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Bohemian Rhapsody, a biographical account of the lead singer of the band Queen, is one of the best films about a great musician that I’ve seen. I say this in defiance of some critics. The rap on the film is that it is too much about the music and the creative and performative genius of Freddie Mercury, and not enough about certain lifestyle issues for which he was notorious.
The opposite is true. The failing of most musician-centered movies is that there is not enough about the art itself. I’m thinking of Immortal Beloved (1994). If you wanted to see a movie about Ludwig van Beethoven as a musician, this was not it. You would think that his real passion was not his art but some secret unconsummated love. Even Amadeus, while better than most attempts, was disappointing in this respect.
It can be difficult to find actors who can provide a compelling recreation of musical greatness. But to bury the story of art in the muck of personal eccentricity is not a good way to honor genius. Bohemian Rhapsody is foremost a film about an amazing singer and a creative process that rocked the pop world through the 1970s and 1980s and left us with iconic songs that changed everything. The movie presents the creative process here realistically and with exciting drama.
Commerce and Art
Even better, this film has a lesson that pertains to the creation of great art in a commercial society. Queen was rewarded in every way for making music that people love. Yes, the same could be said of many top pop artists today. Maybe this doesn’t sound like a radical proposition, but there is a tendency in high-end musical circles to believe that quality and popularity are mechanistically opposed to each other.
If you get famous and rich, you must have “sold out.” If you borrow pop tropes for serious music, you have compromised your art. The tendency to believe that there must be a high wall between artistic integrity and commercial success stretches far back in history, and is with us still.
At the age of 16, I was sure I would become a lifetime professional musician, so I started hanging out at the school of music during as much spare time as I had. I began to notice a certain ethos alive in these circles. They didn’t like audiences. They didn’t like customers. They saw every demand that their art be deployed to please popular tastes to be a terrible imposition. They wanted to be exempt from economic forces at work. I could hardly stand it, so I changed my life plans and, in reaction, went into a field that celebrated commercial life (economics).
Sacred and Secular
The perception that commerce and art don’t mix created a notorious case in the 16th century. Orlando di Lasso was a much-beloved composer of polyphonic Catholic Church music. Many of his masses and motets became standard performance repertoire in cathedrals all over Europe. The clerical class delighted in their pious sound and quality of inspiring prayer and soulful reflection.
Then one day, someone noted a certain familiarity to some of the melodic structures. Sure enough, they were identical to some folk music popular among the less-than-spiritual crowd. Some were drinking songs. Some had bawdy lyrics. His “Missa Entre vous Filles” was based on tunes that included lyrics that can’t be printed here. Panic ensued and di Lasso’s compositions were quickly banned.
This was not uncommon in the age of faith. There was a perception that music composed for a high-end purpose could never be tainted by musical forms coming from secular life. Two centuries later, with the rise of commercial culture, opportunities for composers to rely on ticket sales and sheet music sales increased. No longer was patronage the only option.
But even here, the perception that commerce would taint serious music persisted. And it persisted despite all evidence. G.F. Handel moved from Germany to Italy to England chasing commercial opportunities. He reused tropes from his Italian liturgical music for his English oratorios. And the themes of his oratorios finally settled on stories from Hebrew scriptures precisely because these stories experienced popular success in 18th-century England.
Some people might imagine that someone like J.S. Bach would be free from such grubby commercial dealings, but his hundreds of cantatas were written as a job obligation in exchange for wages. His famous Brandenburg Concertos were composed as demonstration projects when seeking a new gig. And just as with later composers like Johannes Brahms, he paid the bills through teaching far less than through performance. Other composers like Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi experienced wild popular success, while Richard Wagner became the subject of a cult of his own.
Keep in mind that all of this happened before the advent of musical copyright. Bach, Mozart, Brahms, and Beethoven all managed some degree of commercial success without using the law to maintain exclusive rights. They relied on teaching, concertizing, and marketing first-run access to their newest compositions. Once universal copyright came into being with the Berne Convention, there was a new complication: composers believed they could never borrow from contemporaries, whether low- or high-brow sources. But the result was new forms of “serious” music that stopped connecting with audiences completely (who listens to 12-tone rows to relax at home?).
Now to Queen
Queen distinguished itself for its focus on connecting to listeners in a special way, but the band achieved this not through mimicry but innovation. The movie recreates the moment when the band reluctantly decides to try its hand at disco forms. No one was truly happy about the idea until the bass player pushed out the affecting (and apparently eternal) riff from the opening of “Another One Bites the Dust.” Probably a majority of the human race today can recognize the song just from the beat and the three-note pattern it covers. It’s even used in CPR training so that people know how quickly to compress the chest.
As for the signature song of the band, the wildly weird and enormously popular “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the piece redefined what could be popularly played on the radio. It evokes a strange seriousness with its operatic motifs, dire subject matter, and implausibly smooth transitions from one style to another. The band’s producer completely ruled out its release as a single, based on conventions of the time. He was wrong. The song is considered one of the greatest in the history of pop, even achieving a number one status twice.
The movie tells the story behind the song and the band’s ambitions to cross over into several genres. It remains a paradigmatic refutation of the idea that there are tall walls that separate serious art from commercial success. My impression is that these walls today are not nearly as high as they were several decades ago. (The Atlanta Symphony hosts pop artists, folk artists, known musicians from all genres, all in the same season as it presents Mahler’s 7th to adoring audiences.)
The wonderful movie based on the life of Freddie Mercury and his band makes a great case that commerce can be and is the friend to art. It has always been so, but we are only now fully coming to terms with what this implies for the artistic endeavor generally.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
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Gas and Apparel Pull Everyday Prices Down in November
AIER’s Everyday Price Index fell 0.1 percent in November after posting a 0.4 percent increase in October. The Everyday Price index has fallen in four of the last six months. The Everyday Price Index measures price changes people see in everyday purchases such as groceries, restaurant meals, gasoline, and utilities. It excludes prices of infrequently purchased, big-ticket items (such as cars, appliances, and furniture) and prices contractually fixed for prolonged periods (such as housing).
The Everyday Price Index including apparel, a broader measure that includes clothing and shoes, decreased 0.3 percent in November after a 0.3 percent rise in October. The Everyday Price Index including Apparel has fallen in three of the past six months. Apparel prices fell 2.5 percent on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis in November and are down 1.6 percent over the past year. Apparel prices tend to be volatile, registering sporadic large gains or declines in between stretches of relatively steady prices.
The Consumer Price Index, which includes everyday purchases as well as infrequently purchased, big-ticket items and contractually fixed items, fell 0.1 percent in November, matching the decline in the Everyday Price Index. The Everyday Price Index is not seasonally adjusted, so we compare it with the unadjusted Consumer Price Index.
Over the past year, the Consumer Price Index is up 2.1 percent. Over the same period, the Everyday Price Index has risen 1.2 percent while the Everyday Price Index including apparel is up 0.9 percent. The modest increases in both indexes over the past year are largely due to weak energy and grocery store prices.
Motor-fuel prices fell 1.1 percent for the month on a not-seasonally-adjusted basis. Over the past year, motor-fuel prices are off 1.3 percent. Motor fuel prices are largely a function of crude oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices fluctuated dramatically from mid-2017 through mid-2019, rising to a peak above $75 per barrel in October 2018 before plunging to less than $45 by December 2018. Crude prices have been relatively stable since May, bouncing around in a range of $50 to $60.
Grocery prices fell 0.3 percent in November and are up just 1.0 percent from a year ago. Over the last five years, grocery prices are essentially unchanged.
The components with the largest weights in the Everyday Price Index are food at home (weighted 20.8 percent and declining 0.3 percent in November), food away from home (17.6 percent and a 0.2 percent rise), household fuels and utilities (13.3 percent and a 0.3 percent drop), and motor fuel (11.8 percent with a 1.1 percent decrease). Together, these four categories account for 63.5 percent of the Everyday Price Index.
Overall, net changes in the Everyday Price Index remain modest. Energy prices are the most volatile component and have been, on balance, a negative contributor in recent months. Grocery prices (food at home) have also been rising at a slow pace and stand in sharp contrast to restaurant prices (food away from home) which have been rising more quickly and persistently. Apparel prices also remain volatile but in general have been a negative contributor. Other smaller components have had significant but largely offsetting trends. Notably, gardening and lawncare services prices are up 8.4 percent from a year ago, while tobacco products have risen 5.5 percent, postage and delivery services are up 5.4 percent, recreational reading materials are up 4.9 percent, and pet and pet products are up 3.3 percent. Partially offsetting these were audio discs and tapes, down 2.6 percent and video discs, down 2.5 percent. Several other smaller components have increases close to zero.
Robert Hughes
Related Articles – Everyday Price Index
Manual Labor Will Be Revived
In a previous column, I looked at the way automation and AI are likely to transform the world of work and employment. There is a lot of discussion about this, most of which focuses on the likely impact in terms of the kinds of paid work that will disappear. What there is much less of is discussion of the new kinds of paid work that will come into being.
If the result of automation is to create jobs more than to destroy them, then what kinds of work are likely to expand in the future? This is related to but distinct from the first question. In one way, this is a very hard question to answer. Many of the new kinds of employment that will appear are literally unimaginable — if we could imagine them, they would already exist.
Back in the 1980s, nobody could have told people worrying about the decline of jobs in the steel industry that there would be work designing apps for mobile phones, for example. So we can be confident that new kinds of work will appear but have no idea about what it will be — it’s for entrepreneurs to invent and discover that.
However, we can do some thinking about it because while the details may not be clear, there are cases where we can have a strong notion as to what will appear. In the 1900s, for example, there were a large number of jobs associated with horses, at that time still the main power for transport. Almost all of them were gone by 1930, but people could guess that a lot of new work would be created servicing and supporting (as well as producing) the motor vehicles that were replacing horses. Thinking like this about the present situation should lead us to a number of conclusions and to one in particular that many will find both surprising and heartening.
At-Risk Jobs
If you read the various studies that have been done over the last five years, there is widespread agreement about the kinds of jobs that are “at risk.” A recent study by the Brookings Institution estimated that 25 percent of current US jobs are at greater than 50 percent risk of automation. Some are not surprising. Any job that is both boring and repetitive is likely to be at risk. You might suppose that this would mean low-paid manual occupations would be at high risk, and indeed many are — shelf stacking, waitressing, and data entry are all at high risk.
On the other hand, many better-paying jobs are at considerable risk of disappearing. A range of jobs in the transport industry, from truck and taxi drivers to train and bus drivers, are likely to go in the medium term because of the rise of autonomous vehicles (most new metros around the world already have driverless trains). A wide range of clerical and administrative tasks are also likely to be handed over to algorithms, from financial services to company administration and financial advice.
The last example brings up another point. A recent study by the OECD argued that jobs involving face-to-face contact were more likely to survive — which suggests a rosier future for financial advisors. However, experience suggests this is actually not true. When the ATM was introduced, some argued that it would not catch on because customers preferred the human interaction with a teller. Experience suggests that actually the opposite was the case. The same is likely to be true in a range of occupations and not just financial advice and wealth management.
The common factor is that these are activities that can be readily reduced to a tick list of standard questions and hence an algorithm. Routine medical care and diagnosis is one; another is most standard legal work. This suggests that the risk of automation is actually high for many professional occupations such as medical general practice and routine attorney work. In the future, we will probably consult an algorithm rather than a human doctor or lawyer or accountant. However, surgery and nursing are still almost certain to be done by flesh and blood humans.
That particular example can lead us to the surprising and heartening conclusion mentioned earlier. Much of the commentary argues that we are moving into a world where the labor market will be dominated by two kinds of employment. There will be creative jobs that are open to highly educated people and which pay very well, and there will be unskilled and low-productivity jobs (hence low paying), but there will not be a range of middle-skill jobs that pay a decent or even high wage. The view is captured in the title of Tyler Cowen’s work Average Is Over. This has a number of alarming implications, most notably that access to high-paying work is going to become even more dependent than it already is on higher-education qualifications. We should be more sanguine, however.
A Heartening Conclusion
Economic theory, confirmed by empirical research, tells us that people will in general only adopt a new technology when the expected gain from doing so is greater than the cost (technically, when the marginal gain exceeds the marginal cost). This means there are many things that are technologically feasible that do not happen because they do not pass the test of their benefit being greater than their cost.
One example is supersonic passenger flight. This is certainly technically feasible — we know this because two such aircraft were in commercial service for some time. However, there are none now and no prospects for any. The reason, as Boeing discovered while trying to develop a supersonic transport, is that the benefit (getting from London to New York in three hours rather than seven, for example) is not valuable enough to consumers to exceed the costs of such an aircraft, which are due to the technology available and the unavoidable challenges of traveling at such a speed in the Earth’s atmosphere in a way that will meet standards of comfort and safety for passengers. (Military personnel have a different set of criteria, which is why supersonic combat aircraft are commonplace; plus, the buyers of such aircraft, namely governments, are not as price sensitive as airlines.)
One classic example of this is the artificial reproduction of manual dexterity or, to put it another way, of the combination of the human hand with the human brain and the complex feedback and control system (touch and sight) that connects the two. Despite much effort and research, this has proven incredibly difficult to reproduce artificially. Consequently, for most tasks involving manual dexterity and manipulation, it is still cheaper to use a human rather than a robot, and this seems likely to be the case for a long time. This explains why nursing and surgery are both at very low risk of being automated by everyone’s estimation, despite the fact that most surgical procedures and nursing tasks are standard and routine in many ways.
Manual Trades and Personal Services
So, there is a wide range of tasks and work that will not be automated because of this. However, the response might be that the kinds of jobs this applies to are precisely the low-productivity and low-skill jobs mentioned earlier, such as cleaning. Certainly, this is true, but it is not the whole truth. There is also a wide range of work involving manual dexterity that is skilled and highly paid, and the likely impact of AI will actually be to make that kind of work more productive and hence higher paid. Meanwhile, other foreseeable changes will increase the demand for these kinds of work and hence the number of employment opportunities, even allowing for the increase in productivity of individual workers.
This kind of work is that of skilled manual trades such as plumbing, painting and decorating, electricians, and construction work of all kinds. Another is personal-service work such as personal trainers or coaches. Teaching and researching are other examples (at the moment, these are thought of as jobs that require a degree, but that is more about rationing access than reality). Manual trades, for example, are very difficult because of the need for close-up manipulation — a robot that could do an electrician’s or plumber’s job would be seriously expensive.
At this point, another feature of innovation comes into play. What much innovation does is not so much replace human labor as enhance it and make it more productive. AI and associated control systems are a classic example of this. You will still need the manual dexterity of the surgeon or plumber, but the AI and associated technology will increase the range of things that they can do and make them much more effective. In other words, it will increase the value of the service they provide as well as the quantity per unit of time worked — which is the real definition of increased productivity. This translates into higher incomes for people delivering this kind of service.
Moreover, the demand for this kind of labor and service (as well as the others mentioned) is almost certain to increase. For one thing, the people earning very high incomes doing creative knowledge work will want to employ those providing these services in very large numbers (not least because the principle of comparative advantage means it makes sense for them to do this so they can concentrate on their own work). Another feature of AI is that it will make it much cheaper to personalize skilled work and services and so make it more valuable to the end consumer.
What we are likely to see, in fact, as well as the disappearance of a range of familiar jobs, is a revival in the value (and maybe the status?) of manual trades and personal services of all kinds. These will also become higher paying than many are at present (some, of course, already pay well). To give just one example, nursing and personal care are going to have their productivity significantly increased, while the demand for such services is going to rise organically because of the rise in the average age.
This will also mean an increase in the kind of work that requires a trade education and a relative decline in the need and demand for academic higher education. That sector will have to find another market to replace or supplement people looking for certification to have a shot at knowledge or creative work — the business of providing education and tutoring as a leisure and consumption good is one possibility.
In fact, one outcome of AI and automation may well be a revival of manual labor and of the traditional working class — maybe becoming more like an artisan class again. It is actually the credentialed and salaried white collar middle class that is more at risk in the years to come.
The overall effect will be massively positive, as economics leads us to expect. Thus a recent study by Price Waterhouse predicts that automation and AI will contribute an additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with a boost to local GDP of up to 26 percent by the same date. We should be sanguine about the impact of this latest wave of innovation, not just in terms of its overall impact on the wealth of the world but also in terms of its likely sociological impact.
Stephen Davies
