Many of my Facebook friends are semipro singer-songwriters. We tend to attract each other. As such, I see lots of bitter status updates about the Internet’s “devaluing” of music. I never comment; I don’t want to be a dick in somebody else’s space. Lucky for me, I have my own space and can be a dick here all day long!

The Internet hasn’t devalued anything. It’s revealed the true value of many things.

I say this after watching the two worlds in which I spend most of my productive time – music and print publishing – collapse over the past dozen years. I was cranky for a while. I got over it. I say bring it the rest of the way down.

Has the Internet destroyed our economy? Yes, absolutely; it destroyed the economy such as it had been built. So many of the things people used to blow money on have been exposed as having no monetary value. Gatekeepers and middlemen were once able to monopolize the distribution of information and assign it an arbitrary price. They can’t do that anymore.

Journalism as we’ve known it is worthless. I’m sorry. When I want to find out about news that is breaking right now, I use Twitter. I learn about things as they happen from the people who are standing right in front of them. Blogs, maintained by passionate enthusiasts, organize and refine that information at little or no cost to the user.

Most mass-market entertainment is also worthless. Something made for free and posted on YouTube or Soundcloud by a random dude in my neighborhood can be just as funny, just as resonant, just as entertaining as a big-budget blockbuster film or album. It’s not about piracy; it’s about quantity of entertainment. Free stuff entertains me as much as expensive stuff does, and it’s free.

If I go to a restaurant and there’s a wait, I usually move on. All the sit-down places are packed for breakfast or dinner rush? I can go to McDonald’s and have something that tastes good and will leave me full, and I won’t have to wait for it. No, it’s not going to be a gourmet fuckin experience, but it will fulfill my base meal requirements and probably even make me happy. In this way, all restaurants are essentially always competing with McDonald’s for my patronage. They’re also competing with my kitchen at home.

Art is assigned value by middlemen. Its intrinsic value is zero. You can hear music right now for free: hum to yourself. Whistle. You can make something right now that entertains you or speaks for you. You don’t need me to do it; you don’t need painters, or sculptors, or filmmakers, or novelists, or songwriters. Little kids know this… they can entertain themselves all day using nothing but their imaginations and whatever’s around.

Nobody asked me to write or record music. I felt a need to do it, so I did it. That wasn’t for the world at large; it was for me. My benefit has already been derived. If I needed to make money from it too, that would be a sad commentary on how much my music actually means to me.

Here are some things that have value the Internet cannot “take away”:

Expertise. Craftsmanship. Nostalgia. Arousal. Empathy. Quality. Novelty. Scarcity. Collectability.

You can aspire to some of these; others are not up to you. You can practice and learn until you are an expert or a craftsperson. What someone is nostalgic for, aroused by, or can empathize with is subjective. Some people think “quality” is something you know when you see it; I’m not so sure that isn’t subjective too. And it can be argued that scarcity and collectability only add value when combined with one of the other things on that list.

Expertise and craftsmanship are why I’m happy to scrape together the money for a mix by Tchad Blake or Pete deBoer, or session work from Anton Fig or Jerry Marotta or Tony Levin or Graham Maby or Reeves Gabrels or Ralph Carney… these guys do things nobody else can. You can’t fake them in Pro Tools or Garageband. Do they make my recordings more “sellable”? I’m not sure, but in my opinion (which is the only one that counts ’cause it’s my music), they make them better. And I want my recordings to be the best they can be, even if I’m the only one who will ever give a shit.

You don’t decorate your home strictly for guests. Maybe you do, I dunno. But I would figure you’d fill your place with stuff you wanted to see every day… and then if guests happen to show up, they can appreciate the decor, or not.

The most “successful” project I’ve done in the past five years, in terms of monetary ROI, is “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo”. The song itself is fine; a fun listen and very well performed, but as happy as I am with the finished piece I can’t say it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. And yet I’ve sold almost 50 copies of the track on cylinder, a virtually unplayable format, at a whopping $35 a pop. In this case, people are shelling out for novelty and scarcity – it’s a cylinder record, and there are only 50 signed and numbered copies. Some people collect cylinder records and feel a need to buy any new ones that are made. And there is a chance people are also paying to speculate, since Michael Doret is a name in the art world and it’s his autograph on the thing.

Almost no one is buying the product for the song itself.

And then there’s this:

The Bowery Electric Crew – Joey Ramone Dedication

Somebody forwarded me that link after it had been up for a year, collecting comments. I’ve never seen a dime from “The Bowery Electric” (unlike Jesse Malin, I suppose) – and I’m not credited or even mentioned anywhere on the page – but I couldn’t possibly feel more rewarded for my work than I did when I saw this YouTube video and the testimonials beneath it.

When I put forth a vinyl record or a CD or a digital file – just like everybody else does, and just like anybody else can – I have no expectations of return on investment, and I feel entitled to no reaction. I wanted something to exist; it exists. I wanted the catharsis of creation and I got it. I wanted it recorded; I wanted it packaged. I got what I wanted. Nobody asked me to do any of this.

If I create something that has value to a stranger, they will let me know.

This photo was taken on May 16, 2000, at Joey Ramone’s last birthday party. At least, the last one he attended in the flesh. Joey’s birthday is May 19. That party was a couple days early; this post is a couple days late. It’s all right.

Joey’s been gone ten years. Everything about the world is different from the way it was on May 16, 2000, the night Arturo threw down a stack of photos on his living room worktable – the very table the Ramones had leaned on to sign their first record deal – and instructed Joey to autograph and me to flip and stack while he snapped this picture.

I just read something about the plane that emergency-landed in the Hudson a couple years ago. One of the passengers referred to the water landing as a “miracle”. It wasn’t a fucking miracle. It was the work of an excellent, experienced and competent pilot doing his job in an exemplary way. Those lives were not saved by an imaginary god, but by a real human being.

Why is there no longer any appreciation of excellence in our culture, in our society? We don’t strive for it… we don’t even seem to understand it anymore when we see it. What entertains Americans in 2011? Shit we can poke fun at, ridicule. Things that make us feel superior. The “Friday” video, the rapture fail. Our spirits are broken. This is all we have left. We justify the time we waste picking over garbage by invoking “irony”… but there’s no irony here. Slapstick isn’t ironic. Ineptitude isn’t ironic. Self-flagellation isn’t ironic.

The Ramones made music that was simple. Simple can be a cop out; it’s easy to be simple and shitty, or simple and stupid. But Ramones music isn’t shitty or stupid, and it’s very, very difficult to play well. The generation that beatified the Ramones was X – my generation. Not coincidentally, we also wielded irony – real irony – as a weapon. We bludgeoned bullshit to death with it. Like the Ramones, though, Gen X is history.

I want to share a video with you. I found this earlier tonight on some old mini DV tapes and edited a couple of camera angles together. This is from October 8, 2004 – the Ramones “Beat on Cancer” event in New York City. Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny were all gone by then. CJ Ramone, Daniel Rey and the Descendents’ Bill Stevenson performed with rotating singers, including Suicide’s great Alan Vega.

This performance is funny, yeah; it’s a mess. But it’s touching, and it’s right. I offer this without a trace of irony… here is a true artist with giant fuckin balls doing what he does, doing whatever the hell he wants. Being excellent over excellent music. Happy birthday, Joey.

Sevendys’ next session: Presidents’ Day weekend in sunny LA. Chuck Rainey will be joining us once again, along with a few other surprise guests. The venue: EastWest Studio Three, where The Mamas & The Papas used to record… and the Beach Boys created Pet Sounds. We’re pretty psyched!

Here’s Collider performing “California Sun” live at CBGB, December 17, 1999, at an event called the Ramones Cyberpunk Blitz. [The Blitz was technically the launch party for Arturo Vega's officialramones.com, which was and will always be the only website endorsed by all of the Ramones while they were alive - both ramones.com and the late band members' individual sites were developed posthumously by their families, who then strongarmed Arty into giving up the officialramones domain and changing his site's name to RamonesWorld.]

The Cyberpunk Blitz featured 10 bands doing Ramones covers and a performance by Joey. All of the participants were asked to play under a Ramones-themed pseudonym; we changed our name to Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Stuff for the occasion. Because we were the only band with a keyboard player, we got to do some of the more esoteric tunes – “Howling At The Moon”, “We Want The Airwaves”, “All’s Quiet On The Eastern Front”, and this one.

That’s Chris De Rosa on drums, Bonnie Bowers on bass, Sean Gould on guitar, and yours truly. Video courtesy of Chris De Rosa.

“The Bowery Electric” performed live at CBGB, May 19, 2002. That’s CJ Ramone, Marky Ramone, Daniel Rey and yours truly. Filmed by Mick Brin.

I was working at Brill Media back then, and I went to rehearse for this gig at lunchtime. I was running late and basically walked in on the Ramones, mid-song, thrashing away at full power in this tiny practice space. Amazing. After running through “Bowery Electric” a few times, we called it an afternoon – but on our way out we overheard David Bowie rehearsing in another room, and just stood outside the door listening, in awe, for like ten minutes. Then Marky gave me a lift back to work. Nobody at Brill’s had any idea how that production schlep in the corner spent his lunch break.