Following up on my follow-up to Amber Rhea’s comparison of music and porn.

As it happens, soon after my post I was yakking with neighbors in one of the local bookstores and spotted Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by Blair Tindall.

The Publisher’s Weekly blurb captures the essence of my point (though I admit even I hadn’t considered the exploitation factor extended to classical music… until I started thinking about who did and who of my high-school and college-age friends did or didn’t seem to get “special mentoring” at summer institutes and the like.)

By age 16, the author of this alternately piquant and morose memoir was dealing marijuana, bedding her instructors at a performing arts high school and studying the oboe. Later, her blossoming career as a freelance musician in New York introduced her to a classical music demimonde of cocaine parties and group sex that had her wondering why she “got hired for so many of my gigs in bed.” But the vivace [sic] of the chapters on her bohemian salad days subsides to a largo as she heads toward 40 and the sex and drugs recede along with dreams of stardom; the reality of a future in Broadway orchestra pits (where she reads magazines as she plays to stave off boredom) sets in.

Snippet comes from the book’s Amazon.com page.

Again, the point isn’t to single out music per se (though it might have more in common with the porn industry than other hierarchical, over-supply-of-talent businesses like politics, television, and real-estate to name a few.) Instead it’s meant to place problems that occur in porn in a relative matrix. Continuing what Amber started, I think it’s important to stop looking at porn in isolated, absolute terms. And I think it’s important because, really and truly, I don’t think it matters to me whether, for instance, Patsy Cline was a grievously abused and exploited-by-her-husband country-western singer or a porn star. Nor does it matter to me whether, for instance, the actress known as Linda Lovelace was a grievously abused and exploited-by-her-husband porn star or a country-western singer. Both were grievously abused and exploited. And while it’s true that Lovelace was obliged to perform sex acts under bright lights, it’s also true that Cline was obliged to perform sex acts in darkened bedrooms, at the end of the day both were obliged to do so. Industry A meet Industry B.

Final note: If you wanted to go dig up a Marxist to talk about this they’d probably say something about how both music and porn have traditionally big a major “means of production” business where scarcity has been maintained by monopolization of a handful of resources (air and theater time, record and video-store shelves, audio and cinema production studios, manufacturing and distribution channels.) The entirely-laudable-to-me phenomenon of Half-nekkid Thursdays, sex blogging, Flickr, YouTube, and sound recording and mixing tools like Audacity or GarageBand, mixed with the stunningly low distribution cost of internet hosting create some seriously long-term problems for both the music and porn industries in the sense that the “return on investment” equation for forcing women into pornography (or forcing performers into blowjobs for record contracts) holds up very poorly in the face of millions of people who are happy to do much the same thing without coercion… and (worse for commercial exploitation) publishing their stuff without expecting payment to people who will consume it without expecting to pay. (I think our straw Marxist would gloatingly say this was analogous to “the withering away of the apparatus of the state” or something, and though the interpretation might be slightly off I’d give ‘em the point anyway.)