tuesday reloaded
Over lunch, I couldn't help but overhear the oddly-dressed man adjacent to me ranting to his companion about the rampant commercialism of America. His blue shoes and vest spoke volumes of his staunch position against the mainstream. "All I'm a-sayin' is that we's got brotha's dyin' over in I-raq, and you see that woman? She throw away enough food to feed two people!" [he spoke suchly; I am not exaggerating] "...what we need is to get back to the nat'ral world, back to mother nature... get rid of all these companies with unequal labor practices that is starvin' people overseas." This from a man in blue shoes. And what's even more ironic? He's sitting in Jack-in-the-Box.
In a similar vein, it seems that Michael Jackson is weighing in on the piracy issue. While I tend to dislike agreeing with him, I'm forced to admit that he has a point. Jailing music pirates (Arrrrr!) seems a tad heavy-handed. It is commonly known that the music industry (since it's one thing that walks around and does stuff) blames piracy and cd-burning for 'lackluster' sales. Isn't lackluster such a wonderful euphemism for 'crappy'? I offer another alternative: perhaps the music industry has been producing, uh, 'lackluster' music. You see, I draw a line through the music world. On one side is the pop music and commercial froth that I consider to be akin to pop-up ads on websites (Backstreet Boys, *NSync, Aaron Carter, BBMak, Jewel (v2.0... yea, she sold out), Britney, Christina, etc.) ... entertaining, but not something I'd ever think about paying for. Don't get me wrong, I'm a pop fiend... pop culture has its own wonderful things, mostly plastic and disposable. On the other side of my Music World Line are such artists as deserve payment (John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Sting, anything classic, anything with true artistic merit). These I pay for, and I believe others should pay for them as well. My solution: let the froth fly free and let the substantive stuff be the only music that it is criminal to pirate. True, this becomes rather subjective, but everybody knows I live in an idealist world anyway. So it works in my world, and I like my world because everybody knows me there. Alternatively, perhaps the RIAA could step out a little bit and propose the following: a distributed for-profit music sharing network. Call it MyTunes or something snappy. The idea: users buy music, but then can resell it (bulk of profit going to the industry, but users get to keep a few cents) Instead of a centralized server, lay this over KaZaA or whavever the kids are using these days to keep the user base (6 million users automatically!) Current pirates just have to pay for a license, and the industry still gets their money.
But ever am I reminded of the mantra of the hackers of the early 80's... Information wants to be free.
Um, what was I talking about... I forgot. Oh well.
Elsewhere on the globe, it has been proposed to make Jerusalem the capital of the world.
A band calling themselves 'Burka Blue' signed with a Dusseldorf label. Three afghan women in blue... maybe Blue Man Group is looking for wives?
'lackluster' pop song of the day: Aaron Carter - Clapping Song
(yea, guess what it's about...)
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