Prince’s Mad Money

[topum]

As many of you know, after I joined LJ slightly over two months ago I was surprised how strong the Russian segment of it was. I could barely find active journals in English but there seemed to be an ocean of super active journals in Russian. I got interested. Many of you also know how much I am into Google Translation. I read Russian journals via Google Translate sometimes, you might remember these.

Today I was looking at a couple of their top journals and saw a post about Prince. I got curious what the Russia's top blogger's take on it would be. Below is that post Google Translated from Russian with some minimal tweaks only to the bits which did not make sense at all after GT. I had to make those using a vocabulary.

I thought you might be interested too.

Google Translated from this post by miss_tramell, Russia's top blogger.

Prince’s Mad Money

Prince left an estate of $800 million.

-Photo of Prince-

He did not leave a will. The money will go to his nearest relative - his sister - a former drug addict and prostitute.

Here she is:

-Photo of Prince's sister-

And this is one of Prnice’s villas:

-Photo of Prince's lavish villa-

I absolutely do not care that the amount that can not even be comprehended (so huge it is), will go to a former drug addict and prostitute. It is absolutely none of my business.

What absolutely infuriates me is: why the singer Prince is worth nearly a billion dollars?

What he has done for mankind? He wrote a dozen hits in the '80s? Not just hits, but super-hits? OK. More than a dozen? Accepted. But is it really worth that huge amount of money?

Humanity is insane. I realized it a long time ago. It is unjustifiable for songs - no matter how good they may be - to pay millions. Showbiz Workers do not produce anything that moves humanity forward. They do not save lives. Their relatively light work should not be paid so obscenely high.

Every day 22 thousand children die in conditions of extreme poverty.

-Photo of a kid covered in flies-

In 2011, 6.9 million children under 5 died of hunger and thirst. Every hour took the lives of 800 children. They did not have enough food. They did not have enough water. They did not have enough basic medicines.

At the same time the singer Prince amassed a fortune of $800 million.

Showbiz in our world is severely overvalued, and human life is sorely underestimated.

Madness. Cruelty. It is, but it should not be. This is not even the way to the Apocalypse. This is the Apocalypse.

Comments

[topum.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I wonder too, and I might translate some of them later and do a Part II for this.

I think that she does not question what he did with his money and how he was spending it. Neither does she question that all of it goes to his sister (she explicitly states "it is none of my business"). The way it looks to me, she does not attack Prince, she attacks us. She is not shaming him for amassing so much money or for being rich and not spending enough to help those starving kids. She is asking how comes that in the world where we are informed, educated, and apparently striving for justice, equality, compassion and sharing (we talk about it a lot all the time!) and in the system where we vote with our money we are making people who sing songs so insanely rich while a huge amount of people are absolutely struggling in the world. Is something wrong with us? Or with the system? She is saying that the world were educated voters (us) who claim to value justice and equality a lot and are free to vote with their money for whatever cause they see fit a singer who sings songs should not be valued above the lives of a couple of countries of starving kids. And yet we voted differently.

Btw, I do not agree with her post. I think she framed the problem too simplistically and is missing a couple of links in the chain. It is quite a bit more complex I think.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

One of the links that she didn't cover, that partly explains what we see, is that in consumption goods, where we only know if we like them after we've already paid for them, we rely heavily on popularity to guide our choices. As a result, there are a million musicians out there, but a few get almost all the money because once they get some money that is itself an advertisement for their goods so we all pile on.
I don't think anyone would criticize someone for buying three albums a year. If we all do that, and we all use popularity as a major driver for which albums to buy, then someone makes $800M. That's an emergent property of economics and taste. There isn't a culpable party in this small view.

[topum.livejournal.com]

That's why "Or with the system?" is included in my comment above.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Yep. Now, THERE, is a whole pile of difficult arguments. (And no simple conclusions, I don't think.)