RIAA vs Napster: Glenn McDonald’s ‘position paper’ on the topic. The War Against Silence, Glenn’s staggeringly long-running (and just staggeringly long, period) music review site has taken a Jeremiac turn of late, and this is no exception. Culture is fucked and monstrous, nobody ever uses Napster except to download commercial crap, sensitive indie listeners like me are doomed. A vast oversimplification, but not so vast as to completely mis-state his position. Meanwhile I am boggling at Mike’s ability to find eighteen versions of “The Dark End Of The Street”, not all of them by any means bad – a dumb completist impulse not a thousand miles away from buying every Tori Amos 2CD singles set.
This week’s proper TWAS deals with the Belle And Sebastian and Black Box Recorder albums, two records I found more or less disappointing. McDonald likes them more than me, but his gloomy tone holds, spiced a little now with condescencion. “This is why thoughtful people become more serene, but don’t seem to get happier: they know that the only meaningful triumphs are quiet, narrow, partial victories over worthy enemies, and that wild ecstasy is contrived and inconsequential.” This after concluding that ‘uplifting’ pop music songs are ‘for biding time with until you die’. Now, I’m sure McDonald believes this with all his heart, but frankly if this kind of pinched position is what listening to obscure music for years gets you to, I’m sticking with the Top 40, biding that time, and dying shallow but at least happy.