EL&P - Trilogy

The C-faring stranger found another Emerson, Lake, & Palmer album to add to the assortment. If you remember, my love affair with EL&P started way back in 2019 when I heard Tarkus for the first time, and i've salivated over every album i've stumbled across since then. My collection's not complete, but tonight we get to hear Trilogy. It also means we can delve a little deeper into that whole defecting from your birth-country to avoid serious tax-evasion charges thing. England's income tax system is pretty much the same as the US, it's a tiered or bracket system. Everyone pays the same amount of tax in each bracket. Also, contrary to sloppy thinking, your operational expenses get itemized and deducted from your gross income to determine your taxable income. If you made no profit, you get all the money you paid in taxes back as a refund. It's not perfect, but it's not evil either. If there weren't some mechanism for measuring economic activity, then the monetary system would be complete nonsensical gibberish. 

I think the biggest misconception people have is that their taxes pay for all those evil "socialist programs" the Demoncrats invented to screw "the REAL people." That's certainly a reasonable interpretation given how people think and intentionally try to confuse each other, but from a philosophical/structural perspective it's wildly inaccurate. You have to remember that while some people run around doing whatever they feel like doing, other people are charged with trying to predict, accomodate, and compensate for that craziness. There's some real truth to the notion that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, but if you keep at it you eventually reach a plateau where you realize you're actually contributing to some of the problems you complain about. 

My personal opinion is let it crash. Sure it'll suck for some people, but it already sucks for a lot of people. Very few people agree with my opinion, and even fewer will understand my metaphor, but i've given up so just let Joshua play Tic-Tac-Toe with the nuclear warheads until his neural net figures out it's pointless. I'm not happy in that head-space, but what good is lying about it? 

I could keep going, but this is supposed to be an album review. The system in general does what it's supposed to do: force some of the misers to spend and some of the reckless to save. They could do that of their own volition, but they never do. Stagnation is the enemy in the eyes of the Auditors. 

There is, however, a legitimate problem in the world of corporate finance. The problem is that the people with ugly ties have figured out how to take the revenue you generate and invest every penny of it in other things while sticking you, the people doing the work, with the tax burden. Music-wise, it's not the label or the manager or distributor or any of those peoples' responsibility to pay taxes on the revenue you generated in your name, it's yours. That's super easy if you actually have a few million dollars in a couple bank accounts or CDs or other low/no risk liquid assets that you'll never actually consume, but it is 100% impossible if they took your couple mil and stuck it in a hedge fund to bulk up their own portfolio while still reporting the capital gains in your name. Have you ever wondered why certain god-awful bands get all the air-play, all the press, all the TV time, all the everything for no reason when everyone absolutely hates them and there's a thousand more popular bands getting no anything? It's because the former gave their label permission to speculate with their revenue without any financial risk for doing it. 9 platinum albums later, the exec's kids are in Ivy League schools, but you're eating the cheapest peanut butter you can find with a plastic spoon wondering how you'll ever pay the 7-million in back taxes your accountant didn't pay for you at all. EL&P, Bowie, Pink Floyd, every other famous band that complains about financial trouble they mistakenly agreed to be in, i think i even mentioned John Malkovich a year or two ago. When it comes to money, either you're paying me or i'm paying you, and when it comes to a Major Label deal, they've got it so squirreled around that most bands are ecstatic to sign the next 12-million away to pay the measly 3-million their label turned into 9 on the side for themselves. Why did bands like Pearl Jam and Radiohead flip 'em the bird and put their albums online for "name-your-price"? Why did bands like NOFX, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Death Cab for Cutie, and Modest Mouse barely blink when they briefly blipped into the mainstream? Because they were lucky, smart, and popular enough to be able to pay their debts and walk away. 

EL&P didn't defect because 85% of their top-tier earnings was egregious, they defected because they were tricked into giving away the profits from their own sales figures while getting scary letters and phone calls about the legitimate taxes they couldn't pay and being told that's how the game works losers, we own your copyrights, remember? The common misconception was (and still is) that the little bit of songwriter royalties they got to keep were the entire total of their taxable revenue, when in reality those royalties almost certainly fell well short of the tax burden itself, thus necessitating more and more fake generosity in the form of an advance on the next album. We call that a racket.

No, that's not the story of every band or every label, remember that nice A&R lady who negotiated a proper deal for They Might Be Giants, or Danzig trading his coincidentally valuable label name for studio time? It is, however, the common thread in all the stories I've told about British bands under Thatcher's roof: the system and the social order are vastly more valuable than the people they encompass, and the only way to keep the machine running is to take away your ability to compete and succeed on your own merits. Publicly traded companies are the worst in that regard. Wal-Mart's job is to maximize profit for the Walton family and other shareholders for eternity. The eternity part is the only check on their actual operation, they aren't allowed to actually fail anymore. You hate Wal-Mart same as i do, but the sheer ginormity of their distribution power is enough to bankrupt every town or city in which they open a new warehouse. Wal-Mart itself has more economic power than a couple of actual State governments. The spin is that they "managed their growth well," but their actual business strategy is to strategically and systematically deflate geographic markets with sheer purchasing power to drive costs even higher for small local businesses. The average joe simply can't afford to "shop local" without sacrificing an increasing amount of social comfort. The Bottle family stopped eating meals at restaurants years ago.

I feel like i should point out that i'm not screaming these words like a crazy person as i write them. This is my "this is reality" voice. 1.5 million people work for Wal-Mart in the US (2.2 million worldwide). 

Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, DC, Vermont, Wyoming. Those are the States that have less than 1.5 million residents (DC is still a state, even if it has no representation). It sounds bizarre to say Wal-Mart is 3 times more valuable than Wyoming or Vermont, doesn't it? I think that sounds insane. It's true though. More people in the US are employed by Wal-Mart than live in 12 of the 50+1 States, and that's assuming the rest of the country could absord 100% of its peripheral influence if it ceased to exist tomorrow. I don't even want to think about the stockholders who are just pumping their dividend payout back in through the front door, so they never technically "buy" anything ever. At a payout of 2.20 per share, anyone with more than 3,000 shares is making enough to feed a family of 4 all year long for free. It's a generalization, but kids under 10 (and millionaires) eat free.

What does any of that have to do with 3 relatively famous English musicians forming a supergroup of insanity who were selling out 20,000 seat arenas and auditoriums on tour before they ever even set foot in a recording studio? Everything. We always have to look at both sides of the coin as it's making its ascent and descent and chaotically flipping around. From day one, critics (especially American rock critics) wanted to paint EL&P as mindless, masturbatory, self-indulgent lunacy, but the band itself was more concerned about being type cast as a rock band that only plays adaptations of Classical music. Sure that's a big part of what they do, but Greg Lake just wanted to write normal, boring radio-friendly pop hits for a living. He quit King Crimson to play with Emerson, and he hated everything about the Tarkus suite. 

I think the obvious point here is that nobody on the corporate inside of the industry had their hooks in EL&P, so they scrambled to capitalize as quickly and mercilessly as possible. You could call Prog a fad, it certainly fits my own definition, but it's pretty impossible to pretend it was "manufactured." This is what musicians wanted to do instead of Mainstream Pop and Arena Rock, and it caught everybody's attention, even if they weren't keen on participating in the adventure. 

I am keen on it, and this is a fantastic album. It's their 3rd studio album, there's 3 of them, and they do 3 different things. Emerson gets his crazy keyboard calisthenics workout in, Lake gets some lovely adventurish prog-folk to sing, and they do an insane version of Copland's Hoedown from Rodeo. 

Like i said, we have to keep track of which side we're looking at. From one direction, investments are a tool for building up that magic retirement number, but from the other direction you are handing your actual money to someone else to gamble rather than directly supporting your neighbors. Fine if it turns out you win, pretty devastating if you and your 4,000 neighbors don't. In general, those gamblers don't want to lose your money, but the system requires losing your money as penalty for anyone doing a bad job. Logically, they can't grow forever or we'd eventually be one nation under the Waltons. What's the exit strategy for slowly and painlessly balancing the ledger on that 200-billion and climbing? As far as i can tell there isn't one. What good is having all the money if you aren't willing to use it to make problems disappear and/or no one else can afford to buy back any of those capital assets? I think we all know i don't mean the kind of problems a $40 fishing pole or $90 car battery from Walmart can solve. It certainly is an Endless Enigma. Other endless enigmas include 1) did Storm "the pig inflator" Thorgerson actually paint this portrait? 2) are they supppsed to appear conjoined like the Knights who say "Ni!"?, and finally) how terrifying would it be to stumble into the forest and confront all those EL&P clones? I just shivered a little. 

Well, that was a journey. I suppose one good prog deserves another, so join us tomorrow for a Genesis album. Should be fun.

Genesis