by: Cameron MacKenzie
By 1993, I had listened to Metallica’s self-titled “black” album enough to warp the tape, and I had just decided that Master of Puppets was the greatest album ever recorded by man, save for Led Zeppelin IV, which I understood as objectively important, but remained mysterious to me in a way that I somehow chalked up to “Britishness.”
Metallica was my band, and my band had decided, in the magic moment of ‘93, to release Binge & Purge, a monstrous box set of 3 CDs and 3 VHS tapes: live sets with inconceivable covers, unheard music, crowd banter from James Hetfield, an 18 minute long version of “Seek and Destroy” live from Mexico City! This was absolute catnip for the middle-school boy that I was, but the cost of the box, if I remember correctly, came in at $123.00 of real live American money. I saw a picture of the thing in Rolling Stone and it looked to be the size of a footlocker. The box was exciting, mysterious, somehow regal, and completely impossible for me to ever possess, much less enjoy. And then, in a stroke of unexpected wondrous chance, a buddy’s parents bought him the thing for Christmas.
Well, we all had to go over to his house. Me and about four of my friends (at least one of whom who had never even heard of Metallica) rushed home, got on our bikes and met up at my friend Jerry’s place where, as one may expect, he displayed the Binge & Purge box set like it was a religious relic. Jerry was very particular as to how its contents were to be handled and, after ten minutes or so of our furtive whispers as we regarded the track listing in the multi-page booklet he, to our collective fascination and awe, opened up his parents’ stereo, gently lowered CD number 2 into the player, and queued up Metallica’s as-yet-unreleased cover of the Misfits “Last Caress,” live, as well, from Mexico City. The song is short, fast, and profoundly obscene. For the five of us young boys sitting on the rug in Jerry’s living room as he stood beside the stereo with the magnanimous smile of a proud papa, it was nothing short of magic.
All that is gone now. You can find those songs on Spotify, and it’ll cost you almost nothing at all. You can listen to the absurd profanities of “Last Caress” absolutely anywhere--in your room, in the office, in the car, on the bus--and so can everyone else.
What’s lost when you make something available to everybody? When you strip it of all its attending allure and glamor? What’s lost when you demystify things and make them simple, easy, plain, and obvious? I would argue that you lose value. Because what makes something valuable? My dictionary says that value lies in “regard, importance, usefulness.” Of those three, “regard” and “importance” are more subjective than “usefulness,” more relative to external forces, more easily manipulated and controlled.
It used to be that one sure way to generate regard and importance was through exclusivity but, as streaming services have shown us, exclusivity is easily and quickly demolished. That profoundly shifts the location of value to usefulness, and this is a trick that technology seems bent on turning again and again. Today every movie, every song, every photograph and painting and book and poem and play is available all the time from anywhere that connects to the internet. Value now lies, more and more, in the useful: i.e., the ease of use. If nobody owns the stuff anymore, real value lies in how to access the stuff the fastest. Content isn’t valuable. The mechanisms that provide access to the content are valuable. This, we could say, is the revolution.
But, maybe, it was always like this.
After all, somebody paid $123 dollars so that us five boys could sit around and moon over Metallica CD inserts. And the music itself was recorded on very expensive equipment, on a very expensive stage, for people paying a ton of money to see the concert in the first place. Maybe it’s always about access, and never content. Even if we’re going to say that Binge & Purge was valuable not because it was useful but because it was important--it was held in high regard--we’ve got to ask why we held it in such high regard? And I can answer that question. We loved it because we believed it belonged, in some strange and indefinable way, to us. Metallica was our band. Ride the Lightening spoke to our experience (somehow). Lars Ulrich just...got me, man.
Has it always actually been about access to the thing and not the thing itself? If that’s true, then shouldn’t the smart money be on the gatekeepers of that access? Or is there something that escapes the privileges of access, something that can’t be packaged, contained, limited; something that is inherently valuable in and of itself? Is there a thing that is valuable regardless of whoever can enjoy it?
When I think about that, I can’t help but remember that day in Jerry’s house--how happy Jerry was to have us all over; how proud he was of his Metallica box set; how particular he was about who could touch it and how it was to be touched. And I think about what it was he wanted on that particular day. Not the music, not even the box set. He wanted the friendship. He wanted the camaraderie. He wanted the regard. Of course he--or rather his parents--were willing to pay $123 dollars to get it.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.