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May 13, 2002
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
May 10, 2002
Lisa Taraki
In Defense
of Sanctions
Against Israel
Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
and Teens: Criminalizing the Victiims
Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Analyst Details
The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United State
Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Institutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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May 14,
2002
Scapegoats:
The Music
Industry's War on Tapes
by Dave Marsh
"It (the music industry) is in real
peril now and if we don't do something about it, running a record
company in this country will become so unprofitable that it just
won't be worth taking risks with new acts. It will become stodgy,
boring and dead," said Peter Scaping of the British Phonographic
Institute.
Sounds like a cliché doesn't it?
It is. Scaping spoke in 1978. He was talking about cassettes.
This was back when the international slogan was "Home taping
is killing music." The opposite was actually happening.
Mix tapes probably sold almost as many records as radio airplay
over the past 20 years. Today, music retailers complain much
more often that the labels are killing off the cassette, which
is being done openly and deliberately, than about file-sharing
or even CD burning.
There are a bunch of reasons why the
record industry wants to kill the cassette. Dual inventories
are expensive. Get rid of cassettes, and you'd only need one
kind of manufacturing facility, too. There's also the notion,
I suspect, that people with their music collections on cassette
might start replacing them when cassettes become hard to find.
The ulitmate reason may involve class.
People with money have bought CDs almost exclusively for the
past decade. Like me, they came to hate cassettes: It's a pain
in the ass to find a song let alone a specific musical passage
on a cassette, they're impossible to store sensibly, they snap,
stretch and otherwise break and if you dub onto them, the variables
between any two decks and the signal transmission breakdown leaves
you with noise and blur.
But cassette machines are still way cheaper
than CD players, blank cassettes can be reused, if you make a
mistake while dubbing a mix tape you don't have to start over
with a fresh piece of media, and you don't have to worry whether
something burned on your machine will play on your friend's.
If you don't have a lot of money, cassettes are much more user-friendly.
Cassettes, even pre-recorded ones from
the major record companies, are also less expensive. The gigantic
unspoken factor in all of the battles over music is the skyrocketing
price of records.
The difference between swapping cassettes
mixes--which is what was supposed to be killing the record biz
in '78--and file-sharing isn't much. "File-sharing is a
net positive technology," according to Aram Sinnreich author
of the Jupiter Media research report that showed file-sharers
are 41 percent more likely to *increase* purchases of commercial
CDs.
File-sharers are beginning to learn what
it really costs to download, too: "[F]ree doesn't mean free,"
Sinnreich points out. "It takes time spent, energy spent,
hassle, disappointing results. That's the kind of currency that
teenagers have but that people with a day job don't have."
Or as my friend Lou Cohan wrote when
he sent me 20 beauteous versions of "People Get Ready":
"Searching for, downloading, listening to, and finally,
burning mp3 files is not a pleasurable experience."
I hope the damn thing plays on my machine.
DeskScan
1. "Cold Woman Blues" / "99
Blues" / "Outside Woman Blues," Blind Joe Reynolds
(from a CD burned by a friend of newly discovered tracks-plus
the well-known "Outside"--by a country bluesman so
great a friend commented, "He sounds like Robert Johnson's
lost brother."
Very very scratchy 78 sources-try http://www.tefteller.com/html/intro.html
for your own sample)
2. Return
of a Legend, Jody Williams (Evidence)
3. 1000
Kisses, Patty Griffin (ATO)
4. Become
You, The Indigo Girls (Epic)
5. Here Comes the New Folk Underground,
David Baerwald (Lost Highway advance)
6. Adult World, Wayne Kramer (Muscletone
advance)
7. The Byrds Play Bob Dylan (Columbia
Legacy advance)
8. Anthony Smith (Mercury Nashville
advance)
9. Plenty
Good Lovin', Sam Moore (Swing Café, UK import)
10. "Float Away (All of the Streets
Are Lonely)," Marah (E Squared single)
Dave Marsh coedits
Rock and Rap Confidential.
He can be reached at: marsh6@optonline.net
Dave Marsh's
Previous DeskScan Top 10 Lists:
May 6, 2002
April 30, 2002
April 22, 2002
April 15, 2002
April 9, 2002
April 2, 2002
March 25, 2002
March 18,
2002
March 11,
2002
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