Music

I went to a fantastic concert this weekend, and there were some interesting intellectual property issues at play during the show.

• The bad: the way event staff were pulling people out of the audience for taking pictures and video on their phones.
• The ugly: the way Soundgarden closed their set with anti-veteran rhetoric.
• The good: the entire set by Nine Inch Nails, including especially the lighting design and the final three songs before the encore.

Lauralea and I had great seats to see Soundgarden open for Nine Inch Nails. Soundgarden did their usual loose, loud, distorted thing, and it was good, especially when they did their standards: “Outshined” was exceptional. The new material wasn’t impressive, but it wasn’t awful, except when Chris Cornell closed the set with a specifically anti-soldier and anti-veteran rant that gave no sense he had any idea what service members and veterans do. I have no problem with people indicting the various pros and cons of military organizations and military policy as dictated by the brass and the military’s civilian leadership (including the Defense Authorization Acts passed by overwhelming majorities from both parties in the House and Senate that have resulted in widespread concern about the police now being able to purchase military hardware; a concern I share). I do have a problem with Cornell setting up the song “Beyond the Wheel” with incoherent anti-military rambling and uninformed received opinion.

The intellectual property stuff: there were event staff looking for people with their phone cameras up, and apparently if one took too much footage, one was forcibly hauled out of the audience by large men. It seemed to me as if the decision point had to do with the proportionality aspect of copyright law’s fair use doctrine, so I thought I was fairly safe snapping a few discreet stills rather than filming long stretches of the show, but it was a weird feeling of double surveillance: one girl gave the peace sign to the stage while at the same time trying to hold her phone up high and take video of the bouncers who were dragging her out.

There was an interesting moment when a NIN crew sound-check guy with neck-hanging official credentials came around with his iPad doing localized equalizer checks and the event staff clearly didn’t know what to do with him. (The NIN sound was fantastic.) I wonder whether Washington State’s SLAPP law might apply to folks who might use their phone cameras as an exercise of free speech at such events, and also whether prosecutions for EULA violations in relation to public speech might violate SLAPP laws. I’d be curious to hear what others might think.

(Click pictures to embiggen in a new window.)

In a curious twist, at one point, Cornell took a break between songs to exclaim to the audience, “Hey, I just saw [superstar Major League Baseball pitcher] Randy Johnson in the front row taking a picture of us playing! That’s awesome! Randy, this one’s for you.” I forget which song it was — I register most of Cornell’s lyrics as dorky, though I do like that California/Minnesota couplet — maybe one of the new ones; “Live to Rise” or “Been Away Too Long”? That was the other thing: with Soundgarden’s distortion and bad PA, neither Lauralea nor I could make out any of the words unless we knew them.

There’s the cranky stuff out of the way: done with the bad and the ugly. On to the good. NIN opened their set with Lauralea’s new favorite, “Copy of A,” and went through two hours of a great, tightly-rehearsed wide-ranging mix from all their albums. “Copy of A” started with Trent Reznor alone on a bare white stage with a sequencer and the house lights up, and the band members entering the stage one by one, and then moving into “Sanctified” and “Came Back Haunted” as the house lights went down and the spotlights came up. As the show progressed, the lighting design grew in bombast and elaborateness, with a final total of seven ten-foot-tall pixelated LED screens moving around in sync with the band in addition to moving and computer-synced strobes, LEDs, and spots from the sides and rear and front.

I like “Hurt” OK, which was the encore, but it’s not one of my favorites. The band came out before the encore and noted that Saturday night was the final date of their tour and they would be going on hiatus for a while, and then launched into the fantastic final three songs: explosive, searing renditions of “Wish,” “Bite the Hand That Feeds,” and “Head Like a Hole.” I listened to “Wish” again after the show, and thought the background industrial noise-bursts that Reznor later made a trademark were maybe the first time mainstream audiences had heard the type of stuff Einstürzende Neubauten and Skinny Puppy had been doing for at least five years before.

All in all, I still think Chris Cornell is kind of dumb, the intellectual property stuff was interesting to watch, Trent Reznor is amazing, and it was a great night.