Governments can and must help artists to get a fair deal, the legendary lyricist and composer Van Dyke Parks tells Carl Rowlands
VAN DYKE PARKS is a composer, arranger and lyricist. He is possibly best known for his collaboration with the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson on Smile – the "lost" album that attained mythical status. As a solo artist, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, including Song Cycle. There is also Jump! – a musical based on the Uncle Remus stories. Parks is considered a master of Americana, incorporating folk, calypso and more into his musical visions. As well as the Beach Boys, he's worked with a formidable array of artists, including Harry Nilsson, Ry Cooder, The Byrds and Little Feat.
With his support for the formation of the Featured Artists Coalition, a campaigning group aiming to ensure fair treatment for musicians, Parks is ideally placed to consider how they can earn a living from their art in the digital age. And I also asked his opinion about the dispute between Google and the Performing Rights Society, which has seen YouTube blocking music videos from Britain.
"The media draw attention to isolated cases of car mechanics being fined for listening to the radio or demands placed on children for singing Christmas carols. But such niceties are beside the point in the urgency surrounding copyright protection. Instances of collections on Christmas songs performed by needy children are the rare anomaly. We have a spate of real copyright abuses, stemming from both the new techno potential for pirating and the general lassitude it has produced among consumers."
So what is needed in the current climate? "Regarding royalties, we need to focus on the enforcement of guaranteed author and artist rights. The arts are in financial straits. The economic recession has hit all aspects of arts funding, worldwide. At the same time, copywriters and patent holders are under siege from such piracy as we see today. I know no one who hasn't conspired. Yet the question isn't just economic. It's a question of ethics, too.
"In all global sectors, the developed countries were at the forefront of creating statutory protections, as well as leading the commodification of intellectual property rights. Ironically that's where one finds a new cavalier public mindset. The 'Average Joe' has come to accept it. Although unlimited 'free use' has its upside, it abandons the legal principles which fostered invention, whether through patent or copyright. Creators have always been given a voice setting the price of their produce. Kiss that goodbye, if you will.
"Now we see mass duplication of songs available without regard to royalty. What started out as a problem for the imploding music industry in the 1990s has now spread to all aspects of the entertainment industry. The computer age has spawned the malaise whereby you can get anything for nothing. We are all caught in its web."
Parks stresses that the neglect for property rights is a problem that has grown exponentially. "It started roughly in the 1950s, coincidental to the sale of universal rights of the transistor to Japan. With that pivotal utility in hand, Asia's imitative engineering talent framed copyright and patent infringement as a national security priority concern in the United States.
"Its implications are now enormous – from transportation to pharmaceuticals and even the field of journalism. The news industry built much of its reputation on its lack of bias, uncontaminated by skewed commercial obligations. Reportage now suffers from online availability, threatening its ability to present facts, uncontaminated by corporate interest. You may now kiss off real news.
"Meanwhile, writers are getting less and less – less than 'Pennies from Heaven'. In 1900, a loaf of bread cost 10 cents in the US. A telephone call was a nickel. Sheet music for a song equalled a loaf of bread. In those days, this was 10 cents to be split equally by a publisher and the writer – a sum arrived at, in large part, through the urging of Mark Twain and following a joint session of Congress on the subject of authors' statutory rights.
"One hundred and eight years later, even given inflationary increases, in an age when that same loaf of bread now costs 10 times what it did when Mark Twain made his convincing arguments, the song royalty rate is almost a tenth of what it was then."
So who will now subsidise the arts? "That's a damned good question, although late in coming and doubtless lost on the average YouTube or Google fanatic. In the US still reeling from the anti-intellectualism of the George Bush era, it surely isn't the bankrupt arts endowments. Nor is it the government, shying from anything that would look 'socialistic'.
"Royal patrons once fostered the classical era in music, back when Bourbon lords could toss scraps to shut up the dispossessed. Yet they haven't been replaced by similarly noble or prescient patrons. Instead, phalanxes of legal attorneys, obsessed only with the corporate progress of profit and the monetary gains of their distributors, have cut the fees of artists and authors down to a fractional and irreducible creative slice of the economic pie.
"There's no doubt that the music business today wouldn't dare contemplate the investment that was made in such works as Pet Sounds or Rubber Soul. Kiss goodbye to such analogue raptures – and the attendant livelihood of so many symphonic players, at the end of their tethers to mortgages."
Parks takes the view that any solution to all this must rest entirely on government enforcement of laws on the books, with amendments to protect and serve the arts and those who benefit from them – and that's all of us.
"The arts are the property of the artists who struggled, did without and devoted themselves to a certain truth that would justify their nominal payment expectations.
"When Johannes Gutenberg came up with 'movable print", he created the Age of Enlightenment. His first words in that new medium were not 'This is mine' or 'Take it for nothing'. His first words were 'Fiat Lux' – 'Let there be light'.
"A healthy public discourse needs to shine light on the crisis now. Such a bright light must come through efforts to put an end to this pattern of monopoly, as in American cultural imperialism run amok, and its adverse impact." Parks says the very survival of the arts is at stake – as is their role to question authority, entertain, confirm and console."
He concludes: "Google needs a proper mix of approval for what they've achieved and an admonishment for what they are trying to do now. These are simply the opinions of a composer and arranger, whose monthly rental allowance is absolutely at the mercy of such progress. I wish it were otherwise."
Carl Rowlands is a freelance journalist. Van Dyke Parks' albums Jump! and Song Cycle are available from online retailers
