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Looper's Delight
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Those who beleive that it is less than honest and honorable for musicians to do things for financial reasons are basically making it difficult to impossible for they themselves to make a living in music. Isn't it hard enough already? Once contracts have been signed,a band name is a brand ,and a marketing vehicle. if you want to sell recordings/tickets,packaging is necessary,the package is the vehicle to deliver the goods.Since people in modern industrial countries have been trained to respond to name recognition ( it's called branding -not too different from branding cattle) it is necessary to work with that reality in order to sell recordings/tickets,just as it's necessary to work with the conventions of staging,electrical current standards etc..Now some people in music put everything into packaging ,but there's little or nothing in the box-or it's like cotton candy -tatstes sweet but when you try and swallow it,nothing reaches your stomach ,there's no nutrition.On the other hand I often encounter creative, imaginative intelligent ,soulful artists who put no energy into business .Some of them consider themselves to have artistic purity because they don't stoop to commerce but then have limited time to devote to their art because they have to make money to live,y doing something that they only do for the money.Some purity. Certainly very fine works can be produced with no commercial intent by people who do other work that is satisfying.Well and good but no reason to dismiss folks who are trying to make a living in music.Zappa,according to his autobiography spent years turning out music aimed at teenagers ,and touring the auditorium circuit in a music business he absolutley hated,trying to raise money to hire orchestras to play his serious works. If Fripp was just turning out commercial crap to make money I would consider criticism valid,but to use an established name to sell recordings which are imaginative, creative,original,take artistic chances etc, seems completely reasonable to me.I think in fact an arguement could be made that the Court of era Crimson was a more commercially oriented venture than later incarnations.That music was made to be played in auditoriums for huge audiences.It's great music but it's not hard to think -here are some very talented classically trained musicians that have decided to try their hands at stadium rock-w/ glorious results. The current Crimson certainly doesn't play the big venues.