The thread for discussing the amazing Life Is A Problem comp on MISSISSIPPI records

another original music comp that the mississippi box draws from: http://www.discogs.com/Various-The-Kampala-Sound-1960s-Ugandan-Dance-Music/release/1429009

and another one: http://www.discogs.com/Various-The-Sound-Of-Kinshasa-Guitar-Classics-From-Zaire/release/1548676

a few tracks by s.e. rogie that have been compiled a few times... including on his own collection: http://www.discogs.com/SE-Rogie-Palm-Wine-Guitar-Music-The-60s-Sound/master/289054

(btw mississippi put out much of this stuff on a few LPs a number of years ago, such as "love is love.")

(which also didn't credit any of the sources.)

i think that's about it (in terms of sources for the tracks on the mississippi box). sorry for overposting but you were getting my results as i was looking through my collection... live!

so if you want an overview of african guitar music, none too imaginatively (and somewhat unethically) compiled but great great great great music nonetheless (indeed my favorite type of music really), and you also want a weird splintery pine box, i'd say go for it. or you can probably find most of the records i linked to above in the interwebs if you look hard. or i can burn you a DVDR or something.

That is hilarious! Is the splintery pine box suppose to add it it's____?

amateurist i love you but you are bringing me down. this thread is just gonna go in loops.

both topical & relevant:

I have no special affection or distaste for collectors over anyone else. I definitely do not produce records for their benefit. I am more interested in reaching out to people who are not aware of this music than the already hip collector. Ultimately, the collectors don’t really need our label. They are
curating their own world just fine without my help. I believe collectors’ frenzy comes from a real place of love for the music, but it can often go to some not-so-healthy places. (I myself have been guilty of unhealthy, obsessive collecting in the past, so I’m allowed to talk smack.)

if you were able to just sit down & google your way towards five original music comps, discover notes for everything else therein, maybe it doesn't need liner notes. like maybe they are no longer a prime function for a box set like this that aggregates material from other comps. & c'mon man should the guy not release it or fuck with his plans because your shelves are the wrong size?

i wish someone would just share the music on MP3 or FLAC (seeing as the musicians aren't being compensated anyway)

idk if you have better intel than me (/that proffered itt & elsewhere) for this but afaict it isn't accurate:

Ah—this old question. It is asked often. We take great care to find as many artists or living relatives of artists as we can, and we always pay them very well—cash in advance of release, no less. You can ask anyone who has ever worked with us. Are some of our records “bootlegs”? I suppose a case can be made that sometimes we didn’t have the absolute legal right to release certain things. Are they morally corrupt? We’ve paid everyone we could find who had anything to do with the actual production of the art, and are always open to paying others as they come on the radar.
More and more we’ve been relying on established labels and archives to license from, such as the Lomax archive, Arhoolie Records, Fat Possum, Sterns Music, Delos Productions and so on. Overall I feel the label is very morally covered, and reasonably legally covered, on all its releases. Mistakes have been made in the past and atonement has been attempted and accepted by those we may have accidentally wronged. WedoourbestandIdaresaythatwearea very stand-up operation that has put more money in artists’ and their families’ pockets than our own.

have no doubt you are gonna be able to get this comp soon on mp3, so it works out pretty good, huh. i really think some of the ethos of MSR is defined in relation to how things are now, in a world in which people's commercial and auditory experience of music has a wider context than 45 releases & LPs. there's a huge value to this stuff being in play and to the wider conversation created by releases like this, the lights they shine on specific artists, &c.

anyway i want this box like a motherfucker

if you were able to just sit down & google your way towards five original music comps, discover notes for everything else therein, maybe it doesn't need liner notes. like maybe they are no longer a prime function for a box set like this that aggregates material from other comps. & c'mon man should the guy not release it or fuck with his plans because your shelves are the wrong size?

1) the problem is that those comps are perhaps easy to google (if you can correct for some misspellings in Mississippi's labeling) but in some cases hard to find in the flesh. especially with the liner notes intact. i'm lucky that i can get some of them from my university library. the others i spent months/years looking for. some, as i indicated, are available--or were available, at least--online.
there is a lot of writing on this kind of music but most of it is tucked away in liner notes, books, and journal articles that a layperson will not have access to. that is, somebody without the kind of access to such materials being a member of a university comes with. i don't think it's a mortal sin for mississippi to put this stuff out there with no contextualizing information. it just seems kinda lazy and lame to me. we spent an entire other thread going back and forth about this. i think the gesture is kind of an insult to the artists. but others disagree. that's OK.

2) i don't think he shouldn't have released it. it's just (a) not really to my tastes in packaging and (b) stuff i already have. so i'm not the ideal audience for this particular release. but other folks may enjoy it.

3) there is no fucking way they are giving royalties to the folks on this comp, or should i say their relatives because most of the folks are dead. it would require the persistence and research acumen of a veritable genius to track this stuff down, mostly likely by talking to the folks at ILAM. also we've been over this but despite the mississippi folks' insistence that they have paid the musicians or rights holders in every possible instance, this is demonstrably not true. it is true when they are doing a straight reissue of a particular album--otherwise they'd probably get sued. i'm not going to get on my high horse about this because every single other label that has reissued african recordings made in the 20s–50s has probably not bothered with royalties either. so there's no point in singling out mississippi. but their owners do seem awfully defensive about it.

4) what is the wider conversation? do you think more people will become interested in this stuff based on a limited run of 300 LPs stuffed into pine boxes? i mean it's cool if more people listen to and respond to mwenda jean-bosco but what exactly do you imagine this box set becoming the harbinger of?

i should say that i enjoy almost every other mississippi release, occasionally with some caveats. this particular one just harked back to their aesthetics and way-of-doing-business of a number of years ago, and i found that disappointing.

We’ve paid everyone we could find who had anything to do with the actual production of the art

a key question--one that could be asked of many, many labels and by no means just mississippi--is what does "we could find" mean? how hard do they try to find the rights holders of this music (legal and/or moral rights that is).

i don't actually expect any more of them than the legions of labels that came before, from OJL to yazoo to original music, etc. but they get kind of high-horsed and defensive about it which is a little irritating.

i mean i'm holding in my hands right now a francis bebey record released on his own label in the mid 1970s. the label no longer exists (and hasn't for many a year), bebey is dead.... what do i do?

a little googling around finds the centre culturel francis bebey, who presumably have some connection to the man. do i email them? in french? in english? what will they say? who has the "rights" to his music in america, where most of his material was never released?

mwenda jean-bosco died in the early 1990s in zaire. he probably still has family. are they still in the eastern congo? have they moved? where? to kenya? france? belgium? how would i find out? and which relatives can legitimately claim the "rights" to his music? or do i contact and pay ILAM, the archive established by hugh tracey, the ethnomusicologist who originally recorded mwenda? ILAM has a digital distribution deal with smithsonian folkways. do i then have to negotiate with folkways?

etc. etc.

i can ask people at folkways if mississippi contacted them about the tracks from the "music of liberia" LP that are on this african guitar box. but i doubt that folkways paid the performers either. they were recorded by one packard okie, about whom i can find little information in a quick search (there's a chance he was a minister in liberia with a side interest in traditional music).

this is not to say that mississippi needs to make a superhuman effort to track down all these performers or their descendants. it's just that it would be more honest to admit to these complexities and gray areas rather than simply to vociferously claim that all steps were taken.

ty for your response amateurist; you're right about a bunch of stuff, & that we've done a lot of this to death on the other threads, so I'm skipping over a couple of your points.

4) what is the wider conversation? do you think more people will become interested in this stuff based on a limited run of 300 LPs stuffed into pine boxes? i mean it's cool if more people listen to and respond to mwenda jean-bosco but what exactly do you imagine this box set becoming the harbinger of?

i think i remember, around the time that the mississippi tapes started coming out, someone on here being outraged that one featured funnel of love by wanda jackson - that if they had wanted to pick a wanda jackson song they should have picked something less canonical, that if you were going to include a wanda jackson song on a mixtape you couldn't then sell it for $5, trading on her work without reimbursing her. & i just don't think that's true anymore; i think you are, obviously, infringing on copyright but i think you're doing it in a way that has the potential for a bigger net plus, which is people getting to hear wanda jackson. radio style. the filter of couldn't they have at least picked one of her gospel jams is kinda a complicated thing to factor in - the same thing that makes the african box less useful to you but a gift to me - but to me i think the 'moment' of record purchasing has kinda diffused and the currency of music is a little different. the early Mississippi African comps came with notes on saying that music should be taped, reproduced and circulated: I think it was just an approach that the music should be out there, & that this could be done economically enough so that availability was a priority instead of profit.

when I talk about the wider context of this stuff, I can't point to some concrete step 3: profit stage of success that justifies the model, but I think circulation & appreciation is enough of a justification on its own. some of this is just my lazy disinterest in copyright law, my consumer-privilege, or fetishisation of the public domain. but i think, if there were a perfect model that circulated art for appreciation, circumventing the whole royalties thing in a situation where the complexity of royalties meant that it was otherwise just not gonna happen*, i'd be into it. i am just reluctant to press for conditions so strict that they would prevent the thing from actually existing. of the two extremes i end up on the side of stealing music from the musicians who made it, which is pretty bad but which my inner puritan art-nourishes-the-soul impulse assuages.

* the parallel here, to me, is downloading obscure-ish/ubuweb-wave films online - things for which there's not necessarily the apparatus or interest to circulate otherwise.

for me the defensive thing, re: the owners, is just that they're defending themselves, because it's been the main thing that's been charged at the label, rather than something they're wearing as a badge of authenticity. & at least in a bunch of visible instances it was a pretty shallow, erroneous charge, right? but you're right. your point about acknowledging the grey area is otm. i am lucky to have more of an obliviousness to this stuff than you. but i am still kinda taking them at their word. ie that single artist comps are licensed. & obviously tried as hard as we could is gonna be a nebulous thing. i could deal with the idea that single songs appearing on comps aren't, & that no-one on the other side was making money seems like an okay model to me.

also fwiw there's a killer new f bebey reissue just out:
http://boomkat.com/vinyl/519205-francis-bebey-african-electronic-music-1975-1982

as an aside i think there's an oral history on Mississippi coming out on Yeti, sometime. maybe it'll delve into some of this. Eric posted on this or the other thread, too, a while back, you should quiz him a lil.

btw i don't think that if they can't locate or contact rights holders they shouldn't release it. that's not at all what i'm saying. after all i enjoy those original music CDs and yazoo etc. etc. i just think that in being defensive the mississippi dude fails to just own up to the complexities surrounding this stuff, and admit that he's working in a gray area.

anyway some other thoughts i have, maybe we are going in circles but oh well...:

i feel like there's a lack of modesty in the lack of transparency in this release.

here you have five LPs of music by a big bunch of african artists from the mid-20th century. some of whom are quite famous and important and well-known, like bebey and mwenda. others made a living selling records and giving performances in africa, but the information that might be out there about them hasn't been efficiently collected and compiled. others are truly obscure, known--in the mediatized sense--only to those who recorded him, some of whom, like hugh tracey, are dead now and we are largely limited to their field notes.

all the different styles and influences and historical events and places represented in all of these musical recordings--it's fascinating. and there's so much more to be learned, to be written.

and how is this all packaged, how is it delivered to the curious? in a big, rough-hewn pine box with paste-on artwork that, in its spareness and obscurantist design, seems to cast a spell of obscurity, of mystical revelation over the whole thing. the generic "chains" motif that adorns the record labels and the "cover" is literally unfathomable. it could mean any of a million things, or nothing.

because of the nature of the exchange--you have to know about misssissippi, really, to even know this thing exists--what's foremost in my mind as i look at this object is mississippi records. some guy in portland assembled this box, sequenced the records, ordered them pressed at a plant, etc. the handiwork of that person--whether it's isaacson or somebody else--is what this object speaks of, and is to a great extent the basis of its cult value. otherwise why bother with the odd packaging at all? it doesn't contribute anything to the music--doesn't help us to appreciate it, understand it, find more of it--except, again, to present it as this unknowable, mysterious thing, something sufficiently remote in time and space that we oughtn't speculate about the lives of its creators.

i recognize the whole idea that with the interwebs you can just, you know, google your way to some of the contextualizing info. but not really, not with this music. at least, it's not terribly easy. and it's also distinctly ungenerous. why not give us a few leads? why not acknowledge your sources, tell us how _you_ heard this music, who was doing the curation and recording that you are relying upon.

frankly the whole thing strikes me as tacky. the pine box (and other gambits that mississippi and other labels have tried), devoid of any connection to the music, feels like ham-fisted way of infusing the set with the "aura" of a distinct (rather than mass-produced) object. but the very wilfullness (sp?) of it, and the clumsiness of the conception and execution, makes that aura feel cheap. and at a moment in time when you have blogs where people share music they love as well as tons of smart ideas and information, the whole "mystique" aspect seems like a cover for laziness or lack of knowledge.

sorry we're not going to agree on this. it just seems that of all possible ways of getting this music out there to a new audience (which is an INCREDIBLY worthy goal), this is one of the lamest and most self-regarding i can think of.

i mean if you just want the music "out there," start a blog. post those original music comps, with liner notes. john storm roberts won't care; he's dead. i mean, people do this already. the blogs holywarbles (RIP) and ghostcapital for one.

or what the hell, just reissue those original music comps. why the fuck not. they look cool, they are immaculately conceived, etc.

my point is just to say that despite your defense and despite isaacson's claims there is clearly a lot more to the "mississippi aesthetic" than simply sharing good music with good folks. i'm not saying it's sinister or anything, just that there is a level of investment in a mystique that the dude refuses to acknowledge. we've talked about this too.

because of the nature of the exchange--you have to know about misssissippi, really, to even know this thing exists--what's foremost in my mind as i look at this object is mississippi records. some guy in portland assembled this box, sequenced the records, ordered them pressed at a plant, etc. the handiwork of that person--whether it's isaacson or somebody else--is what this object speaks of, and is to a great extent the basis of its cult value. otherwise why bother with the odd packaging at all? it doesn't contribute anything to the music--doesn't help us to appreciate it, understand it, find more of it--except, again, to present it as this unknowable, mysterious thing, something sufficiently remote in time and space that we oughtn't speculate about the lives of its creators.

i recognize the whole idea that with the interwebs you can just, you know, google your way to some of the contextualizing info. but not really, not with this music. at least, it's not terribly easy. and it's also distinctly ungenerous. why not give us a few leads? why not acknowledge your sources, tell us how _you_ heard this music, who was doing the curation and recording that you are relying upon.

man you totally get me here, & this is so lovely to read, the idea of the text as some kind of alluring gateway to wider discovery. & yet i still do disagree, because i think part of recontextualising it or decontextualising it is valuable in itself, & is an alternative to the comprehensive, didactic thing - partly for dragging it into a different sphere, so that it exists outside of the context it started in, but partly just to pitch it in isolation, as, yes-i-know-fetishistically-but-fuck-it, a weird musical object. when i'm saying "why write liner notes if you can google them", "why worry about a single song when people could buy albums" it's just because that's what i see buying a record as - some initial step. maybe you prime someone contextually with everything they need to for the next step & maybe you don't, but that totally fits with both sides of my experience as a consumer. either hearing something totally out of place & being hooked - a song at the end of a tape & you don't know what it is or how you would even find out, its very peculiarity fascinating - or alternatively having the trail of breadcrumbs & so having a next step ready to follow.

" weird musical object"

there's really nothing "weird" about it and that's something that i admit kind of freaks me out a bit about the often undifferentiated mix of "outsider art" and just "stuff you haven't heard". i mean, i often find the music pretty damned compelling in both instances. but the flattening out that occurs when the common denominator is allowed to be "weird" is problematic. it's an act of othering is what it is.

i dunno, compare the mississippi box to this guy's work: http://www.elijahwald.com/afcds.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxW-E7CzT0k

compare the sort of morbid mississippi box with the living multivalent presence of the music in this video and the notes below it. people who listened to this music growing up, who are related to the musicians, who are seeking or writing books on the subject, who have stories to tell about meeting the performers, who want to know what the performers are singing about and how it related to their lives and the society in which they lived.

i bought a bunch of those CDRs from wald. i would highly recommend them.

if i had time i'd start a blog myself and share some of this stuff.

also when you're done w/ that youtube you can chose to listen to all kinds of stuff: contemporary kenyan pop, video footage of mwenda, more songs performed by wald, etc etc. more "random" and intriguing and genuinely serendipitous than the kind of psuedo-serendipity for which you can choose to pay $65.

by "choose to listen" i mean those are the "suggested" videos that show up when you're done.

there's really nothing "weird" about it and that's something that i admit kind of freaks me out a bit about the often undifferentiated mix of "outsider art" and just "stuff you haven't heard". i mean, i often find the music pretty damned compelling in both instances. but the flattening out that occurs when the common denominator is allowed to be "weird" is problematic. it's an act of othering is what it is.

yeah i just don't agree; one of yr previous posts inched towards the potential ethnocentrism of implying a mysticality to a product, but i just don't think that's what it is. there's something auditory about s.e. rogie or william onyeabor records that makes me feel okay about "weird" - it's a relative term, sure, but i don't think i'm getting too culturally bogged down. i think it's a production thing, or at worst it's maybe an appreciation for the thing's obscurity in our canon/hierarchy/w/e.

gonna check out yr wald thing, but again - these are two approaches, right? & the one run by the guy in north Portland who just jives to this stuff in his living room is gonna be different and have different priorities.

also when you're done w/ that youtube you can chose to listen to all kinds of stuff: contemporary kenyan pop, video footage of mwenda, more songs performed by wald, etc etc. more "random" and intriguing and genuinely serendipitous than the kind of psuedo-serendipity for which you can choose to pay $65.

this is a weird analogy! again because one man's funnel of love is another man's yesterday, but otherwise because youtube is probably not a preferable mode of commercial distribution upon close inspection

frankly the whole thing strikes me as tacky. the pine box (and other gambits that mississippi and other labels have tried), devoid of any connection to the music, feels like ham-fisted way of infusing the set with the "aura" of a distinct (rather than mass-produced) object. but the very wilfullness (sp?) of it, and the clumsiness of the conception and execution, makes that aura feel cheap. and at a moment in time when you have blogs where people share music they love as well as tons of smart ideas and information, the whole "mystique" aspect seems like a cover for laziness or lack of knowledge.

...my point is just to say that despite your defense and despite isaacson's claims there is clearly a lot more to the "mississippi aesthetic" than simply sharing good music with good folks. i'm not saying it's sinister or anything, just that there is a level of investment in a mystique that the dude refuses to acknowledge. we've talked about this too.

oh, piffle. this whole thing, the brace words you've expended on this, amounts to a trivial aesthetic objection. no one is being harmed here. literally no one, not even the consumer, as the mississippi releases are generally quite affordable. you wish the dude were less defensive. okay, maybe he's too defensive. big deal. and you wish there were liner notes. me too, but i can live without them, as i'm more interested in the music as music than in reading about it. and you wish there weren't an aura of "mystique" and object-fetishism attached to certain mississippi releases. as far as i'm concerned, neither is a sin, but if you're repelled, you're welcome to tune out.

your willingness to attack harshly bothers me. you accuse mississippi of bootlegging, but then admit that other, ostensibly more respectable compilers are equally limited in their ability to find and pay the proper rights-holders. you're almost comically eager to accuse mississippi of ripping off a single source, but then have to amend yourself to admit that they've cast a very wide net. you suggest that anyone who was interested could go to other sources for this material, but then admit that you've spend dedicated years tracking it down yourself. that sucks. it suggests that your hostility here is not a product of the way this particular product has been assembled and presented, but rather a preexisting condition that you're seeking any available outlet to vent.

you're welcome to tune out.

is this a variant of the old thumper saying, "if you can't say anything nice..."? i have nice stuff to say about other mississippi releases, usually the ones worked on by other folks like the lomax archive (nathan salsburg) or ian nagoski etc.

i don't see it as a trivial aesthetic objection. it's an aesthetic objection tout court. it doesn't matter much in the scheme of things, but then neither do your or i. people have expended far more verbiage complaining about other things (like a single pitchfork review, say) on ILM. hell, "trivial aesthetic objections" are our bread and butter. beyond that though, i feel--though i haven't made clear in yesterday's posts--that something of the "mississippi aesthetic" (that is, trying to clumsily re-inject a mystique where such a thing is redundant, just a general desire to mystify) is evident in other things, other approaches within what might be called the record-buying public or something. but i'm not nabisco so it's hard for me to find handy ways of explaining this without offending people.

i noted above that this release simply isn't for me, but might interest other people. i also noted that i could work on providing links to DL most of the stuff on this box, which would render the box and the $65 or so it costs redundant for those who don't need the object. i dunno, i don't personally see the point of paying for something that you can get for free otherwise. obviously if you and other folks feel that the presence of the music on a particular format (vinyl) and in a handmade pine box constitutes value added, by all means go for it. i don't care.

and i almost feel like a jerk pointing this out, but they didn't really cast a wide net. the vast majority of the music in the box is from three or four comps, all released in the same series on the same label in the 1980s and 1990s. much of the other stuff is from sources that are currently available, either as LPs or as downloads from the folkways website. the two bebey tracks may constitute the true rarities. at what point does this become kind of weird? if i download the entire "music of liberia" comp from the folkways website, make my own LP out of it, put it in a white sleeve with my own corny art brut drawings on it, and then sell 500 copies for $15, is that not a little lame? (this is almost literally what that "monk" record label does btw.)

but you're right. who cares? nobody. the same however could be said of almost every ILM thread. so i guess i touched a nerve.

at what point does this become kind of weird? if i download the entire "music of liberia" comp from the folkways website, make my own LP out of it, put it in a white sleeve with my own corny art brut drawings on it, and then sell 500 copies for $15, is that not a little lame?

i guess there's a fulcrum point for everyone where the production of interesting objects tips over into lame object fetishism. sure, mississippi records are providing collectible, LP-format product for people who are specifically interests in collectible, LP-format product on the mississippi records label. that's weird to the extent that it strikes you as weird, but i'm okay with it because value-priced and aesthetically appealing mississippi comps have introduced me to a lot of music i'd likely never have heard otherwise. beyond that, they're fun to have and look at and arrange on shelves in order to satisfy a hoarding itch - i won't deny that.

if "the vast majority of the music on the box" really is drawn from a single source, then i agree: that's kind of lame. and it's bullshit if they didn't even think to credit their obvious source. then again, perhaps they secured permission from the original compilers, i dunno. in any event, it's hard to work up any real objection over an obvious fetish object with a print run of only 200. basically nobody's ever gonna hear the damn thing.

for the most part, i don't judge introductory compilations on the basis of whether or not they include "true rarities", material unavailable elsewhere. i love the nuggets series and the rhino power pop comps that have been discussed recently around here because at one time they presented me with a convenient, well-curated introduction to songs, artists, eras and genres with which i was unfamiliar but about which i was curious. of course, most of what they contain is available elsewhere. little was rescued from vanishing obscurity, but didn't bother me much. i'm not a genre expert and certainly wasn't when i first heard them, so rounding up the usual suspects did me a great service. i enjoy them even today because i simply like the music and track sequencing. the same is true of many of the mississippi records compilations i own.

i've come to see mississippi as a reliable guide to a world of wonderful music with which i'm largely unfamiliar and who reward me with cheap yet hoard-worthy objects for the attention i pay. that strikes me as a fair exchange. the album-objects they manufacture are almost like cereal box prizes in that regard. the music is point, but the allure of a shiny new toy can't be denied. it's clear that you don't really require the kind of introductory guidance they provide, anyway.

paragraph 1: "...specifically interests in collectible..." = "...specifically interested in collectible..."

paragraph 3: "...but didn't bother me much." = "...but that didn't bother me much."

paragraph 4: "...unfamiliar and who reward me with..." = "...unfamiliar, and they reward me with..."

it's hard to work up any real objection over an obvious fetish object with a print run of only 200.

Imho, if it's wrong, it's wrong, no matter how few or many copies. Can't Mississippi ever listen to anyone else's (arguably the consensus) pov re how to re-release music re crediting people and liner notes and such?

too many "re"'s

eh, many of their releases have extensive liner notes and accreditation. this one's apparently an exception. and i don't yet know that there's anything really wrong with it. would have to know a bit more about the sourcing on a track-by-track basis and whether or not the original compilers were consulted.

bottom line, though: no. i think that if you're producing goods in ridiculously small quantities and selling them basically at cost, then there is no way to do wrong. jack led zeppelin II for all i care. no harm done. there's a single-sided total control LP that has a side of early beatles tunes on the flip, clearly "mastered" off an old vinyl copy. i don't see this as wrong. i see it as value-added.

many of their releases have extensive liner notes and accreditation.

Not the few I have

i've got more than 20, and i'd say it's about 50/50. the comps almost never cite sources. can see why this might rankle some, but as long as they're doing as good a job of paying the rights-holders as the original compilers, it doesn't bother me.

And you believe they are paying the rights-holders, or have even made efforts to do so ?

i don't have any reason not to believe that they haven't made a good-faith effort. they're described their policies in this regard, and they seem satisfactory to me. as amateurist said upthread, it's often all but impossible to contact or even identify the rights-holders where these sorts of recordings are concerned, and this has been as much a problem for the "respectable" anthologists from whom mississippi seem to source much of their material as it is for mississippi themselves.

also, i don't believe they've made much money (if any) selling handmade LPs in extremely limited runs for $12 a pop, so it's not as if they're some kind of rapacious vampire organization profiting off obscurity. and, yes, that is an important distinction afaic.

lol

"i don't have any reason not to believe that they've made a good-faith effort."

so many typos and such...

paragraph 1: "...specifically interests in collectible..." = "...specifically interested in collectible..."

paragraph 3: "...but didn't bother me much." = "...but that didn't bother me much."

paragraph 4: "...unfamiliar and who reward me with..." = "...unfamiliar, and they reward me with..."

― spextor vs bextor (contenderizer), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 2:36 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i seriously admire you for proofreading your own post. that is after my own heart.

it's often all but impossible to contact or even identify the rights-holders

sometimes, but not always. often it just requires more effort than most people are willing to put in. the soundway dude goes to pretty impressive lengths to figure this stuff out.

as i noted above, it seems like the mississippi releases curated by other folks, like ian nagoski, nathan salsburg, etc. are much more responsible in providing info and context on the music. isaacson just doesn't seem interested in that, though to his credit he hasn't tried to suppress it in the releases he doesn't initiate. it's really those alan lomax, nagoski, etc. releases (and the stuff licensed from big legal mess) that i really love of mississippi's recent releases. when they go it alone, as in this african guitar box, the results are kind of tacky. but i repeat myself.

i also love their michael hurley, dead moon, etc. stuff too, but that's a different hill of beans.

yeah, a lot of my affection for mississippi is a product of their LP reissues: dead moon, dog faced hermans, the ex, michael hurley, clara rockmore, "bongo joe" coleman, abner jay, bruce haack, washington phillips, etc.

"i don't have any reason not to believe that they've made a good-faith effort."

C'mon, the label's whole history as has been documented here and elsewhere is reason NOT to believe they make any effort at all

i don't think that's the case at all. early on, they had the idea that they were operating at such a low, "off the grid" and "among friends" level that they didn't need to worry about that sort of thing. when it became clear to them that their circle of friends was spanning the globe and that people were becoming upset by their indifference to copyright and proper remuneration, they tried to make reasonable amends. tbh, i respect both the position from which they started and the accommodations they would up making. they just aren't pheonix/radioactive or whatever.

i mean, that's as i understand it, and perhaps i've been misinformed.

by "off the grid" do you mean "placing bootlegs of LPs by african musicians in every significant indie record store in the USA?" b/c that's what happened (i think it was the orchestre regional de kayes LP). they apparently corrected that error eventually (or so i recall reading), but i just wanted to point that out.

yeah, but that's the point at which the rubber hit the road, right? in their early days, they'd been operating out of their portland shop exclusively, making records for in-store customers and a fairly small network of friends. then they spread out to a clutch of west coast indie shops, and after that to the rest of america and the world.

i forgive them for failing to adjust their practices ahead of their growth curve because they've been responsive to criticism, they don't seem ever to have done anything for profit, and they were never printing particularly large quantities. they still produce some of the cheapest LPs out there, and it's not like the quality is poor. i pay twelve to fifteen bucks for a mississippi record, and the chances are good its gonna come with a bunch of inserts, a bonus 7", a handmade cover, special printing, maybe even a gatefold or some such. that speaks to me of a fundamentally ethical, "in it for the music" mindset. were i buying a cutthroat, money grubbing boot, i'd be paying $25-30 for the same.

yeah i'm not hating over it i just wanted to point out that they managed to get a bootleg (or two or three) into stores before public shame caused them to alter their business practices.

that speaks to me of a fundamentally ethical, "in it for the music" mindset. were i buying a cutthroat, money grubbing boot, i'd be paying $25-30 for the same.

yeah, this is true. those LPs on the monk label, which seems to have jumped on the bandwagon once mississippi became a big thing, are more what you're describing insofar as they are really tackily packaged comps of old blues stuff that's been reissued (on every conceivable format) a million times, and they charge real import prices--$18 minimum, often i see them for $30.

and they are mastered, like most of mississippi's comps, from other LPs or CDs (or even MP3s) rather than from original elements or even selectively-sourced 78s.

i should say most of mississippi's comps not curated by salsburg, nagoski, etc.

yeah, those monk albums are crazy overpriced and boring besides. no sensibility of their own, just a record mill.