I heard this morning on NPR that AC/DC is joining such distinguished ranks as The Eagles (“I just hate the fucking Eagles man!”) by releasing their upcoming album exclusively through America’s bastion of trash Walmart.

To me WalMart is the shopping equivalent of Jeff Foxworthy. If Walmart was a band they’d be gdosmack or three doors down. Wallmart is like making jenkum* from what you find in a Nascar raceway’s public bathroom and then huffing it.

In other words, found memories of the band in my youth or not, I guess they’ve gone from being non-entities to being on the list.

You know what list.

I did a lot of thinking about ACDC after hearing this, as I really don’t know where I stand on them anymore. Like the bands in my previous post, it has been well over ten years since they have even really existed in my world, and so I don’t know exactly how I feel about anything they’ve done other than the handful of classic tunes that served as fodder for many drunken debauch’s while growing up (my first and only bar fight was to the tune of Hell’s Bells). What I do know is that any band or artist who releases an album exclusively through any major retailer pisses me off. That’s the last thing the recording industry needs, and when I hear all these people whine with negative conjecture about what is to come of tactal music sales and how downloading threatens profit and yada yada yada I have to say you reap what you sow.

Sure, in the short term a move like this may be an answer to some of those issues, but in the long term it most definitely is not. If I wanted the album, why wouldn’t I rip it if I got the chance after the band tried to tell me where to buy it? I prefer to shop at non-major chains, and if a band I did care about tried this it would piss me off too. But then again I guess maybe you could say that at this point anyone who is going to buy the 2008 ACDC album would probably not be the type to care so deeply about what kind of stores they patronize. A band like ACDC has joined the spectacle, become a major blip on Corporate America’s radar as a dinosaur and an institution, and of course the stereotype that the older people get the less passionate they feel about issues like this, especially if they are still keeping up with ACDC is ignorant and dangerous, but I think, not without some precedent.

I know that’s terrible, and of course it doesn’t apply in all situations. As I age I have not lost that spark of wanting to support the independent, nor have many of my friends. But as the industry, especially the retail aspect of it, continues to shrink exponentially we all have grown at least a little weary of the fight. Supporting those indies is getting harder and harder, and although ACDC is not on my radar, its moves like theirs that makes that the reality of the situation for all of us. Living in the outskirts of LA I have a choice: drive up to Amoeba or patronize the likes of FYE.

Fuck FYE. Had to get that out of the way up front.

At the same time I have to have a happy median because there are so few indies now and over the last two years there have been MANY albums released that I felt I needed to buy on or around the first day out, and driving back and forth 30+ miles each freakin’ time is just not going to happen. For now I’m lucky in that every time my wife and I have the money we drive up and spend a couple of hours shopping for rarities or what we haven’t acquired yet at Amoeba and the rest of the time I can use the excuse of my nice employee discount at a certain Book/Music/Video chain.

Hypocritical, yes? Realistic? Yes. Meeting my point in the middle, I feel like it. I feel better about where I work than I do about a store like Walmart for many reasons, some may be self-delusions, but not all. But do not think I do not see the danger in my own thinking. But again, this is the reality at the moment. When I lived in Chicago I ONLY shopped at Threshold Music in Tinely Park or Unabused in Bridgeview.

Both those closed.

So what, we have to pick what we feel is the lesser of the evils? I do not have any delusions about the fact that in the end corporations are corporations, and they are all out for our blood.

Don’t believe me?

In 1886 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad that a private corporation was, legally, a ‘natural person’ and as such entitled to the same rights as you or me. When you stop to think about this, that would make Corporations the dominant form of life on the planet Earth for over a century now, and just like any other organism here they have evolved – they’ve done to us as we did to the Earth’s other inhabitants before them and learned how to utilize and exploit us.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ you might say, ‘corporations can’t live and think and breath like we do.’

No?

Once someone can explain to me every nuance of the why’s and wherefore’s of thought, emotion and everything else that makes us think we’re so unique on this planet then you can argue that a massive, extra-dimensional entity like a corporation can’t do the same. Until then, I’ll keep my Mulder-ish thoughts and biases, thank you very much. We can all tell when something unconscious passes between two of our kind or when two animals in close proximity are ‘communicating’, but we are post enlightenment humans and we’re species-centric so we dismiss everything we don’t understand as futile or meaningless. Well, I can’t help but look at globalization as the corporations doing as we did when we began to branch out of our places of origin and migrate and colonize the world.

So, coming back around again the long way, it feels to me like ACDC has kinda sold us out. If they’d done it to beelzebub it would have been cute and in character, but to something so mudane and slovenly as Walmart, well, I hope they enjoy their money and ‘security’. Maybe next they’ll end up doing the soundtrack to the next Toy Story movie, eh?

……..

*Jenkum is a drug made by saving your bodily waste in a container with a balloon over the top of it, living it in the sun long enough for the gases to be released and caught in the balloon, and then, yep! You guessed it, huffing that shit (no pun intended). No I’ve never tried it, no I would never try it. Thanks to Warren Ellis for that depraved bit of sociology.