I live alone and I rarely listen to the radio, excluding talk radio shows or National Public Radio.   rarely find myself dialing into radio jock stations as I hate to hear commercials, so all my music exposure comes from friends or the occasional web site or two, that I check for tunes if I’m audibly bored.  These days everywhere I look Media companies are doing new advertisements and in general tossing some serious support behind the whole “Make your own mix” lifestyle, that having a burner can give you.  And honestly there is something great about carrying around theme music, it completes the daily experience of the movie we call Life.

 Of course like social programming the first thing I think when I see these commercials are “Oh my god, if he makes a mix and gives it to another person, he’s a music pirate.  The Artist is suffering!” I always look suspiciously inside my head for the subliminal land mine, which has exploded in my skull and think of how the RIAA is trying to legislate morality.

 Jonathan a few weeks ago brought over the new Tracy Chapman album: Telling Stories, which I love.   We were working on the second edit of Kung Fu, our first physical poetry book, which we originally released on New Years Eve, back in 99. Budget restrictions forced us to par down the art and other aspects of the book that we’d originally wanted to include. This allowed us to cut the production costs in half.  While we worked over some Chinese food and prepared the collective muse that is our partnership, Jonnie stuck in the album and we listened to it and drank cheap beer.

 Tracy Chapman has always been a poet and a communicator of life, much to her eventual mocking in public life.  For years though she stayed committed to her style and art, receding more into the realm of “Great Artists who were once insanely popular and are now victims of overexposure, who still produce some great albums that no one listens too”  Each new album Tracy Chapman has created has brought a little refinement to her stark and simple lyrics and guitaring, back in the mid nineties she toured Lilith Fair with her new studio album New Beginning, broke out with a bad ass country flavored single and she was back on the forefront and bigger then ever.

 Since I don’t listen to radio and don’t have cable I am on a island as far as it goes to hearing about new albums. I was excited to hear what Telling Stories would sound like, as I likened it to being the sophomoric offering of her phoenix revival into the mainstream.  It’s good, unlike most Poet Singers Tracy Chapman’s voice seems to evolve and smooth out with each new album.  Somewhere, under the peeling bark that was her early voice, we hear and feel more of the heart and uncurling certainty of where the words come from and what they might mean for her personally.

 I promptly recorded a copy of the album on my machine with Real Jukebox, knowing that Jonathan would lend the CD, but begrudgingly.  For another week I listened to it while chilling on my computer.  A week later, as I planned to grocery shop I instead found myself in Target looking for the album and buying my own copy.

 I could have just as easily have burned a copy of the album and printed out a cover on my color printer and been a happy fool with good free music.  I actually want to support Tracy Chapman, I find when I love an artist I want them to make more music for me to hear and love.  It won’t happen if I burn a copy off a friend and just listen to it.  So I do support them, I don’t rationalize that Tracy Chapman is already richer then me, “I like it I buy it”, that’s my rule.

 My music buying morals lie under the honor tradition which shareware made popular.  If I get a copy of your album and dig it I’ll buy it, If I get a copy of it and don’t dig it much, it’ll eventually get deleted or copied over and I’ll look for more music which I like more.  The RIAA can’t make me do otherwise, they can attack coders and websites which promote music utility tools which make it easier.  So….if they won, you and I would just go back to the cave man antics of sticking CDs in the stereo and copying them to tape, doesn’t matter, if people steal, they steal.  Their are already established traditional methods of easily copying music and I don’t see the RIAA screaming on how boom boxes with double decks or cd burners are destroying the bottom line of musicians everywhere.

 It sure would make more sense if the RIAA just worked with the tech industry to make a standard out of MP3 or whatever popular compression format is convenient and good for consumers.  Then do something cool and damn smart like installing kiosks in established music stores and anywhere else for that matter, where you can make mix albums on the fly, cruise the book section, get a coffee and come back in an hour to grab your new burn…

 In the meanwhile, screw’m bum! Off your friends, get the music however you want, don’t forget about the artists though, they made the music in the first place and the next time I see you, I’ll let you bum a copy of Telling Stories or anything else I have, but I’ll break your legs if you love it and don’t buy it…

Wanna get into copying music to your computer and also having something to listen to downloaded music?

My techie friends scoff that I like Real JukeBox but it’s cool, stick in a CD and it’ll automatically make a copy for you, later on if you own a full copy of RJB you can take songs and make burns all you want.

find out about Real Juke Box Basic for free and try it for yourself 
As I said my cool friends would shake their collective heads and say use Win Amp which is a cool customizable player with some nifty ass features, including a cool interactive screen saver, but it don’t rip and it don’t work as easily as RJB.

There are other cool utilities that I use to make my life easier and I’ll list them here later on.

Rock on baby...