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Tool, widget, product, puppet, whatever you want to call it Lily Allen is the most recent high-profile pawn installed into public power by EMI and the RIAA-minded marketeers. I’m not sure yet if I should pity or revile her because time will reveal if she was just another Bush the 43rd-type marionette strung up and misinformed by her backers to steer the general public into their views of the file sharing war (This is another argument for later.). Or perhaps she knowingly signed a bunk artist slave contract to become another head-nodding yes-man to The Man.

Poor thing. She really is just a brand; snarky soundbites and drunken sexcapades serve only the pithy press releases used to rile up the audience entertained by the circus.

Sure there are pressures to succeed and survive, but let’s take a look at an example at why humans don’t evolve.

Rewind about 20 years back and you’ll find the same kinds of strings Geffen had pulled to reel in Guns N’ Roses’ fame and fortune:

Lie. GNR’s independent label at the time, Uzi Suicide Records, wasn’t independent. It was later revealed that the label was a Geffen subsidiary all along.

Cheat. Their live EP Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide wasn’t live at all. The crowd noise was actually overdubbed into the 4-song cut.

Steal. Drop the 10,000-vinyl EP’s like viruses. Viral they were indeed as the so-called grassroots campaign had been cloaked so well to lure a feeling of pseudo-respect from sympathetic fans, music programmers, supervisors, and club promoters alike—manufacturing a hyped up majority to fork over their wallets and budgets over to a snickering minority.

Fast forward 20 years since and, here we are with the Lily Allen-EMI-MySpace triad. Same shit, different day where technologies change, and humans don’t.

Some would argue, “Her music is good, so who cares?” I can respect that. It’s a valid argument and I can leave that to their discretion. But I, for one, don’t like to be duped nor to have my thoughts (traded for time, money, goods, or abilities) choreographed into the whims of a small group of people who resort to deception to justify their causes. Those kinds of means can’t end with a right of so many wrongs on anyone with a conscience. And I’m assuming that you, who are reading this, have one.

Pop music history was built on this inglorious dark side and has birthed enormously inflated egos and false expectations—from The Beatles to the Backstreet Boys, Motown to Michael Jackson, Elvis to Eminem, and Madonna to Britney Spears. The very latter who’s “Circus” tour and recording of “I’m A Slave 4 U” very well could be the quintessential music mantelpiece of the 50 or so years of pop.

These pressures can be overwhelming. And combined it is actually a larger issue of the bottom-line mindset we have contributed to the world where we otherwise might have thought slavery and coercion have been abolished. It’s freaky even to think about it as an individual in their respective industry taking on such massively orchestrated evil like Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Business, Big Media, Big Military, or the Big Banks let alone trying to rally the every- Joe and Jane Blow toward your (our) plight.

I sincerely hope Lily Allen does quit as she had claimed to re-evaluate her life and perhaps, buy back her soul. Hell, I had quit too and it gave me a chance to step and look back at the bullshit fed to me by engineers of mass marketeering and their drones—hands that feed and bite you at the same time if you were employed as their agent.

We all make mistakes but it would begin to grant Allen some clemency to act upon her claim. Otherwise she’s just another “star” who’s had the room light turned on her as a cheaply-stickered glow on a darkened ceiling.

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