Sheep and Goats

Tag: Prince

  • Listen Obey and be Blessed on a Christmas Album? I Don’t Think So.

    “Publisher BMG has plunged itself into a copyright lawsuit with elements that are so bizarre it's hard to fathom what the company was thinking of. According to the complaint, BMG illegally used a song owned by religious group Watchtower in a for-profit Christmas album, featuring songs from other faiths, which are set to be sung in cathedrals. Needless to say, Jehovah's Witnesses are outraged.”

    Well, I wouldn’t say that they were “outraged.” It takes a lot to outrage us. But we don’t do Christmas. And the songs aren’t for commercial use anyway. What in the world were they thinking?

    The song is Listen, Obey, and be Blessed. Imagine—the friends hear the album, and there it is as one of the Christmas carols! From us, who don’t do Christmas! I don’t think so. It’s not their song. It’s our song. It is a song for what Witnesses see as pure worship. It is not to be sung by every interdenominational Tom Dick and Harry, each with his or her own peculiar notion of who God is and what he wants.

    “Listen, obey, and be Blessed” as a interdenominational song? Obey what? Obey the religious call to give the election to Trump? Obey the religious call to promote choice (abortion)?  Obey the religious call to defy authorities and pack out your church, Covid notwithstanding? Obey the religious call to protest the police? And suggest that you will be “blessed” regardless of who, how, what you obey? No way. Of course Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t like it. Of course they’ll take action to stop it. BMG should know better, dealing in copyrights the way they do. Make a buck on our song? No.

    I’m not even sure why they would take that song, anyway. It is far from my favorite. It’s not one I would select if giving the public talk. The public speaker selects the opening song, and the WT study both begins and ends with one—3 in all. (Today the opening and closing songs were the same. Sometimes that happens. You can’t check every little detail.) I think there was a time I selected a song that had nothing to do with the talk, and I may have even said so. I selected it because I liked it.‬ That song was—no, I won’t say— maybe BMG will grab that one, too.

    During his lifetime, Theodor Geisel fiercely resisted offers to commercialize his creation—the Dr. Seuss characters. After his death, his wishes were discarded, and now those characters are everywhere, dressed up like puppets and written into any crass and sappy narrative.

    His widow subsequently said, “If Ted could see this, he’d say, ‘I’m glad I’m dead.’”

    In the Prince chapter of Tom Irregardless and Me, I wrote of how Prince tried to do that, with much better motive, but still he didn’t get away with it. The only backdrop one must have for this is that some doctor said that Prince died of ‘VIP syndrome’—that is, maybe his doctor was so awed by celebrity that he forgot to do his job, that he neglected to lay down the law for his famous patient:

    “New to the faith, it didn’t take long before Prince cast his eye upon the Kingdom songs that are sung at each meeting’s beginning, midpoint, and end. Maybe he could – you know – spice them up a little. Remix a few. With the best of motives, he began doing just that. CDs were released and began to circulate among the friends. Whenever that sort of thing happens among Jehovah’s Witnesses, it happens fast, for every Witness knows every other Witness. The Governing Body caught wind of it. Would they be flattered that Prince stooped to iron the kinks out of their music, like Mozart repairing the little ditty his employer’s (another Prince!) house musician had composed? Would they be jellified with VIP syndrome? If the learned doctors had turned to mush, what chance had bumpkins like they?

    “Prince is reworking our music, and rightly so!” Would they say that?

    “They excoriated him: ‘Get your hands off those songs! Those aren’t your songs – they’re OUR songs! They’re not pop, they’re not rock, they’re not funk! They are KINGDOM SONGS! Do you know how to spell ‘copyright?!’ Touch them again and you’re toast!’

    “Then they sent out letters to the congregations telling Witnesses not to play those CDs because they weren’t authorized. They managed to overcome their VIP syndrome pretty well, didn’t they? (Dr. Klitzman’s colleagues would have let Prince gown up and lend a hand in the operating room) They told him to keep his hands off their songs! Of course, they were nice about it – they always are. Their letter acknowledged his good intentions, but they laid down the law. I’ll bet Prince found it refreshing to be told off! What a change of pace from toadying doctors.”

  • The Purdue Pharmaceutical Travesty—I Called it First

    “OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma pleads guilty in criminal case” was the headline November 24, 2020. They finally nailed them. Read the APNews story. Their reckless manner has caused the death of nearly half a million people and the survivors of those people found only “minor comfort” in the guilty plea. Of course! Kill a person even accidentally in ancient Israel and the closest kin had every right to track you down and kill you unless you hightailed it first to a city of refuge. How much more so when the scoundrels deliberately blinded themselves to the mayhem they were causing for the sake of turning a (huge) buck.

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    Now—it is unseemly at such a time to boast. You just don’t do it. Nevertheless, I will boast and hopefully not be thought too crass.

    I called this out first. Maybe not absolutely first but I was among the first to assemble all the pieces. This is because I had begun to write Tom Irregardless and Me about life as a Jehovah’s Witness—it was in its infancy stage, when Prince died of a fentanyl overdose and since he was the best-known Jehovah’s Witness on the planet, I made his spiritual life the entire first chapter. As far as I know, the chapter is the most complete collection anywhere of vignettes about him as reported in the various media.

    Prince’s high-profile death put the fentanyl trap on the map and revealed how easy it was for persons who would never do recreational drugs to become addicted to these painkillers they came across through “honorable” means—they were prescribed by doctors who gave no warning and usually did not know themselves how their products would take over a person.

    After dealing with one doctor who claimed Prince died of “VIP syndrome” (doctors are so awed by celebrity that they fail to do their job), I quoted a newly-posted letter from Dr. Chris Johnson, and the next three paragraphs are from Tom Irregardless and Me, published in 2016.

    Dr Johnson wrote how of how he was “forced to paint an unflattering picture of the industry that I have been a part of for the last 15 years. I wish I could tell you that this epidemic was due to an honest mistake. That the science was unclear or had mixed results that only later became evident. But I can’t. I also wish I could tell you that the only reason the problem persists is a ‘lack of physician awareness.’ But I won’t. The reason this opioid problem started and the reason it continues is sadly for the most American reason there is – business.”

  • Oxycotin

    I beat CBS to the punch by two years in what they said about the Oxycotin pharma fraud. It is in the Prince chapter of Tom Irregardless and Me, there because Prince died a victim of that fraud. Since the Prince chapter is Chapter 1, it is even in the free preview section.
     
    I didn’t mention the company or the drug by name. I followed the lead of Watchtower publications, which seldom names individual villains. You do not name a villain, for as soon as you name one, you create the impression that removing that villain will fix things. Instead, if you should succeed in taking him out, another villain immediately steps into his shoes and the play continues with barely a hiccup.
     
    It is the play we are watching, not the heroes and villains in it. You do not have to know the names of the actors to follow the play – it can even be a distraction if you do. The names don’t matter. If one actor doesn’t show up for curtain call, they simply plug in a substitute, and the play continues.
     
    'Tom Irregardless and Me', in the Prince chapter, quotes a Dr. Johnson, who wrote to say he was
     
    “forced to paint an unflattering picture of the industry that I have been a part of for the last 15 years. I wish I could tell you that this epidemic was due to an honest mistake. That the science was unclear or had mixed results that only later became evident. But I can’t. I also wish I could tell you that the only reason the problem persists is a ‘lack of physician awareness.’ But I won’t. The reason this opioid problem started and the reason it continues is sadly for the most American reason there is – business.”
     
    At one time, Dr. Johnson points out, American doctors prescribed opioids as did doctors everywhere: for pain relief from cancer or acute injury. He then tells of a drug company, introducing a new opioid product in 1996, that swung for the fences. It didn’t want to target just cancer patients. It wanted to target everyone experiencing everyday pain: joint pain and back pain, for example:
     
    “To do this, they recruited and paid experts in the field of pain medicine to spread the message that these medicines were not as addictive as previously thought…As a physician in training, I remember being told that the risk of addiction for patients taking opioids for pain was ‘less than one percent.’ What I was not told was that there was no good science to suggest rates of addiction were really that low. That ‘less than one percent’ statistic came from a five-sentence paragraph in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980. It has come to be known as the Porter and Jick study. However, it was not really a study. It was a letter to the editor; more like a tweet. You can read the whole thing in 90 seconds.”
     
    The CBS story of 5 days ago reveals a former drug rep of the company who spills for them.. I had it all two years ago, and it is even more damning. I didn’t put it in the book because illuminating Prince’s JW life was the object of the chapter, not crusading against pharma.
     
    In fact, not only was the drug far more addictive than doctors and reps were led to believe, but the pain relief it delivered only lasted a few hours, not the 12 that was advertised. Yet, when complaints of such were received, the company would not permit reps to advise patients to take it more often, since that exposed the fact that the much more expensive drug was no better than what was already being used for pain. Instead, the advice was to increase the dosage, and that obviously served to intensify the addictive quality. Prince and millions like him got hooked on a drug that the doctor prescribed, and when doctors started to get squirrelly, withholding supply for fear of what they were unleashing, these ones were driven to the black market to find substitutes.
     
    It is here in the first chapter, Prince, which, to my knowledge, is the most complete, and perhaps only, published collection of the artist's JW experiences and interactions. And it is in the free section.