ARTS & FARCES internet

Bob Dylan blew into town last night on an ill, idiot wind, and he didn’t have to sing about it for us to know which way it was blowing. This was, after all, the day that the U.S. Congress passed a disturbing bill that hopes to combat terrorism by restricting civil rights.

I hate—absolutely detest—arena shows, but you make an exception for Bob Dylan especially when it’s his first show in his mom’s home town since she died.

At least three and maybe four generations came together 14,000 strong to hear what this 60-year-old national treasure—and one of our own up here on the far edge—had to say about the most troubling times in more than 30 years. I have to admit that it was a little disconcerting when Dylan and his band took the stage in snazzy white and burgundy suits, respectively. From up in the cheap seats it looked like a 1970s soul review, but this was Dylan and I eagerly suspended belief and judgment. Since he’s been opening recent shows with Fred Rose’s “Wait For The Light To Shine,” I knew that those must be western-cut suits and this show—like most Dylan shows—was going to run the gamut of musical styles.

Pretty soon all God’s creators gonna be pickin’ cotton for Bill. Or maybe Rupert or Walt.

Imagine that suddenly, all distributions of GNU/Linux were illegal in the United States. As well as Zope, Python, Perl, Apache, and all other open source software products. While that arguably may not be the goal of the Security Systems Standard & Certification Act (SSSCA), it would surely be a result. The SSSCA would outlaw any digital device—including personal computers—that did not include a copy protection mechanism. Right now the only thing keeping it from happening are the events surrounding 11 September.

The bill, written by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC)—chair of the Senate Commerce Committee—with a lot of help from Disney and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

If you’ve been watching and reading the mainstream media, you have to be struck with the incongruity between the demand for blood on the one hand and the enormous sense of compassion on the other. It seems that the closer to the devastation, the higher the level of compassion and, conversely, the further from the epicenter, the higher the bloodlust.

The broadcasters—with the exception of today’s passive observation of a day of remembrance—have taken it upon themselves to whip the citizenry into a frenzy that will seemingly only be quelled by heads on pikes. According to the mainstream media, the only questions we need to be asking is, “where are the bastards” and “how many ways can we punish them.”

These are, unfortunately, the wrong questions. The main question we need to be asking ourselves is, “what did we ever do to piss someone off badly enough to do something like this.” Collectively we’re demanding revenge and retribution, but we’ve not bothered to examine that maybe—just maybe—Tuesday’s events were someone else’s misguided attempt at revenge and retribution.

While readily admitting that my music bias resides with my generation, I just can’t figure out “new music.” Frankly, I haven’t been able to decipher popular music for more than 20 years. The last “new music” I remember buying was probably Talking Heads. Oh, I buy a lot of new releases (moe. Grateful Dead, Keller Williams, String Cheese Incident, Yonder Mountain String Band, and The Big Wu come immediately to mind), but these aren’t new musical forms—more like retreads of older musical forms if you will.

But “new music” has always evaded me. Consider the Billboard top-selling albums of July 1971:

• “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones
• “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye
• “4 Way Street” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young
• “Aretha Live at Fillmore West” by Aretha Franklin
• “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” by James Taylor

I’ve seen the end of the music industry, and it’s not mp3. Rather, it’s the Shorten (.shn) file format. Unlike formats like mp3, Shorten is lossless and provides an exact copy of the original work. That means recording artists can use the format to distribute their music directly to fans. For established artists, the major labels will be obsolete. They’ll make more money and users will enjoy significantly lowered prices. New artists will be able to take advantage of the file format to garner an audience with lower risk and without need for the typical usury relationship with a record label.

Tastemakers will be real folks—you and me—rather than label accountants and A&R lackeys.

Here’s how the process will work. You’ll download a new release as a set of .shn files. The release will cost, at most US$5.00, but most likely a full 70-minute release will be about US$2.50 with US$2.00 going directly to the artist and US$0.50 going to the site that provided bandwidth and storage space. Of course you’ll have to add the cost of your own bandwidth, CD burner, blank CD, and printer and supplies for jewel case inserts.