I am about to have a rant so tune out now if you’ve ever sung Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds while taking a shower and then found some little Magoo type man standing outside your shower curtain with a bill in his hand that states you must now pay copyright fees to the Beatles (what’s left of them). Take a breath (that’s me, not you) while I backtrack. In case you didn’t know, in order to play the radio, a cd, your ipod, mp3, etc., in a public place you must pay a fee to the city in order to obtain an entertainment licence. If you should extend your entertainment to include live music, live performances e.g. spoken word, comedy, open mic, you must pay an additional fee and pray that no one decides to strip off while performing (‘there must be no frontal nudity’ – what happens if someone moons I can’t say). So we pay our dues to create an ambience and hope that it pays off. BUT if I decide to give a stand-up, spontaneous performance of, oooh, let’s say Benny and the Jets, really classic stuff from the man with the big glasses before he got eaten by the lions, I would be obliged to pay an additional licence fee to the corporations representing the artists/writers. Don’t get me wrong – some talented person wrote something beautiful and fully deserves the credit, kudos and money but how far can property rights be extended? If we all started singing ‘we will, we will rock you’ on a busy Saturday in the café, wouldn’t that be an utterly amazing tribute to the late Freddie Mercury – and we would all be grinning like idiots at each other until the little Magoo guy came round demanding that you put 25 cents into the music meter to pay for the pleasure of listening to your own voice. Freddie is dead, so is Luther, Teena, Michael, Teddy, Whitney and the joy we still derive from their music can’t be equated with a dollar amount when we want to lift up our voices and sing with them. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then this is our way of saying we love this music and the talent that made it. Those of you who have been blessed with a voice that can give pleasure to so many, remember how you felt when you first created that song, that sound. Did it fill you with joy? Or was it just about the dollar. P.S. Message to George. You can only paint one Sistine chapel and you painted something so beautiful that it still stands the passage of time. Sing something that makes you happy and when it makes you smile, we will smile too. Dot 2 Dot Café will be open until 5pm this Friday (June 7). Come in and try out our new espresso machine, enjoy a pastry and just breathe for a little while.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 03:17:42 +0000
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