Rock-and-roll panel: Comments.

This past Saturday I went to a panel on artists who've worked with rock album covers. All of them were thankful for the massive exposure landing a choice album can give someone's work, even if people don't know the artist behind it, though they lamented the fact that CD covers are smaller than record covers, and MP3s just don't allow for the circulation of cover art like it used to be.

In addition, one speaker trashed a lot of rock-and-roll artists for their lack of social concern, and how there's not been one good rock song about the Iraq war, and how rockstars "are shoppers, not rebels," and how the role of the rebel in popular consciousness has increasingly devolved away from rockstars.

Also also, they spontaneously trashed New York and how there's nothing happening there since no one can afford to live there. "But Brooklyn is better and a lot of artists live there," the moderator was like, and everyone in the panel kind of shook their head and was like, "No," as if the Brooklyn artists didn't matter. One (foreign-born) panelist said Berlin had a really productive art scene right now, where people were flocking there and it was cheap to live.

Also also also, they said the U.S. is so big that it's hard to have a "moment" here like you do in other countries like England, where everyone can get fired up about the same musical developments at the same time because it's densely populated and everyone's tied into London. They were saying that to have something get going to create a moment, it would have to happen in New York/Chicago/L.A. and elsewhere and get momentum really quickly, and that just doesn't happen.