The column linked above (click for larger size) appeared a while back in The Times. Written by The Economist‘s Deputy Editor Emma Duncan, it’s an attack on those of us who believe growing our own food is a worthwhile way to spend those hours not already devoted to wage slavery or domestic duties.

Emma plainly believes that the economies of scale available to massive supermarket chains are likely to produce a better product than struggling enthusiasts could ever achieve.  The fact that they have access to “£14 billion worth of assets” and “a workforce of nearly half a million” naturally means that their tomatoes will be more successful – and probably more efficiently produced – than those grown by enthusiasts in their back gardens, greenhouses or allotments. She dismisses their efforts as “modern sentimentality,” born of a misbegotten nostalgia for pre-industrial farming and “holistic socialism”.  Basing her conclusions on the “vile” tomatoes grown by her sister, she also rubbishes the efforts of amateurs in favour of scientific factory farming, overseen by experts. Growing tomatoes is a complicated business, she says: “an amateur in a damp garden in east Oxford is hardly likely to be able to compete with a global industry. “

The trouble with this is that she is wrong.  Growing tomatoes, especially if you have access to a cold greenhouse or a polytunnel, is one of the easiest things you can do. Pretty much all you need to give them is a bit of sunshine, regular watering, and a modicum of pruning. Since childhood, when I first learned watched my father pluck ripe, juicy fruit from his greenhouse vines, I’ve grown a good crop almost every year. Even when I moved from the home counties to the decidedly wetter and colder environment of northern Scotland, my tomatoes continued tasty, plentiful and much in demand by friends, family and even a few local customers. Now, we grow luscious beef tomatoes, pendulous plum tomatoes for cooking, sweet little red and yellow cherries, even exotic “black” varieties from Russia, really a deep bruised purple. Not only do we enjoy good eating all summer long, the whole family gets involved in growing, fertilising, weeding and caring for the crop, just as they do for the salad leaves, cucumbers and other vegetables we grow alongside these jewels in our crown. Out tomatoes are grown with more than money and expertise and an eye on the bottom line.  They are grown with care, and with love.

Are my tomatoes evenly-coloured, regularly shaped, unblemished? Certainly not: like most natural things, they come in all shapes and sizes and usually gather a few blemishes along the way.  Do I have any special skills? Not really.  Yet every year, our little family dreads the coming of autumn, when the tasty tomatoes finally give out and the last few green unripened remnants are turned into chutney before the plants are dug up and composted.

Today, our crop being long exhausted, I finally gave in and bought a bunch of out-of-season salad tomatoes from our local supermarket. Grown god knows how and imported from who knows where, they were bright red, unblemished and precisely regular in shape. They looked like the fake wax fruit you see in window displays. They were beautiful – but they had about as much taste as a red balloon filled with slightly musty water.  Now, it may be that Emma Duncan has access to a particularly good supermarket, and that her sister is just a rotten gardener.  But her thesis seems to me to depend not so much on the facts of the matter, as her own prejudices as an economist and her own lack of taste as a consumer.

As with all good things, though, it’s possible to overindulge. Learning from the past may be a good thing – but becoming obsessed with it is quite another.  Just ten years into the new millennium, we have become true fundamentalists -  more anally fixated on what we produced and digested yesterday than we are on looking towards tomorrow.

This strange fascination with our own fundament affects almost every area of our culture.  Maybe it first reared its head in the arts, as an appetite for sequels, prequels, remakes and reunions  began to outstrip an appetite for innovative new work.  In the theatre, revivalist rehashes of old pop songs by Abba or Queen, loosely stitched together to simulate a story, have replaced musicals which push the boundaries of the genre.

As leftfield maestro Stephen Sondheim recently pointed out, “The proliferation of jukebox musicals is an example of how storytelling is becoming less important”,  sidelined by audiences’ need for  nostalgia.

It really doesn’t matter to us any more if the plot of Mamma Mia makes less sense than a second-rate seaside comedy; or if spurious characters  (“Killer Queen” in We Will Rock You…) give the performers a flimsy excuse to launch into another hit.  Shows like these are all about the feelgood factor: clapping your hands and singing along.  These days, even veteran composer/producer Andrew Lloyd Webber can’t break a new idea – his latest was a sequel to The Phantom Of the Opera, Love Never Dies.  In straight theatre, too, the groundbreaking original play is an endangered species, relegated to fringe outings while the West End bristles with (mostly musical) revivals.

While technological advances in film have brought us sparkling new tools such as mo-cap and 3D, filmmakers have declined  to use them to revolutionise the language of cinema.  The dominant format has become the franchise, in which familiar characters and situations are replayed over and over as though we’re slightly dim preschoolers learning our kerb drill. Fans of romantic fantasy watch as film-makers exhaust every single plot device delaying the union of Bella and her vegetarian vampire; horror franchises such as Saw serve up escalating sadistic scenarios to an audience becoming dangerously desensitised to depictions of pain.

Creativity is limited to variations on a theme and once successful, a franchise runs almost indefinitely, carved into as many instalments as possible to maximise revenue.  Successful though they might be in terms of entertainment, the only form of innovation allowed in this game is the “reboot” -  as in Bond and Batman – in which exactly the same characters and situations are recycled using younger actors and updated production values. Plus ca change.

It’s in music, however, that our attachment to the past has done most damage. Just a few decades ago, music was a powerful agent for social change and evolution. Think  The Beatles, The Rolling Stones; think David Bowie.  Somewhere along the way, though, we’ve lost our desire for surprise. With a very few exceptions,  we no longer welcome artists who shock, challenge or disturb us. We want familiarity, security, a big comforting dose of what we already know.

As traditional marketing mechanisms falter and fail, what remains of the industry puts its faith in the tried-and-tested – and audiences lap it up.  Young talent and musical experimentation has all but fallen out of the mainstream, invisible behind the stampede of older artists forced to consolidate in order to survive.  This year alone has seen reunion shows, albums and tours by everyone from granny-friendly boy band Take That to grunge grandees Soundgarden, with a parade of lesser-known talents – Suede, Pulp, Garbage – following desperately in their wake.

It’s not always the artists’ fault: as former Japan frontman David Sylvian recently told an interviewer, ” there is a point at which a long-term artist is notified that further experimentation isn’t welcome. That a return to a career’s highlights in terms of style and content would be advisable.”   It takes a very strong personality allied to a long career track record to stand up to that kind of pressure:  heroic refuseniks such as Peter Gabriel and Robert Plant are notable examples, but for many, independence of what made them famous is usually won at the cost of what Sylvian wryly describes as “a drop in sales and the threat of obscurity or, worse, irrelevance.”

Artists with a strong enough command of irony may seek to use the mechanism of the reunion as a tool to raise the stakes and give them greater freedom of opportunity. As Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell recently remarked, “the mythology of a rock star is larger than ever, at a time when the music industry can’t create them any more.”  Thus Soundgarden’s tongue-in-cheek depiction of their iconic 90s image within the “Guitar Hero” videogame successfully raised their profile with a whole new generation of young X-boxers.  Nevertheless, even master-producer Timbaland’s musicbiz clout couldn’t save  Cornell’s beautifully deranged pop masterpiece Scream from being kicked to death by critics who objected to his attempt to flout the repressive rules of the game.

But these are exceptions that help to prove the rule.  More often, sadly, it becomes obvious that resistance is futile – and the future is assimilated Borg-style into a mechanical version of the past.  Deprived of the space to evolve, the artist descends into self-parody, afraid to step outside their comfort zone or simply suffocated by the weight of their own brand.    This trend seems particularly severe within the rock genre, where bands which have survived long term have become victims of public perception, punished by their own fans for any deviation from their unique selling point. In this context,  Aerosmith’s recent announcement that their new album will be “an old-school Aerosmith record,” made “the old way” should surprise no-one.

In the wider world, too, fear and retrenchment are gaining ground.  In a world which has been shrinking for decades as affluence and access to transport increases, we are increasingly suspicious of foreign travel.  Instead of reaching out into the world and exploring it, we defend ourselves behind layers of prejudice. We allow ourselves to believe anyone of Asian appearance is a potential terrorist, we permit our paranoid governments to subject us to more and more expensive, intrusive and ineffective security checks “for our own protection”.  In our towns and villages, we are convinced that a paedophile or a maniac lurks on every corner to abduct our children, while we ourselves are the ones guilty of denying them a frank and fearless future. Instead, we assuage our parental guilt by buying them trinkets, gaming machines, TVs and DVD players so that they can better absorb the world by proxy.

And over the Atlantic in the so-called “home of the brave”, first-ever black President Barack Obama is nursing a metaphorical bloody nose while  housewife superstar Sarah Palin and her mad hatter’s Tea Party tell voters  they should abandon (or maybe refudiate?) such modern nonsense and “get back to  time-tested truths”.  So much for the American Dream.  Adieu Captain Kirk: no more boldly going where no man has gone before.

'Stellar "Eggs" Emerge from Molecular Cloud: Closeup of Evaporating Globules in M16'

But it’s not all bad news.  In one area alone, innovation and discovery still capture people’s imaginations and draw them on towards new discoveries. Science is currently enjoying a new golden age – due at least in part to brilliant popular communicators like Professors Brian Cox and (against all odds) Stephen Hawking. In a complete reversal of the trend within the arts, science has reawoken people’s curiosity and hunger to explore.  We  have become fascinated by the weird paradoxes of quantum physics, bewitched by the remote magnificence of the imagery beamed back to us from Hubble and Cassini.  Even those doommongers terrified that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider would  tear the fabric of space-time and suck us all into a black hole were distinctly fascinated by the possibility, seduced by the frisson of danger and uncertainty which always accompanies genuine experimentation.  Amazingly, the LHC research even made the pages of ultra-reactionary tabloids like the Daily Mail !

Meanwhile, TV programmes like Cox’s Wonders Of the Solar System and the BBC’s Horizon series bravely fly the flag for curiosity, for imagination, for the possibility that everything we know about the world is wrong.  As one British newspaper reporter put it, “particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable”.  As CERN’s huge particle accelerator fired up to full power for the first time, television coverage showed its learned scientific team as bright eyed as small boys on Christmas morning at the thought that those tiny sub-atomic collisions might smash out new realities – that they might be about to discover something entirely new, something which would throw all their hard-won theories up in the air and make them think again.

That’s because these scientists actually like to think. Imagining the impossible is what they’re all about.  As mathematician Sir Roger Penrose put it in a recent Horizon documentary, “a change of mind is not something unpleasant – it’s something exhilarating.”  Physicist Lee Smolin went further, neatly linking history and future together in a way which might teach us all something about navigating our way through a life less compromised by fear.  Talking about the origins of the universe in the far distant past, he mused:  “I think the only way to keep going [is] to go under the assumption that tomorrow’s idea will be the best one so far.”

Or to put it a little more piratically, courtesy of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow before franchise fever robbed him of his spark……

“Bring me that horizon!”

This wonderful DVD is far, far more than a filmed stage production and not just a canny cash-in for schoolkids studying the play. Yes, it features Dr Who and Jean-Luc Picard in the two main roles, but both David Tennant and Patrick Stewart are seasoned theatre actors with a great deal of experience.

Both give titanic performances in this modern-dress production, Tennant bringing out Hamlet’s quick-witted humour as well as his brilliance and his terrible, conflicted sense of doubt. Patrick Stewart brings wolfish cunning and kingly dignity in turn to the double role of villainous Claudius and the murdered ghost.

The Royal Shakespeare Company production underlines the play’s sense of claustrophobia and psychological conflict – bloody retribution always at war with the secrecy, surveillance and caution which infects the Danish court at the dawn of a new, modern age.

The modern-dress setting makes this easier – for example, when Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, he doesn’t stab him through a tapestry – he fires a gun, shattering the two-way mirror behind which the eavesdropper is silently watching. Mirrors, reflections and copies underpin the language of the play and this production translates all of that into the visual world in which we experience it.

Switch the concept across to music, however, and something strange happens. What’s Spotify – the online music streaming service – if not an enormous music library? Like those fusty town libraries, it’s legal, and free (or close to it). It’s equitable. It offers a range of material, unaffected by current hype, marketing, sales or image. But unlike them – somehow it’s become sexy.

It’s altering our attitudes to music at basis. For years now, the music industry has been all about ownership. Rights, royalties, contracts, possessions. Now all that’s changing. More and more artists are parting company from major labels and making their own arrangements for sharing their music – even, as Radiohead demonstrated, for a voluntary payment. Increasingly, at the click of a mouse button you can access pretty much anything, from any era. “My stepson…was telling me how he’s currently into Cole Porter, music from the 1920s and swing music from the 40s,” said 80s pop star John Taylor in a recent speech given at UCLA, “…the availability and accessibility of music on the internet today is truly incredible.”

With something like Spotify, you don’t OWN a copy of the music you’re hearing – you’re streaming it in high quality over the Internet. But the chief point of that kind of ownership has already been steadily eroded by the growth in digital downloads. No longer do we buy weighty vinyl albums with gatefold sleeves, artwork and lyric sheets all designed to annotate and sell the idea of music as an artefact. For many people, even shelves of jewel-boxed CDs had already given way to a bulging computer hard drive. So what difference does it make – really – if that song coming out of your computer speakers is hosted on your own computer or a remote server somewhere else? Unless you’re a hopeless hi-fi nut or one of the few unfortunates left who can’t get broadband, the answer is very little.

And maybe there’s another upside to the new lending-library approach to music. Buying, owning and collecting all the CDs by a particular artist used to be part of what made you a superfan. Collectors and completists felt they had invested in their idol’s career, putting money in their pocket and contributing to their success. All that might have helped build a loyal fanbase – but sometimes also limited an artist’s freedom to evolve. The power of money does strange things to art: angry fans whose artist has changed direction or explored other avenues of music-making, have sometimes behaved almost like company shareholders whose investment has failed. That has produced more pressure on artists to produce more of the tried-and-trusted, via a tightly-controlled brand or even through revivals of past successes. Change and experiment meant uncertainty and diminishing returns.

The effects of that pressure are still showing up via a rash of predictable comeback albums, reunion tours and legacy reissues. Now that a new generation of fans isn’t being asked to make that continuing financial investment to its acts, could we be seeing the death of the whole idea of music as something we can own? As target markets age and sales of CDs plummet, there are already signs that the old breed of tribal superfan might weaken, terminally distracted by the allure of infinite choice. When the whole world’s laid out to enjoy for free, why limit yourself to what you already know? And as we learn how to live without owning the music we love, perhaps that music’s original currency – discovery, imagination, innovation and experimentation – will flower anew.

When I first heard it, quite a while ago now – this Scream left me shaken. Coming at music from anywhere but hiphop, perhaps I expected Cornell’s collaboration with Timbaland to mean some kind of dilution. To have to go looking for what I wanted under an overlay of something else. Carry On had been a book of short stories, an exploration with an uncertain ending: I knew this would be something more cohesive, a power jolt, but I wasn’t ready for the sheer size of the shock. I was expecting something like Bowie’s Let’s Dance, a subtly subversive shot at the mainstream. What I got was closer to Earthling.

No – despite what you might have read here and there, Scream actually isn’t an easy listen. Sleek enough to slide under the radar to target the casual listener, its darker content may escape those looking for non-stop sunshine or a critical mass of heavy riffage. And in the sadly unimaginative world of rawk, expectations are easily confounded. Take away the genre signifiers – heavy guitars, live drums – and many won’t recognise what lies beneath.

Which is a shame, because although it might be wearing party clothes, Scream is a dense, complex and sometimes harrowing piece of work: imagine Superunknown remade with different tools, its band dynamic replaced with a dialogue between a great singer/songwriter and a great sonic imagineer. Together, Cornell and Timbaland have drawn on developments within the eclectic European scene to create a new musical hybrid which invokes the underground dance clubs of Paris, Oslo or Lake Garda as much as the arenas of the global rock circuit.

Timbaland’s sonic kaleidoscope challenges and supports Cornell’s peerless voice by turns; sometimes brutally sparse, sometimes surging and splashing around the layered vocals and sputtering beats like boiling sugar. Emotions rear up unexpectedly, fear stalks the back of a phrase or lurks inside a harmony, the sun comes out on a cadence or a scream unzips the sky and makes it rain. It’s a cavalcade of shapes and colours, a kind of electronic zoo in which all kinds of creatures spawn and frolic.

Songs ebb and flow into each other like scenes along a river. Centrepiece “Take Me Alive” – with backing vocals by Justin Timberlake – is “Kashmir” meets Bollywood, its dark imagery both sinuous and sinister. Title track and US single Scream ends with the clanking trudge of a retreating army before an electronic hornpipe drops us into the murky hell of “Enemy”. The neo-disco stylings somehow turn an already dark song into something truly terrifying – a danse macabre, a relentless ballet of stylised self-hatred. It’s the album’s most disturbing moment.

Cornell’s lyrics have evolved over time from impressionism into expressionism, learning to wear their black heart on their sleeve. Instead of spinning oblique metaphors which keep the listener at a polite distance, he now pulls you directly into his nightmare: “no price/nothing I pay will make it all right/nothing I see
will make it lose sight/nothing I take will make me sleep at night”.

Elsewhere his elegant trademark wordplay reasserts itself, with dystopian lines like “the perfect present is no longer the future”. There are Chandleresque excursions into storytelling – we meet the guilty adventurer of “Other Side Of Town”, the hapless victim of a dancehall temptress in “Part Of Me”, the hellcat-on-wheels of “Watch Out”. Perhaps none of them are Cornell, or perhaps all of them are. Like the music which surrounds them, these lyrics are prismatic, reflecting differently depending on where you stand.

Maybe Scream will revive the lost art of the concept album, though it doesn’t so much tell a story as follow an emotional arc, a hallucinogenic journey through heaven and hell. This is a huge, 3D production, a cinematic creation from its crazy opening fanfare to the sound of film running off projector spools which brings it to closure.

Or…almost to its closure. The jokey bit of off-the-cuff studio verité which ushers in final track “Watch Out” isn’t the only snatch of the blues we hear: after a long silence, hidden track “Two Drink Minimum” rounds off the set with a slice of survival, distant cousin of Audioslave’s “The Last Remaining Light”. Cornell says he recorded it as the sun came up at 6 am after a long night in the studio: Scream leaves you with the same sense of having made it through the night to morning. Excellent and fair.

Human beings love to put things into categories. It makes our lives tidy and easy to track – but however much we struggle to contain life’s chaos, it has a nasty habit of breaking free and running riot. Living things grow and change, people especially – and so do the things they make, like art. Genre labels in libraries, music stores and broadcast media only tell us so much about the weirdly mutable stuff in which they deal.

The latest storm to blow up in the X-Factor teacup is over the winner’s single, Hallelujah. Originally written by Leonard Cohen, it was memorably covered by the late Jeff Buckley on his 1994 album Grace, a sublime piece of work which almost deserves its acknowledged status as art-rock’s Holy Grail. However, for some people music made by dead guys is Art while music made by hungry talent show contestants is “inevitably soulless”. Sadly, grace of any kind is in fairly short supply on Facebook pressure groups like this one, which overlook the fact that X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke’s gospel-inflected reading of the song actually has the kind of passion, soul and commitment which might well have made Jeff Buckley smile in recognition.

It wasn’t a matter of misplaced credit – Buckley had always said his recording followed John Cale’s arrangement of the song, and Burke’s very different performance was really nobody’s but her own. Meanwhile, songwriter Cohen, recently relieved of his liquid assets by an unscrupulous manager (see this story), is all too happy to see his work coin in a bit of Christmas cash. The boycott campaign protects nobody: it merely spotlights the kind of snobbish outrage which sometimes ensues when artists overstep category guidelines and the line between art and entertainment is blurred.

Which could mean a lot of adjustment is needed to both ears and preconceptions. In an era when big-name musicians from wildly different genres are busy pairing up like wallflowers at a tea-dance, categorising music is becoming more and more difficult. Where do you file Alison Krauss and Robert Plant? Chris Cornell and Timbaland? Alicia Keys and Jack White? James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma? The music created sometimes turns out more compound than mixture – a new substance which defies its origins, a huge risk which may please everybody or nobody. Crossover, once seen as a moneygrabbing dilution of artistic purity, is now becoming responsible for some of the bravest and most interesting music being made. Rather than typecasting creativity, it can be a source of growth and experimentation for musicians of every stamp. After all, travel broadens the mind. The more so, once audiences begin to disregard cultural signifiers and leave their narrowcasted comfort zones behind.

Which brings us back to the original question. If, as Jim Morrison once said, everything is broken up and dances…….what makes art? Where is it found? How can you recognise it? Does it differ from entertainment at all? Let’s have your thoughts….

When the musician Prince wrote the word “slave” on his face back in 1993, he made a powerfully iconic gesture. Not only was he pointing up his own frustration with his record company and the terms of their contract – he was also invoking his own country’s history at a time when a civilised society felt able to buy, sell and enslave a human being. Although liberators from Abraham Lincoln to William Wilberforce put an end to slavery across much of the world, elements of serfdom still held sway within the music business. Artists felt they were being bought and sold by corporate entities, prevented from owning the master tapes of their own work while being forced to dance to the tunes of their masters.

The pressures of digital piracy and easy music downloads have since forced the record companies onto the back foot. Although much remains that is restrictive, most artists – whatever their level of success within the industry – now make much of their living by touring. Music is increasingly seen as a kind of loss leader, a free inducement to tempt in those in the market for mobile phones, designer clothing or social networking. The focus for experiencing music has moved back to perhaps where it should have been all along – the live stage. And whether you’re a squillion-selling country or R&B singer, an arena rocker or a folkie slogging round the DIY circuit, that’s where you’ll be plying your real trade.

Sadly though, the idea of ownership of art has been harder to shift. Painters and sculptors have long had to accept the fact that the things they made could be bought and owned by others, and have had to adjust to the loss of original artefacts on which they have lavished care, passion and love. Those whose work was able to be copied and reproduced, like musicians, writers and photographers, have maybe had an easier time of it. When J.K. Rowling sold her Harry Potter books to Bloomsbury, the manuscripts stayed in her study along with the bound and published evidence of her success. And unlike yesterday’s composers who needed an omnipresent orchestra to charm their imagination off of the printed page and into reality, today’s musicians can rediscover their own fully-realised work at the touch of an iPod button.

But even today’s artists experience one last powerful barrier to artistic freedom – and from an unexpected source. Sometimes, the most powerful constraints can be placed not by a publisher, a gallery owner or a record company, but by those who buy into and consume the artist’s vision. The fans.

In his 1987 novel “Misery”, Stephen King writes about an author kidnapped and imprisoned by one of his readers. Obsessed with controlling his output to suit her own requirements, Nurse Annie Wilkes shackles him to a bed and cripples his body to stop him escaping. Then she treats and cares for him, force-feeding him painkillers and saving his life only as long as he dedicates it to her vision rather than his own.

Reputedly inspired by the murder of John Lennon by crazed fan Mark Chapman, it’s probably the ultimate nightmare for any artist – and a powerful metaphor for all those who become the victims of their own success. Actors who become typecast in a role or musicians who are not permitted to overstep genre expectations are primary examples of this kind of mindset as it operates in the marketplace. Although they may not be moved to direct action of the type King imagines, fans do become invested in the product they are buying, identifying with its familiar associations and demanding that it does not change. Just as confectioners get angry letters if they change the packaging of a chocolate bar or a breakfast snack, music fans rebel if a favourite artist experiments by wrapping his art up in something new.

Bob Dylan was famously called a “Judas” when he went electric in 1965; his work was developing but many felt betrayed. Arguably, some were invested more in the idea of an acoustic troubadour in the Woody Guthrie mould than they were in the man and his continuing musical vision. Alt-rock darlings Radiohead were reviled in some quarters for dropping the guitars and resorting to electroblippery on 2000’s “Kid A”. Even celebrated changelings like David Bowie suffer from reinvention anxiety. Despite having moved through modernism, hippie folk, heavy metal, glam, retro, art-rock and soul over a decade and a half, his multi-platinum “Let’s Dance” encountered more prejudice from fans than ever before. Conceived as a deliberate mainstream breakthrough, this 1983 collaboration with Nile Rodgers of Chic outraged those who had seen him as an alternative, if changeable messiah.

That situation may be about to repeat itself with grunge icon Chris Cornell’s new alliance with urban music’s own King Midas, Timbaland. Cornell spent much of the 1990s making edgy art-rock with his band Soundgarden, picking up a cultish audience who bought into his dark and often depressive emotional landscape. When their hero later kicked the booze and the pills and re-emerged as a family man with a couple of cute kids and new line in sensuous love songs, many older fans experienced abandonment issues. Sounding reminiscent of Stephen King’s anti-heroine, they wrote blogs and forum posts urging him back into the emotional shackles from which he had escaped.

For many of them, his Bowie-like aspirations towards mainstream success with forthcoming album “Scream” are the very last straw. The grunge voodoo dolly they bought back in ’94 has changed and developed, as real living things will, and the changes have robbed some fans of their original emotional investment. And that’s where the flames kick in. For the last few weeks, music forums have been full of the kind of seething rage and recrimination Bowie was lucky enough to escape in those far-off, pre-internet days. Fans furious at the Timbaland collaboration have demanded statements, explanations, even apologies: many have insisted, without irony, that Cornell has become an industry puppet whilst volunteering to hold the strings themselves.

Plainly, an “alternative” artist owes it to his fans not to explore too many alternatives. One fan even declared that Cornell would be better off dead than left alive to dishonour his own myth. Or, perhaps, merely crippled and shackled by the pre-existent expectations of his audience? Maybe Stephen King’s gothic fantasy wasn’t quite so paranoid after all. Or perhaps the concept of slavery has as much currency in 21st century art as it ever did in 19th century commerce.

In the end, those writers, musicians or thinkers who seek to explore and experiment will stand or fall by the extent of their own courage. Some may be cowed, dropping wearily back into the shackles of Nurse Wilkes and her real-life counterparts, grateful for her deadly care. Others will persist, knowing that keeping their nerve and their will intact is the way through and the way forward. No-one now thinks of Bob Dylan as merely an acoustic troubadour. Radiohead’s reviled “Kid A” is now an integral part of their oeuvre.Hopefully, Cornell’s new album will follow the same healthy trajectory.

Such eruptions will continue as long as people feel. Because the need for slaves, or enemies, or scapegoats is in the end driven by our own fears, jealousies and longings. We forbid artists to change because we are jealous of their freedom: we have to go to work every day and allow someone to tell us what to do, so we resentfully try to bind those who write our books and make our music with the very same ties. What we forget is that it was their very freedom that drew us to them in the first place; their liberty to express whatever they wanted, whoever they were, whatever they felt. Their ability to move, redeem or simply or communicate with complete strangers, anyway, anyhow, anywhere they choose. The ultimate irony is that in enslaving them to our own selfish needs, we deny our own most basic link with the art they make.

by Clare O’Brien

I

It’s all about now, you said.

If I missed my chance

You’d be gone.

You closed the door, left the roses.

The wind took your laughter

As you walked to the sea.

II

You couldn’t speak,

Your eyes begged.

The water soaked you silently

The bed, the floor,

Your hair was plastered

to your skull. You shivered.

In the doorway,

A statue barred my way.

No bedtime story

No lullaby.

III

I found you in pieces

Tossed in on the tide

Sand-stranded like a shattered crab

I scooped up each scrap, threw you

Back to your sea cradle

The lost shell song.

IV

Seal grey or sky blue

You’re in your element now

Take your clothes, take your keys

Leave your skin on the shore.

Now you’re velvet smooth

Move in stillness,

Slow, deliberate, giving

Yourself like rain.

V

Our dreams smell of you.

You find us when you want to,

Cross the depths on stepping stones

Made from our sleeping minds.

We catch your scent, stiffen like cats.

As we wait stone-blind and paralysed

Your language swells and rises,

Murmurs on under our breath.

When I was a kid there was a fairly rubbish western on TV called Branded. It was about a US cavalry captain who’d been falsely accused of cowardice in battle – “scorned as the one who ran.” Back then, branded was a pejorative – implying an indelible mark, an ugly label you’d never be able to shake. Something limiting and restricting, which marked you out as a coward or a slave. If you were branded, you were owned, conquered, shamed.

A little later, when I was at college in the 70s, my friends and I would buy supermarket toothpaste, butcher’s loose sausages, no-name ketchup. It was usually as good as the stuff made by the companies that advertised on TV, and it was cheaper. Not buying the big names was a matter of pride, a kind of small-scale piracy which kept us free. We weren’t lured in by the big-budget ads, we declined to worship at the temple of Heinz and Cadbury. We didn’t think Colgate could give us a ring of confidence and we suspected Wrigleys wouldn’t double our fun.

Yes, there was a touch of teenage elitism about all of this. Yes, we thought we were clever. But our cool was homemade, not bought in ready-designed, and even when egg-white Mohicans and safety-pins replaced cheesecloth and lovebeads, it was our imagination that shaped the trends as much as anything from the chain stores and the high streets.

I don’t know when branded goods became a badge of allegiance instead of a mark of slavery. Maybe it was some weird takeover, like the pod-people in Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers. As I struggled in various capacities with the world of late c20th business and commerce I heard terms like “consumer confidence” and “brand equity” and wondered what they could possibly mean. The world was changing, and the brand names and logos we had laughed at in college were deemed to have real value.

Some businesses seemed to consist almost entirely of their brand names, the goods or services they offered fairly irrelevant by comparison to the name they bore. There were even “premium brands”, strangely aristocratic items whose value – like that of the old upper class we’d all rejected – seemed more imaginary than demonstrable. This is worth more of your money because I say it is, the ads barked. Pubs, hotels, restaurants were not to be judged simply on the food, ambience and service, but on the size of their name and the strength of their presence, like an invading army. Even the term “rollout” suggested tanks advancing inexorably across the countryside, eradicating the friendly anarchism of seaside B&Bs, suburban corner shops and village pubs.

Brands fought for our allegiance, sometimes to ludicrous effect. In a retail park in our nearest cityof Inverness, a branch of Pizza Hut and a drive-in Burger King glower across the car park at a new J&B Sports fitness centre. Drive in, pay, get fat, pay all over again to get thin. All this in a city surrounded by rugged countryside where you can shoot rabbits and game, gather wild food and walk for miles. But that doesn’t stop people flocking to the lure of slave-jobs that pay cash to buy all the things the city offers. And I’m no better. I may walk past Burger King with my stomach full of home-grown organics, but I’ll greedily chomp through the latest fodder from Hollywood in the big fat multiplex a few yards along.

Even virtual worlds like the net’s Second Life – created, perhaps, to provide an escape from the first – are being invaded by brands. Recently, Starwood Hotels became “the first hotel brand to place a 3D computer-generated property inside a virtual world”. The irony of this seems to have escaped almost everybody, as has the daftness of spending real money to buy designerwear for your computer-generated avatar or dollar-a-go “gifts” for your Facebook friends.

The adage about a fool and his money is an old one. But considering web inventor Tim Berners-Lee sacrificed a personal fortune in order to give us virtual freedom, it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to use it to buy designer snake-oil for an imaginary projection of themselves.

But maybe that’s the secret. Maybe it simply doesn’t matter whether we get anything real for our money or not. It’s the brand we’re buying – not the trainers, not the perfume, not the coffee. That might just as well be pixels for all the use it is. It’s the idea. The association. The cachet…or the catch. Because sooner or later, be it Jimmy Choo, Cadburys or Coke, we’re hooked.

What do you do if you’re branded? Nothing. That’s the point. Unlike the poor old cavalry captain, we’re conniving at our own slavery, baring our backs for the hot iron. We want to be abused. We want to be owned. When we buy our little nuggets of nonsense, we want to display that ownership. Because in some weird, weak, way, it makes us feel safe.