#music

The Mind Owned - The story of traditional music versus the modern music industry staking out the mind as territory

The mind is territory and it can be owned.

At least in today's world it can through copyright and the force of law.

The mass perception is programmed through repetition. To control the mediums that repeat the data into the mass perception is to own the vehicle that can edit the mind and its collective base programming.

Traditional music was once a way to preserve culture. Through songs that no one could really own but were owned by everyone within that culture, customs carried on, and people then repeated these songs onto the next generation.

When a new song is born and it catches as a song worth repeating, then it is repeated and it also becomes part of the cultural repertoire.

Modern popular music is no different, however with controlled media seemingly meaningless songs find a seat into core conditioning of the collective mind the same way traditional/folk music once did.

Controlled media in this sense is the ability to market a symbol through repetition in popular public mediums; which is dependent on ownership of that medium, the amount of money in one's pocket to push that symbol divided by the present value of that symbol in the group mind.

The controllers of the media in effect have control of the ability to imprint new group conditioning through repetition.

Look at Coca Cola for example. A useless product that has no nutritional value (it actually causes disease) that has become an international cultural icon and it is accepted without question to have huge banners at all major events, whether it be music, sport or charity; and plastered onto every spare space it can smear its marketing faeces onto in every major town and city. One of the latest advertisements which I have seen plastered in Thessaloniki in Greece, Perth in Australia and Copenhagen features both a male and a female motioning toward to an upright bottle with their mouths open indicating a possible commencement of fellatio.

Modern popular music in the modern age has become the same thing. Seemingly useless crap that holds no substance, yet is deemed valuable because of the manipulation of the rules of the group mind through the media - dependent on a public that remains unaware of their nature and their tendency to behave as a group; all the while the public being conditioned from birth with the belief they are individuals who are making individual decisions living in a 'free' society.

So the group mind is like a country divided in territory by corporations, products, governments, religions, belief systems and culture.

By all rights it holds the cultural heritage of an era and is deemed an 'iconic' song in which the group mind collectively 'owns'.

It is a modern traditional song. Programmed into the group perception by mass repetition under favourable circumstances all thanks to marketing geniuses of the era.

But, here's the catch, it is 'owned' by the corporation. The corporation enforces its 'ownership' using the force of physical laws in a country. Through our conditioning into the system or 'rights' and our collective tacit consent to this system it effectively 'owns' a piece of something that is collectively owned. That is, it owns a guaranteed trigger or switch in consciousness that, should anyone want to or try to use it (this collectively owned traditional song) must pay the corporation per use with money = physical labour (well, for the majority of us not born with it, or not having the skills to swindle it through 'smart business'). So for something that cannot be inherently owned, through the invisible fences put in our minds in this 'free' society, it IS 'owned'.

And by no means am I suggesting you go out immediately and copy everyone's work and then try and sell it as yours. There is a place to give credit where it is due, it helps us collectively to gain a system of reference points by which to gain a constantly perfecting picture of reality.

Ownership of the mind is corporate slavery. To understand how the group mind works and how our individual minds are affected by the group mind on an unconscious level is a good place to start research to become self-aware. Pick up a text book on group psychology and if you are like any normal person, you should be shocked at what you're reading. The level of sentience or conscious decision making actually present in a public that believes they are all sentient is possibly below 1 percent of the population.

Copyright, although sounding great to assist everyone in protecting their work, is only in effect able to protect those that have the money to take those to court that have done the wrong thing.

So while, in the modern society of the hipster, the 'individual' is bandied about as some kind of modern cultural saviour, we actually live under a very intense kind of invisible mental slavery where entire swathes of group mind territory has been claimed by corporations who are willing to police their territory with the long arm of the law.

Consider what kind of laws are to be passed by corporations that own such music through international trade agreements only answerable to international courts run by the corporations themselves. The TPP (Trans-Pacific-Partnership) in Australia for example.

If the strict copyright laws that are in these agreements are passed, 'Hotel California' (a modern traditional music - a piece of mind territory - a conditioned trigger in the collective bag of tricks) won't even be allowed to be played on the street by a busker.

It's not just music that we should be aware of, it's anything cultural and that is anything that is in our group perception that we relate to as a group. As soon as something becomes popular enough, it is owned by the group. The 'creator' acted as the group to seed the idea and can not use it to pump up their ego any longer than the introductory period.

But everybody wants to be god you see. Everyone plays a game of power, wanting to have some kind of eternal life through imprinting their personality through a creation or discovery into the group mind. The desire to never be forgotten. The desire for power.

What we all share and use on a daily basis cannot be owned. It's a fundamental flaw in the present system. But I do believe it is not a mistake either.

Free the mind with self-awareness. Free your own mind first, understand what parts of your mind is the group mind, then assist others in finding the same. With enough people on board, real freedom will become part of our collective bag of tricks and this kind of invisible chains can never hold anyone ever again.

If a desire for power caused this mess, shouldn't appeasing our need to control others alleviate it? In this discovering the personal insecurities that caused us to need this power in the first place. Then is the solution then, not to be the 'chosen one' as the media constantly puts in your head through a thousand super hero films but just to learn to be ordinary and be satisfied by being ordinary?

The mind is not territory and it cannot be owned, though we constantly manifest physical representations of this greed to try to lock the mind down from the outside in...

What is it really to be a rebel?

Comments · 11

@vibesforlife(65)· 2660d
You are so right with it, most of the minds today are controlled by either repetition or fear/force of law. But its a sad reality that 99% of alive human beings are following this pattern. Including myself, though I am trying to break free from it but its tough given the society, the conditions and the acceptance criterias :(
@montycashmusic(71)· 2666d
A reply from my ex-band member in a band called Sink in 2007-08 called Tim in Perth, Western Australia, not yet on steemit:

I agree with everything you've said. A desire for power, I believe, is an inherent human trait. Unfortunately the education most of us receive doesn't prepare us for understanding this aspect of ourselves and so this desire leads us to do some pretty awful things. Conversely, having a lack of power in our lives can lead people to lashing out in despair, which can also involve doing horrible things. Creativity, or creation might be the better word, I feel is the most effective way to fulfill the need to feel powerful and also the least harmful. Creating something where there was not something before can give a person that feeling, whether it be constructing a physical object, writing music, giving joy/laughter to someone who's unhappy, anything like this I consider to be creation. When a person performs the act of creation, but doesn't stop to enjoy the fulfillment that comes with this, it's usually because they've fallen into the trap of listening to the group mind (corporate group mind?) which says "this is not enough, you must do more, you must be number 1, you must be on top". On an individual level, if you listen to and really take on board the praise coming from people one to one, you'll never feel like it's not enough. You'll likely even find contentment (the true definition of happiness).

I've always been aware of the group mind, I understand how it works, but I've always been outside it from as far back as I can remember. In exploring my recent revelation of being Asperger's, or on the autism spectrum, I find it interesting to note that autistic people appear to be naturally immune to the group mind. Medically, autism spectrum "disorder" is widely defined as a developmental disorder that generally results in a lack of social awareness/ability. I'm suggesting that the social problems may stem from this natural immunity to the group mind. Autistic people are often unaware of the group mind, or simply can't comprehend why it's something to be followed or engaged in. They will either not engage at all, or else attempt to take part without properly understanding it which often leads to awkward interactions with people who are part of the group mind. Both of these lead to social rejection and society as a whole deeming them to lack the ability to socialise "correctly". Perhaps in an age where the group mind is proving to be controlled and directed by a powerful few, we should be looking to the autists/aspies to lead the way in breaking from the group mind.
@montycashmusic(71)· 2666d
Here is a reply from my beautiful friend Maeve Rose who lives in Copenhagen not on Steemit:

Thanks for sharing. Reading this made me think a lot about the relationship between the environment and our bodies: how the things we consume - including what we feed our minds - have a direct influence on us, how we feel and develop. Modern music fills me with dis-ease.

Coca-cola is a very fitting metaphor for modern music: "A useless product that has no nutritional value (it actually causes disease) that has become an international cultural icon..." Modern music is packaged and sold as a complete product. It's cheap, oddly familiar, and addictive. Quantity over quality, width over depth.

Traditional songs, on the other hand, change over time. Old songs are shaped by the minds and hands of several generations of anonymous musicians who each imprint a part of their own struggles and their own stories onto the artwork. There's a subliminal, grounded and nourishing quality to it that's difficult to replicate. The music is living, it's pruned and cared for like a tree, and it's never really 'complete', because it's tool for storytelling that is meant to grow and be passed on. Over time, a song can come up again in several forms, barely recognisable, but connected at the root to a single source, ready to be shaped by new musicians.

Copyright is supposed to protect the rights of artists and musicians, but as you mentioned, more often than not it's being used to protect the interest of companies, the middlemen, the 'procurers'. A modern, popular musician is asked to play the role of a prostitute more than a artist. Selling something: a worthless product. Their role is to repeat and perpetuate the ideals of modern culture in a way that seemingly feels as 'edgy' as music was 50 years ago. These 'prostitutes' don't have a say or a hand in creating the songs, they're often a victim of their environment and as oblivious as the consumer. Fame is a mechanism to rise an individual up in order to make the product known.

Platforms like Spotify make a killing off of 'loaning out' songs for cheap, often without the consumer realising it (since it's a subscription business model). Free platforms like YouTube turn a profit through advertising, sponsorship, and by suggesting new videos based on the data they've already collected, keeping listeners hooked and stuck on the website. This phenomenon brings to mind a line I heard a lot when listening to various individuals talk about cyber security over the years: "If a product is free, then YOU are the product."

We should be wary of the things we put into our bodies and minds. As if I needed another reason to dislike and distrust modern music; you've illustrated exactly what it is that modern music does and what exactly it wants to capitalize on. The mind. The only logical thing to do is to acknowledge it, to avoid the mainstream and to look elsewhere for creative nourishment. There are hundreds of thousands of musicians who create for the love of creating. Even if you listened to each song back to back, all day every day, and until the end of your life, you would never hear it all. It's those people who are worth listening to. That in and of itself is a beautiful thing.

The desire to never be forgotten is the desire for immortality, or power over death. The irony is that spending too much time building something (physical or mental) to be remembered by can make us forget to live. That's why it's so important for the act of creating to be a fulfilling act, enriching and euphoric. A moment lived, a moment captured.
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@arcange(79)· 2668d
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@montycashmusic(71)· 2668d
A reply from my friend Tom in Australia not on Steemit,

That was a good read, well structured. The first four paragraphs paints the foundation in black and white and from there you have done well moving through the rest of the article towards the desire to be extra ordinary, like we all should pimp out our lives and join the pop circus.

I agree with your view, the modern evolution of music from my perspective seems to be like that of a funnel that concentrates down to one category/output which is popular pop music, and as you wrote void of substence. Music, like all forms in the family of artistic expression has great power through experiencing it. We all know the times we experienced a piece of cinema, music, a novel etc that shook us down to our core and in hindsight seen how that touched us in ways that helped shape our perspective on life, positively speaking.

But as you noted that coin can be easily flipped to a negative impact, I do wonder what perspective I would have if being born a generation later with the influx of 'smart' devices and being bombareded with the latest pop culture at a much earlier age.

Growing up with Disney and later MTV helped influence my enjoyment of stupidity, of course it wasn't all bad but I could have invested much of my time elsewhere but through a developed interest in cinema where I discovered good filmmaking I was able to sort out the shit from shinola. As long as its consumed it will be reproduced, I suggest to get off the main roads and explore.
@montycashmusic(71)· 2668d
@belfastshaman Do you feel that spiritual beliefs have been commodified in a similar fashion, wearing down their meaningfulness?
@montycashmusic(71)· 2668d
My notes this morning.. It's called culturally endorsed corporate slavery. Delightful innit?
@montycashmusic(71)· 2668d
Here's a comment from my friend Omar in California not on Steemit:

desire for power... that's the issue

it's the same desire i saw in self-help new agers

we don't know how to be non-fascist, because whether it is in conservative, alternative or spiritual forms, we still seek the aggrandizement of power

the buddhistic method is one way to jettison the issue of the desire for power... but then there are other ways to channel it - maybe with what you concluded in your blog

i can't really see a truly global-social unified channeling of this type of desire. but for sure i can imagine a network of small centers of such reformulated group-desire...

i like the idea of being ordinary

but not ordinary in the sense of dominant cultural norms by resurrecting ordinary itself - that being truly ordinary, a divided vulnerable compassionate being, is in essence extraordinary in relation to the anesthetic mode that is spreading now

for example, when i am in villages in 'underdeveloped' regions, i meet extraordinary characters in ordinary garb"
@hlezama(74)· 2669d
Very thought-provoking piece.

Modern popular music in the modern age has become the same thing. Seemingly useless crap that holds no substance, yet is deemed valuable because of the manipulation of the rules of the group mind through the media - dependent on a public that remains unaware of their nature and their tendency to behave as a group;

I think that the same principle applies to movies, fashion and many other cultural artifacts that have been planted on people's mind as if they were in control of those ideas, as if they had actually come up with those goals and opinions. Being a rebel means to be able to assert that Avengers End Game is a crappy movie, not worth the hype, even if that cost you some friends and relatives :)
@curie(77)· 2669d
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