Blog Homework

Amber passed me a baton so I'm obliged to answer five questions about music. But I suppose, since I try to avoid this topic at all costs, I'll take this opportunity expose myself for what I truly am - a pirate and a music fanatic. Yes, screw you reader, I am no longer sparing you. Me and Music have been going steady for a good long while, and I'm gonna talk about us.

First things first, it's time for a lesson in the history of mp3s, from my point of view. I hopped onto the mp3 scene a good 3 years before it really started getting attention, back in 7th grade, before Little Dick Lars started crying about Napster. Back then the trade was mainly for kids who knew how to work IRC, which stands for Internet Relay Chat. Basically you'd go into IRC chatrooms - turned file sharing havens - and download music off scripted personas called "bots". There was no search engine, the selection wasn't all that great, it wasn't user friendly at all, and if you needed help nobody gave a shit because they were too busy being "leet" to bother with helping "noobs".

Around this time the mp3 scene actually started to become organized. Not too unlike the software pirates, mp3 groups started to form, ripping quality mp3 albums, tagging them with their group name, and ensuring the shit got around. Which is why you may sometimes see something like this "50_Cent-The_Massacre-2005-RNS". Whenever an album leaks before its store date, 99 percent of the time these groups on IRC are responsible. I was actually part of one of these groups freshman through junior year, and as a result I had access to hundreds of albums released on any given day by all the various groups on the IRC network. Those were the days...

My claim to fame on the piracy network was when I released Linkin Park's first album, Hybrid Theory, weeks before it came out in stores. Pre-releases are golden on the mp3 scene, I got plenty of perks and nerd props for that one. In total I released 35 albums and eps. Go me.

Napster of course popularized the fruits and labor of this "hidden" piracy network, and about 2 year ago the FBI had enough information to make a huge bust on the mp3 piracy scene, arresting the most well known distributors and crippling the main channels. But IRC is public domain so it wasn't hard for the groups to scatter and find new channels, new passwords, and new servers. I left after the first major bust because I figured I didn't want anybody showing up at my door and jacking my hard drive.

As far as being a music fanatic goes, I have roughly 170 gigs of music on my computer right now. Fucking buttnuggets, I gotta throw away albums everyday in order to download new ones, I'm down to 200 megs of space on a 210 gig harddrive. I'm a pirate, I don't buy music at all unless I"m at an indie store. The last cd I bought was Yield by Pearl Jam, because I had a gift certificate.

03. Song playing right now:

Constantines - Young Lions

04. Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me(in no particular order):

1. Jeff Buckley - Grace (At the end he holds a note longer than I though humanly possible while his band goes nuts, it just kills me everytime)

2. Radiohead - Street Spirit (It just sounds like one of those divine songs that wrote itself)

3. Interpol - Untitled (I love arpeggios and these guys really know how to show restraint in their song writing)

4. Smog - I Feel Like the Mother of the World (He tackles the subject of religious violence, especially in the Middle East, says so much in so little words "Oh do I feel like the mother of the world with two children fighting".)

5. The Beach Boys - Wouldn't it be Nice (Just one of the greatest songs ever composed, even though I love The Beatles more)

6. Elliot Smith - Alameda (Forgot about this one. Just... Listen.)

05. Which 5 people are you passing this baton to, and why?

I'm holding on to this one, unless someone wants it?