SHOULD RECORD COMPANIES PAY FOR KNIFE CRIME? by barry hutchinson

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SHOULD RECORD COMPANIES PAY FOR KNIFE CRIME?
by barry hutchinson

Music has influenced the way we live our lives for decades and record companies have never been behind the door in letting the public know how much their product has changed our lives. Pop music since the introduction of rock n roll in the 1950’s has helped to create the youth’s image and behaviour sometimes completely taking control of their lifestyles. However if you cast your musical interests further back in time, music has helped to evolve our social history from the classical era to the Charleston of the roaring ‘20’s. Record companies have continually used this marketing ploy to promote their product to generations of our youth to make huge sums of revenue for themselves, while society has had to pick up the bill both financially and by loss of life. Shyness has never been a part of the record industry’s image but controversial issues have been paramount to promote a new genre of music or artist, non so obvious as the punk rock invasion. Can record companies now say there is no link to the gang culture society has to contend with today when they have been so forward informing the public that their product has changed the world so many times in the past.

Record companies promote not just the music and lyrics, but merchandise and in addition the image of that artist, in this day and age of the money making machine, very few artists can choose their own image or promotion. Yet it is these major four products that can have such a devastating affect on both our youth and the way it effects the lives of millions of people in the UK. Gun culture, drug culture and gang culture images and clothing do damage to not just the kids themselves but also the area around them, from hanging around street corners and anti social behaviour to how they calculate what is acceptable in life between right or wrong. Nothing is new, after all we’ve had hippies, teddy boys, mods n rockers, punks and many other youth cultures but none so damaging to everyday life as this current trend, every day we see in the papers more violence by gangs to innocent people. Perhaps we should be more tolerant, after all, if you were twenty years old in 1967, the summer of love, you will now be sixty, so that old woman in the post office queue could have been taking LSD and dishing out free love to all and sundry, in a Cannabis smoked filled wigwam at the Isle Of Wight rock festival, or that man walking the street with his walking stick, perhaps he was a rocker, meeting up at the Ace café and racing to the next coffee bar on his Dunstall Dominator down the Old Kent Road with a Sunday excursion to Brighton for a bit of fun with the Mods on the multi mirrored hair dryers, Yet we always think of older people growing up on a diet of Glenn Miller or Matt Monroe. So what’s changed today?

Music has always had connections with the dark part of human society but as a bi product but these days artists who will remain un-named openly promote it to sell music in a blatantly obvious way with the hard man image. Add this to the facts that although we live in a time of more modern technology for catching criminals

The police are seen more as a tax collection agency for the government and local councils than a law enforcement agency, full prisons, soft judges and solicitors who would get Jack The Ripper off on a technicality if it lined their pockets enough is it any wonder that kids seem to think they are above the law.

As the music industry has shown time and time again that it will protect its own interests when its revenue is at stake, conning artists to back them due to the fact they will not get paid for their work from illegal downloads and not reminding them of the millions artists have lost to record companies in the past, this is despite the fact that artists have more income producing streams than record sales like advertising and merchandising. It was the record companies themselves who were losing the most with extinction on the horizon. With this form of promotion that the record companies are currently engaged in and the lyrics actively making gang lifestyles an attractive proposition then should the industry chip in with the cash its earning from this image and help to stop this gang crime?

The time has come to say enough is enough of people living in fear while others profit from their misery and throw open this argument to both the industry and the general public.

Author's Biography:

I am based in the UK and specialise in articles about the UK, cars,motor bikes and local history

Posted on: August 25,2008

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