From the article Lester Bangs’ Basement by Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stone) in Slate:
Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it. That’s a fantasy shared by many music fans—and,mutatis mutandis, film buffs as well. We all know the Internet has made available a lot of things that were previously hard to get. Recently, though, there are indications of something even more enticing, almost paradisiacal, something that might have made Bangs put down the cough syrup and sit up straight: that almost everything is available.
I’ve spent most of my life in search of recorded music. And it was an often-professed fantasy that I wanted to own every album ever made. That may not be entirely true as I have little use for polkas or death metal. But from the time I was 14 until I left the US in 1995, pretty much every Saturday of my life was spent in record stores hunting obscurities and bargains. A friend and I used to hit all the shops in NYC’s Greenwich Village and East Village and later on Brooklyn. We found a place over on 8th Avenue and 18th Street or so that sold records for 50 cents and a buck and we’d buy something if we liked the cover art or if it had some unusual instrument on it. (“Ooooh, mellotron, let’s give it a try.”) Any trip, first thing I’d do was grab the Yellow Pages in the motel, tear out the page listing local record shops and try to hit as many as possible. London in 1972 when I was 18 years old – I brought back dozens of LPs.
By the 1980s, I owned thousands of records. For ten years, my first wife and I lived in a 300 square foot studio apartment that had stacks of vinyl everywhere. I finally parted with most of them in 2001 when I moved to Hong Kong the second time. I couldn’t afford to ship them across the Pacific and didn’t want to pay for storage (I’d done that during my first four years in HK). Unfortunately, I was forced to sell them off in San Francisco just after the tech bubble exploded – everyone was selling off their vinyl and things that might have gone for $10 or $20 just a year or two before were fetching just a buck apiece. I did keep a few boxes of stuff I just couldn’t bare to part with – some rare albums and singles, lots of picture discs and shaped discs, and albums that just represented a particular time or memory, things that I had an emotional attachment to.
Now I still have thousands of CDs. I got lots of ‘em from owning a CD store in NYC in the mid-80s and even more from the days when I worked in radio and consulted to record companies. I also bought plenty of them. They are one reason I’ve never lived in a 500 square foot rabbit hole in HK, although at the moment about half of the collection is sitting in boxes in a room in my flat that’s serving as a storage room.
The rise of MP3′s, a lossy medium that purists will wail about, coincided with my, shall I say, late middle age. Working rock concert security in my teens, managing bands in my 20s, blasting music in my ears via headphones as loud as possible, all resulted in some loss of hearing at the high end and, yes, tinnitis. So MP3s ripped at 256 or 320 sound quite okay to me. Plus MP3s have helped me realize a secondary fantasy – that of being able to take massive amounts of music with me when I travel or actually whenever I leave the house.
I was the same way about movies. When I grew up, there was no such thing as home video and cable TV didn’t exist yet. We had seven channels in NYC and you had to wait all year for the rerun of King Kong on Thanksgiving Day. I had a friend in college who had a projector and a small collection of films on 16mm and to me that was the most incredible thing. I wanted to own every movie ever made and that became possible in my lifetime via VHS, laser disc and DVD. I don’t know how many thousands of DVDs I have (working for a major home video company for 8 years certainly helped in that regard.)
The collector in me likes having the physical item. I loved holding LP covers in my hand when listening to music. The tiny CD booklets never had the same impact; something was definitely lost. I feel that when I “own” the actual disc I have it; the digital versions seem less permanent. I have what normal people would consider a hellaciously massive amount of music on hard disks now, terabytes, and can call up almost any track from tens of thousands of albums within seconds. So yes, I have rarities and obscurities that I used to point to with pride. The first 20 singles from Stiff Records. Almost everything released on Frank Zappa’s Straight and Bizarre labels. Alexander Spence’s “Oar.” The original release of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request with the 3D cover (and Some Girls with the Lucille Ball photo). The Dave Mason “Alone Together” picture disc that looks like someone threw up on a turntable. ”Robert Mitchum Sings Calypso Like So.” A rare promo-only 12 inch single that has the Columbia label on one side and the Capitol label on the other. A promo-only sampler from Mercury that plays from the inside out. And so on and so on and so on.
But even that approach is rapidly becoming outdated, as the article in Slate makes clear.
The concept of “rarity” has become obsolete. A previously “rare” CD or movie, once it’s in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that’s a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don’t have a CD in stock.)
A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less availablethe way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?
The article goes on to point towards the easy availability of almost everything online now. If you can’t find it in iTunes or Amazon, you can find it on a blog or a torrent or on Usenet. (And the same holds true for video.)
I believe we’ve entered an era where having a collection of music or film is redundant and books are not far behind. Why buy something when it’s almost instantly available online? All you need is a fast internet connection and the ability to type a few words into Google. It’s much more advanced in the US and Europe than in most of Asia. And we’re not completely there yet. Why buy a movie and put it on a shelf and have it take up space when you can stream something from Netflix? Except that there is no Netflix in Hong Kong and the few meager legal choices we have here seem positively 20th century. And I dread the idea of living someplace like the Philippines, where the average internet connection at home is measured in Kbps rather than Mbps, or a place like China with its censorship and constant need for proxies and VPNs.
The phenomenon crystallized for me while working on a story about the Rolling Stones. I wanted to see the 1972 documentary Cocksucker Blues again. The film, a porny, drug-soaked cinéma vérité by the noted photographer Robert Frank, was never officially released. Indeed, under some sort of legal agreement with the Stones, Frank can show it publicly only when he is physically there. It tends to be presented at college events or in museum screening rooms.
The film took me about 30 seconds to find on the torrent networks, and perhaps half an hour to download. The movie was in great condition. Indeed, I was surprised at how explicit the sex scenes were; although I’d seen it twice before, I didn’t remember them. I wouldn’t swear to it that they hadn’t always been there, but it made me wonder whether Frank had shown expurgated versions at the showings I’d seen in the 1980s and ’90s—and that the illicit one on the Internet was the definitive version
Later, I noticed that I’d made the process unnecessarily difficult on myself: The thing is on YouTube, complete with gobs and gobs of sex. And if you’re into the Stones you can of course find tons of other footage, right down to a circa 1964 Rice Krispies commercial. All the Ed Sullivan performances; odd documentaries, like one from Australia, or another bit of foofara called Charlie Is My Darling.
Sometimes the quality isn’t great, but on the other hand they uniformly lack the bad aspects of official DVD releases: No intrusive previews, many fewer commercials; no security warnings from the FBI or Interpol in multiple languages or legal announcements regarding the commentaries; no inconsistent navigation; and so forth. The so-called “illegal media” are often more consumer-friendly and easier to use than the legal.
It’s just astonishing to me that the major media companies – the record companies and film companies and publishers – are fighting so hard against this inevitable future, actively trying to hurt the future means of distribution in order to protect ancient technologies that will eventually go the way of the abacus and the zeppelin. I may come from the last generation to build home libraries from atoms instead of bytes and I may or may not think that something intangible is or will be lost in this bit of “advancement” but the fact is that the future is already here and trying to fight it is simply an open invitation to extinction.
Asia Pacific Anti-Fraud Unit <info@apafu.com>
