Their songs have never really been more than surface level politics. A few anti war songs (and limiting that to very old wars so they're not seen as taking a stance on anything current that might be controversial), anti nuke songs, anti corruption (while not going into detail what they mean by that). Stuff they think everyone will agree with.
edit: Fixed typo. That was really triggering me after a while.
Exactly, they’re partly infamous for suing Napster. Not sure why people now think they’re going to jump on a political bandwagon.
It’s good to have a cause that you believe in, but cancelling people just because they don’t want to be a platform for it is just trying to limit pluralism
My husband and I were talking about how the internet was to our 8 year old a few weeks ago and now he “understands” what Napster, Limewire, and BitTorrent is 💀
“Here’s what Lars got wrong, and why he took so much criticism at the time: that suing Napster into oblivion was the answer. That course of action was never going to be fruitful, because once the can of worms was open — once the internet existed inside peoples’ homes, basically — it was a foregone conclusion that music would eventually be greatly devalued. It’s that simple: once the means of distribution changed, the record companies and rights holder could no longer maintain their price controls, and the floodgates were open. Lars is not a genius for recognizing what every music consumer with a computer at the time also knew. What was the expected result? Sue the internet out of existence to maintain the dominance of CDs forever? It makes no sense at all.
Which is why when people say that “Lars was right” they’re merely stating the obvious. But that’s not what everyone was saying he was wrong about in the first place! When people criticize Lars for how he handled Napster, they’re saying that no course of action, legal or otherwise, was ever going to halt music downloading (and eventually streaming), so complaining about Napster — and doing so quite loudly, and at great expense — was always a fool’s errand. Once Napster was taken down, Kazaa and Limewire popped up in their place… the trend was unstoppable! A game of whack-a-mole. Because you can’t get in the way of progress.
So: Lars was not right. Lars was wrong. He was wrong to sue Napster and launch a public relations campaign against it, because that was never the answer. It took several years for the technology to catch up, but streaming services were always inevitable, too, and no amount of high-powered lawyers were ever going to stop that. With the gates of distribution lowered, there was nothing anyone would be able to do about the resulting lowered income from recorded music.
I’ve been saying this for years, but it bears repeating: the period lasting roughly from 1950 through 2000 was an aberration, not the norm. At no other time in history prior to that had musicians been able to sell their recorded music at great profit, and at no point in the future will they be able to again. It was a blip, a spike, a rarity that that was ever able to happen. Streaming is the course correction, not the downfall.”
He should have said nothing because now he made it political. If you just want to be a dancing puppet on stage don't tell everyone let them figure it out with the performance.
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u/Iggy_Slayer 9h ago edited 7h ago
Their songs have never really been more than surface level politics. A few anti war songs (and limiting that to very old wars so they're not seen as taking a stance on anything current that might be controversial), anti nuke songs, anti corruption (while not going into detail what they mean by that). Stuff they think everyone will agree with.
edit: Fixed typo. That was really triggering me after a while.