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Our Profit Margin Could Be Your Life

Indie punk band HeWhoCorrupts maximizes profits by eliminating frills like melody or the standard chorus/verse/chorus structure

By Anne Elizabeth Moore

The back of some crappy beer-soaked tavern is not where one expects an awakening of political consciousness. But if you’ve out come to see hardcore punk band HeWhoCorrupts (HWC), you’re going to have one—smoky and sweaty though it may be. At some point late in the evening (or more likely, early in the morning), the CEO of HWC, Thomas Camaro, will… return to article

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    Maybe what it really comes down to is that there are really no new ideas out there anymore. It’s all been done before so art has become nothing more than trying to repackage old ideas. Image is nothing but trying to remake other images into your own.

    Other bands have done the nudity thing, but realized that it gets it the way of the music. Either you’re strippers or professional musicians trying to make it big, the latter becomes the motivation.

    And others have played music with lyrical content of the money theme, nothing new there either. But in consumer capitalism, hypocrisy becomes automatic when a band is trying to make money singing about the sins of money.

    But this bands thoughts on economics are a little off. Corporations are not “fueled by independents” as the objective of corporations (I’m assuming Slania is speaking of the music industry) is to sign bands into the corporate realm, to own them. Further, corporations are always out to either eliminate or squelch the competition or to take over the competition with buyouts. Slania’s band will be ignored by corporations unless HWC becomes popular enough locally to consider as a national band. In that case HWC will be signed and “owned” and you can bet they won’t be playing in the nude anymore.

    United States Posted by Jon B on May 2, 2007 at 11:37 AM
    Page 1 of 1 pages

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Also by Anne Elizabeth Moore
  • The Lessons of the Berlin Wall
  • Embedded in Pink
    Code Pink has become a lightning rod for contemporary activism - from both the right and left.
  • In Condemnation of Opting In
    Our voices are being drowned out by our peers in the supposedly independent media, like Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, who calls Starbucks "the new record store," and music journalists like the Chicago Reader's Miles Raymer, who argued in a piece called "In Praise of Selling Out" that the music industry's decline can be "rescued by corporations that make everything but music"
  • Our Profit Margin Could Be Your Life
    Indie punk band HeWhoCorrupts maximizes profits by eliminating frills like melody or the standard chorus/verse/chorus structure
  • Operation Pocket Full of Wishes
    Cultural intervention at American Girl Place
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