"File-Swapping Is Cool, Daddy, and You Know It!"
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Some Shit I Stole, Yo!
I hear that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is about to start suing hundreds of users of peer-to-peer music file-swapping networks to intimidate them out of copyright-infringement. Well, all I can say to that is "Good luck, dumbasses!" How many fingers does that little Dutch boy have? I mean, there are hundreds of hack-happy slackers out there just dying to be the one who starts up the next generation of p2p networks that operate on full anonymity. There's nothing the RIAA can really do to stop what's happening.

It may be that file-swapping is killing the recording industry, but that's only because the recording industry has been making a killing forever. Some of these "artists" have been given everything by the big corporations and the only way to justify it is to keep the price of albums artificially high. Eighteen bucks for a Jennifer Lopez album from Sam Goodys or Camelot Music? Get the fuck out of here, you fucking thieves. I'm looking at a large stack of CDs I got for twenty bucks and a big fat coax cable and I'm thinking something tells me I'm into something good, beeatch. Oh, and fuck Herman's Hermits, too.

You want the real story behind the decline of the recording industry? There's an immense amount of unlistenable horseshit out there. That's it. That's the whole of it. If someone were to shove the American Top 40 (do they even have that anymore?) in my face and threaten me with death to hum a few bars of any one of those songs, I couldn't do it. Songwriting has absolutely and undeniably died. Pop music is now solely the domain of untalented and uncreative young black people. It's an enormously embarrassing passage in the history of American music these days. The only songs that it's even possible to like are re-makes of songs I grew up with. What are today's kids going to grow up to remember? Nothing created by those of their own generation, that's for sure.

I hope that file-swapping destroys the music business so that it will have to resort to such things as promoting talent that can actually create its own music in a live setting. I'll take it up the slopchute for a thirty dollar ticket or a twenty dollar tee-shirt if the band who's doing it makes me give a damn five minutes after I've heard 'em play their hearts out for me.