artist; one
considered at least as important, if not more so, than the singer /
songwriter herself;
for it was mainly women artists who were the faces and voices of this
new medium. The faces as the commercial selling point; the voices for
the soul and, often, beauty, the new producers couldn’t possibly
evoke from their digital electronics alone. The producer then became
the DJ, remixing multiple versions of established hits 'live,‘ and
performing them before club-goers‘; the new audience for this new
form of artist.
As technology has become increasingly
sophisticated and accessible since then, the voice, from wherever the
source, has become no more to the successful DJ-Producer than any
other sampled sound, remixed and utilised to serve their whims. In
tandem, the track’s 'lead‘ vocalist had been quietly and
successfully relegated to that of 'featured' vocalist in less than two
years. A decade on, the related ambient
branch known as trance (or ambient trance or psy-trance) demanded
further use of the woman’s vocal as a means to enhance a track‘s
already existing beauty and subtlety of atmosphere. By now, the
DJ-Producer was The Star and – unchallenged - called the shots.
So, let‘s define what, and who, we are talking about here. Many
such cases stem from the role of 'featured vocalist,' where a
DJ-Producer invites a professional singer to add their voice onto the
chorus or repetitive 'hook' of the track they've constructed in their
studio. If the vocalist has written neither the lyric nor melody to
that chorus or 'hook,' how it is subsequently used is up to the
DJ-Producer. However, this form of ownership – legally or otherwise
– is often used to encompass those choruses and 'hooks' that have
been written by the vocalist.
Of course, popular music has always
progressed – and thrived – as the technology that produced it
became increasingly sophisticated. This has been the case since
shellac was discarded for vinyl and the CD for the download. However,
the role of creator, and his definition, has since become vague. A
position very much to the DJ-Producer’s advantage. The goalposts as
to who does what and where have crucially shifted, finding no new
home, leaving the woman artist in a legal limbo. The mainly male
DJ-Producers have taken advantage of this, big-time. The
singer-songwriter who has penned the original track and mix she has
contributed her vocal to won’t necessarily receive either payment
or named credit for her work. Not only this, any subsequent remix
will also be out of her control where a fellow DJ-Producer wants to
put his very different signature on the original mix.
It is the case
that not all vocalists' write the tracks they appear on; but, to
treat those artists who do the same way, (for independent artists is
who they remain), as if they are merely another worthy sacrifice to
serve the sound, and ego, of the all-powerful DJ-Producer, should be
called out for what it is – artistic theft. Thankfully many artists
have recently gotten wise to this situation and refuse to work in the
'featured‘ vocalist role ever again, now viewing it as toxic.
One singer-songwriter, whose debut release made
the Top 10 in the early 90s,‘ recently related how she receives requests to use her vocals, for
unsanctioned remixes, on a weekly basis. She emphasised that no
permissions to use her name or voice on these remixes have so far
been given for use on any of the big name music platforms. It appears
that, whatever her response, it is casually ignored as is crediting
her as vocalist. She says she had previously been burned early in
her career and so, unsurprisingly, has been left somewhat scarred. 'These people can leave a sensitive person feeling like they are
nothing...,' she says. 'I hear it, day in, day out, from fellow
vocalists and it's disgusting, vile behaviour.' She is, however,
moving on. She adds how learning from these experiences has enabled
her to write and record new music and release it through her own
label. She's fighting back – and on her own terms.
Another, Susan Brice (aka CocoStar), recently
reflected:
'Due
to the birth of the internet and it's grim dilution of most things
(we are in a different time with music), it is mainly male dominated
and throw away. The industry as a whole has not changed at all with
regards to the 'cut throat' stigma which it seems to rely on....
Most
businesses in the world have become harder to run due to dilution,
thus creating a plethora of mass production services and items all
easily had at the touch of
a button. Sad times indeed, but years ago we had to wait for
everything which created a feeling of worth and gratitude for the
individual. There is no waiting anymore for most things For the
younger generations this situation is forcing them into a boredom
vortex in a fake 3D world, which is not their fault.'
This artist adds that she has had at least five
self-penned songs stolen, the rights for which she is currently
fighting.
Consequently, such artists have been left to
fend for themselves, leaving them in territory legally impotent.
Rather than farm themselves out to DJ-Producers' whose work they
might otherwise distantly admire, artists, since burned, are now
returning to those whom they’ve worked with in the past and feel
they can still trust. Retreating back to those they know appears the
only alternative. Long-term, this can’t be a settled response,
mitigating against future creative and monetary growth. Some readers
may think, 'well, why wasn't this situation dealt with by the artists
themselves, years ago?' Such protection to become law requires its
recognition in Government legislation. Successive Governments‘ have
proven toothless in this regard; consequently, in the eyes of many
artists, so have The Musicians‘ Union. As someone pro-union
himself, this is disappointing to say the least. According to their
homepage, their mandate here is to "lobb(y)
Government to protect these rights on the basis that only a small
number of MU members have regular salaries. Most are Small and Medium
Enterprises (SMEs), whether they are sole traders or members of a
band, and they therefore rely on their copyright and performers’
rights to make a significant part of their income. In essence, their
copyright and related rights are an important part of their ‘product’
and of the diverse income streams that make up their income, and,
like any SME, they have to protect their product."
Fine so far. They add:
'What
we are arguing for is fair compensation for musicians from the device
manufacturers. These manufacturers are already paying for patents to
software developers and the like on each device sold, and yet the act
of copying onto these devices the ‘software’ the consumer is most
interested in – music - is not currently generating any income for
musicians, unless it is through legitimate download purchases.'
Under
a page entitled ‘Fair Pay for Musicians’ they state their
recognition that,
“musicians rely on live revenue
to survive. Income from CD sales is decreasing and illegal
downloading continues, making a sustainable career difficult without
fair pay for live performances.”
Still good. Or is
it? Reading between the lines – and looking elsewhere – there is
a disconnect here. This is two-fold. An assumption exists that all
artists are full-time and, being so, must be the sole recipients
requiring MU support. The problem with this line of reasoning today
is that most women artists in particular can’t
be full-time due to the very exclusivity of the deals being struck
between the platforms and the DJ-Producers. Allied to this is the
aforementioned lack of permission sought to use a singer-songwriter’s
vocal elsewhere on the track of another DJ-Producer. Such
precariousness for the artist means payment is not only inconsistent
but often non-existent. Thus, maintaining any kind of career – even
as a second-string – is unrealistic. Secondly, if the MU are
mandated to do little more than lobby,
(and, legally, that’s presumably all they are able to do), then the
Government – not known for having fingers on pulses when it comes
to an artist’s ability to produce – are the final arbiter.
Surely, the MU should be ‘upgraded,’ made independent enough to
make their own rules – specific to artists’ needs – apart from
Government diktat?
Today, of course, there are many women
DJ-Producers challenging this decades-long patriarchy. Annie Mac,
Lisa Lashes, DJ Heather, Maya Jane Coles, DJ Rap, Ellen Allien and
many others have been well known for years around the clubs of the
world, many owning their own labels. Such a high level of commitment,
e.g. the touring, anti-social hours, hotel stays, hiring and firing
of staff, etc., suggests this much-feted role is no less full-on than
that of any successful, full-time band. It also suggests those
artists with life commitments prioritised elsewhere (be it another
business or to young family) are equally feted to lose out and be
treated not unlike agency workers in other, more regular, jobs; where
a recording contract is a two-sided deal between the DJ-Producer and
music platform, freezing out the artist that actually supplies their
product. While a woman artist becoming
a DJ-Producer
may be one way out, it isn't a
solution to the live, ongoing issues of writer credit or vocal theft.
The ripping-off of singer/songwriters is
nothing new. It's been going on since the days of Tin Pan Alley and,
subsequently, Colonel Tom Parker. Its latest manifestation resides
with the deals being cut between music platforms and – the usually
male – DJ-Producers. Currently, in the US, The Music Modernization
Act is a bill intended to ensure songwriters have 'a seat at the
table' when it comes to payment and the collection of royalties from
the big digital platforms. One clause, however, has proven
controversial. This would exclude any retrospective legal claims from
those music platforms who have signed-up to it, such as Spotify. The
compromise which ensured their participation. (Update: on the 25th
April, the bill was passed, unanimously, by the House of
Representatives). This is, at least, the start of some official
recognition and recompense and not necessarily the end of the road.
Meanwhile, independent voices in the field have started up, offering
advise and support to those already established, but suffering the
lack of credit and payment. (See below for an example).
Welcome, if
somewhat belated, (if historical social media posts are anything to
go by), are the fans finally coming around to showing some empathy
with their idols‘ situation; the realisation dawning that they may
lose both the work and
their favourite artist unless this situation is dealt with. I know of
at least one other case (an artist once interviewed in these pages)
who – while not entirely giving up on her love – has been forced
to work elsewhere due to unreliable payments.
I’d be the first to admit that the dry
concept of regulation in the arts would normally make me very queasy.
However, seeing the ease with which work can now be stolen and
manipulated, and the negative effects this has on the original
artists, surely justifies singling-out this field as a major
exception. With credit and payment being such live issues in music –
and gender-favouring issues at that – certain obligations must be
fulfilled before the DJ-Producer can so casually finger-press that
final 'click.'
books.
a Q & A with
Steve Rasnic Tem
FIGURES
UNSEEN collects your more recent work, published since 2000. How do
you think your writing has matured, or changed, over the last
eighteen years, compared to your earliest published work?
Steve
Rasnic Tem:
Actually, FIGURES UNSEEN collects work from all stages of my career,
beginning with my first professionally published short story, “City
Fishing.” I think the confusion is because I selected stories from
each of my collections, and my first English collection, City
Fishing,
didn’t come out until 2000. (There was an earlier, French language
collection Ombres
sur la Route.)
Basically, I tried to select a representative sampling of my short
fiction, a book I could point to when people asked, “What do you
do?”
That
said, there is an evolution in my stories from the beginning until
now. When I finally became serious about writing I started out
studying and writing poetry, and my first fiction actually came out
of my experiments writing prose poetry. So these first stories tend
to feature the compression of poetry, use echoes and choruses and
alliteration and other poetic techniques, and they also tend to be
more dream-like and fabulist than the later fiction. They also tend
to be very short.
The
initial evolution from that early work largely consisted of learning
how to write longer stories—more narrative-driven, more complicated
plots, more characters, using more than one obsessive theme per
story, etc. The use of language and tone also became more
complicated. What drives me now is more thematic. I’ve been picking
up on events and themes I once found too personally troubling to
write about. One thing about getting older—you tend to grow less
reticent about revealing yourself. You grow beyond embarrassment.
Several
of the tales in FIGURES UNSEEN feel particularly personal. Familial
grief and loss seem especially foregrounded in tales such as 'A House
by the Ocean,' the seminal 'Wheatfield With Crows,' 'The Figure In
Motion' and 'Firestorm.' Was this conscious on your part? Were you -
perhaps intentionally - working through similar feelings during their
writing?
SRT:
I think my work has always been somewhat personal, but I’ve gotten
better at incorporating the personal material, so readers are seeing
more and more of it. But even when I’m writing about events which I
haven’t experienced myself, the key is to be empathetic and to make
them personal. Some aspects of writing are very much like acting. You
must try to “inhabit” your characters, especially the
protagonist. Oftentimes problems in tone and awkwardness are due to
the fact that you haven’t learned how to fully inhabit your
character yet. Also, usually when I write about personal material
it’s after
I’ve worked those feelings through, not during.
I
particularly enjoyed the dark humour of ‘The Poor’ and
‘Crutches.’ I could relate to how I, myself, view the coldly
callous treatment meted out in the former and the sense of inevitable
defeatism in the latter. Do you have a strong sense of social
injustice, the way Governments’ can often treat people and how they
respond?
SRT:
The inherent problem with any government is that it by necessity must
treat people as numbers and percentages to a certain degree in
drafting policy. If it’s a just government then it also tries to
protect and preserve justice for the minorities and outliers whose
needs and sense of identity is at variance with those in the
majority. But still, we’re basically talking about numbers and
percentages here. But human beings are not numbers and percentages.
They’re far more complicated than that, and they expect and demand
empathy. And empathy makes things messy. So messy in fact that there
is pressure to disregard empathy in making policy. There is even
pressure to disregard empathy when leading one’s life.
The
result I get from all this is absurdity. Much of modern life abounds
in absurdity. And my sense of the absurd is expressed in stories like
“The Poor” and “Crutches” and “Head Explosions” and a
number of others. The only way around this is to find ways to
humanize government, to make empathy into a tool for handling large
numbers of folks. We’re not very good at that yet—maybe we never
will be. One of the reasons we’re not very good at it is that
anytime we don’t understand someone, any time they scare us or
disappoint us or they trigger our own anxieties or even when we just
feel sorry for them, we fictionalize them, we make stories up as to
who they are and what they’re about. And sometimes those stories
are bad enough they veer into prejudice, racism, misogyny, etc.
Perhaps if we were more aware of how we fictionalize other people,
we’d do it a lot less.
This
question is, I’ll admit, something of an old chestnut, but it’s
one I’ve yet to reconcile for myself. I’m not a fan of the term
‘horror,’ as describing what I either like or the audience I’d
like to attract. As both reader and writer, Robert Aickman’s use of
the word ‘strange’ is more my starting point; where the ‘weird
shit’ that occurs is almost supplementary, from left-field, rather
than the driving force of the tale. What do you think of the term
‘horror’ whenever critically applied to your own work?
SRT:
I’ve been back and forth on this question over the years. In part
because of its association with movies, “horror” has come to
imply this big emotional response, this open-mouthed,
hands-in-the-air, heart-stopping response to something
incomprehensibly terrible. Well, that doesn’t fit what I write at
all, and it doesn’t fit most of what I like to read.
I do like
Aickman’s “strange stories,” and to a certain degree I like
“the weird,” but we can get into endless conversations as to
actually what these terms mean. In fact, currently we seem to be
drowning in terms attempting to pinpoint the various shadings of this
literature: “Smart horror” and “Elevated horror” and “the
weird” and “dark suspense” and “bizarro” and “dark
fantasy,” etc. And in the end they really don’t seem to clarify
anything.
But,
whatever we do, the label “horror” never seems to go away. That’s
the one that sticks, inaccurate or not. And I have to say I have
loved a great many things over the years with that label emblazoned
on the spine. So I suppose I have come to just accept the term. Call
my work “horror,” but if you really want to know what I’m about
just read the stories.
Of
the current generation, who are your own favourite short tale authors
who you feel are woefully underrated or underexposed?
SRT:
There are so many—it’s a golden age for this literature in the
short form. As for underrated or underexposed, it depends on the
context—very few names seem to be known everywhere. But here’s a
sampling of people I like to read: Caitlin Kiernan, Simon Stranzas,
Lynda Rucker, John Langan, Kristi DeMeester, Nathan Ballingrud, Mark
Valentine, Jeffrey Ford, too many to name, really.
How
far are you into your latest project and can you hint as to its form
or content?
SRT:
I’m playing with a lot of things. I just finished a short story I’m
very proud of, “The Parts Man,” which will be in The
Valancourt Book of Horror Stories
this Fall. Also coming this Fall is my short story “Thanatrauma,”
another one I’m very proud of, in New
Fears 2.
In terms of books, I’m half-way through finishing a YA horror
novel, Summerdark,
and I’m working regularly on the novel Bodies
& Heads,
a rather strange extension of my short story of the same name that
was in The
Book of the Dead.
It’s hard to say how much I’ve completed on that because I know
I’ll be doing a lot of rewriting. Maybe 35%?
Huge thanks to Steve for the giving of his time.
See the Tems' official site here: http://www.m-s-tem.com/tems/blog1.php/home
All The Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma, Undertow Publications
Priya Sharma describes herself in her day job
as a doctor and general practitioner, having formerly studied
medicine at university. Certainly, her debut collection reveals an
interest in biological transformation and its effect upon personal
relationships. Her best more
precisely invoke what the back cover refers to as her melding of
'myth and ontology.' On a personal level, this is what I try to
achieve in a strand of my own; where an individual in the present
cannot – either by choice or design – surpress their past or true
nature. This is the overarching theme hiding in plain sight behind
the fantasy. Beside this, the bonds of love, lust and loss play out
in familial situations.
'The
Crow Palace' refers to 'the altar of the childhood rituals that bound
us'; a bird-table gradually constructed in increasing layers, over
years, by the father of twins, and possibly at the expense of their
own home.
In
'Egg,‘ a young woman's infertility is bargained away for the
promise of motherhood when a witch with ambiguous intent offers her a
daughter; except this child is in an egg. Once the shell breaks, she
gradually bonds with the offspring as she would any daughter. Yet,
this is only the first test of her commitment. Sharma posits an
interesting dilemma; the strength of a mother's love in the face of
her spawn being a different species.
'The
Sunflower Seed Man' sees the secret of a sunflower, planted by the
late husband and father buried beneath it, appear to fulfill its
unknown promise from the perception of his wife, desperately mourning
his loss.
In 'The
Englishman,‘ the most affecting tale, Kris Sharma has been away
from India for twenty-five years. On his return to the country, his
wife and old life having passed, he wants to know who he now is and
where he now belongs. In his quest for identity, he stumbles upon an
answer that, ironically, subsumes it. The title then is also ironic,
in that it recognises his definition as one kind of 'Englishman' by
the Asian and another kind in England itself. Such a tale, with its
nod to the human condition, reveals Sharma as a definite cut above
most of her contemporaries.
'The
Nature Of Bees' is a personal favourite. At an age-old family
community that harvests honey, a woman falls for a handsome, sensual
male whose covert intention is revealed as much wider than she could
have foreseen. (I appreciated the false sense of security intimated
in his depiction as a louche romantic).
'Fabulous Beasts' is something of a domestic drama as a father with a
history of violence, having served his time, is released back to the
family home. His view of reintergrating-into-society is to continue
his psycho-sexual dominance from where he left off. However, his
growing children share an ability his self-serving mind could never
encompass.
Sixteen
tales for a debut collection feels excessive. Fortunately, Sharma is
one of those cut-above new voices from whom the best harbour prose, as beautiful as it is visceral, that elevates them above mere horror.
Pan Review Of The Arts - No. 8 will be here in July
