DrFurry

Best thing ever written on DiS. Exemplary.

I never had you down as a Style Council fan Dom.

Why is it a good thing if a piece of shit keeps another piece of shit off the top of the charts that most discerning music fans regard as being shit anyhow? The success of James Blunt compared to the dance choons you so rigidly hate is simply evidence that mainstream music is pretty much fucked in the originality stakes and that James Blunt isn't a lone turd in the sewer but part of one glorious excretion that's floating down underneath your house right now. Let the industry continue screwing up, at some point there will be a reaction. The single sales figures are sliding ever lower, the downloading revolution gathers pace... it's like watching a huge football team slide into bankruptcy. At some point, the mainstream music industry will do a Leeds United and then someone will catch onto this idea of looking around for talent. Until then, ignore James Blunt, yes he's a fucking annoying little cunt who, based on TOTP last night, has all the stage craft and charisma of a wombat's foreskin, and spend your time telling everyone about this great band you saw in a venue the size of a garden shed instead.

Simon could try the Elton method of staying fresh and get himself sampled on a track by a long-dead rapper.

On The Road is detailing a time that none of us truly understand. A time where travelling huge distances didn't mean getting on an aircraft. A time with no cellular phones, a different media, perhaps more innocence. I'm sure that many people who have read it have never been to North America and so don't get just how vast and unexplored much of it feels. It's very much a fantasy book now and that's how I've always taken it, a book that is evocative of a time I will never get to be part of.

But hey, Kerouac was a bit of a wanker and much of his other output is pretentious bilge, for instance at least 50% of Desolation Angels.

..and hurrah to them for that. Don't really want to be doing 'Cuaght by the Fuzz' over a decade later. I'm wondering if this is an odd single choice, the sort of track that works better as an album track.

I'm too busy dribbling down my shirt to do any kicking.

Too busy gawping to do any kicking... feel... hypnotized...

Ah, Geoffrey Durham has magic hands and even more magical fingers. Just ask Victoria Wood. If only she'd have gone for the spangly outfit number like Debbie McGhee...

I hope she gives handjobs with a better rhythm than she demonstrates when she's miming playing the guitar in her videos otherwise the poor lad's cock will be ribbons by now.

Did he bone Paris Hilton in the past? Hopefully this means we can look forward to Avril's pert assets being flashed across the p2p world very soon.

'New' body? Hasn't anyone seen the pcitures from the last few months where her fried chicken shit in a bucket diet gave her quality acne? Those beautiful clothes that scream 'I was gangfucked in a trailer park by pigs and loved it'? There ain't much different between a pregnant Britney and the Britney from six months ago physically. One can only hope she follows Courtney Love's example and never, ever shoots up on heroin during the pregnancy. Oh no, not once.

It doesn't sound like the perfect soundtrack to the fantastic thunderstorm darkest Wiltshire has been enjoying today. Global warming is a dreadful thing but having a tropical-style thunderstorm in fucking Trowbridge does have a certain coolness to it.

I very much doubt that this has cost any licence fee money. What Sirius has been doing in recent times is the equivalent of a football manager transferring in players, and players don't pay for the honour of playing for a team now, do they?

How exactly can the American public be considered close minded and pompous if 1/5th of them believe they have been abducted by aliens? That doesn't sound close-minded to me, that's more reflective of the vastly superior quantity and quality of hallucinogenic drugs out there in the States. Free your mind, drop acid, be abducted by ALF. Sounds pretty good to me :)

I think it's better that Anderson and Butler came back under a new band name instead of using Suede. There's already been one Suede reincarnation circa Coming Up: two would have been absurd, like the ever-changing Oasis lineups. I like the album but it's worlds apart from the first two Suede albums in that lyrically it's a middle-aged viewpoint, perhaps best characterised by the line "All the silly things that we do just remind me of the flippancy of youth" from 'Lovers'. The first two Suede records (the first of whcih, let's not forget, came out over 12 years ago now) sounded like a young 20's guy going out and living life, with Coming Up serving as the final throes of that youthful explosion: to me, Head Music and A New Morning sounded like a guy looking back on what he used to do, recounting tales of narcotic and social excess. To go back to that again would sound pretty ridiculous so it's to Anderson's credit that he does expand away from that, lyrically it's the best stuff he's written since Coming Up.

What this means for McAlmont and Butler... shame, I'd like to hear more of the pair working together.

"After all, you wouldn't pass judgment on an alleged criminal without sufficient evidence"


Does this make Fightstar the rock equivalent of the Guildford 4 then?

Irrevocable proof that ridiculous but intelligent idiocy can be most amusing. Arf! I look forward to the next installment as the bait is cast and the fisherman sits there, waiting for a bite...

It's possible to love a band and hate it as well. I hate the Manics now after being a total devotee, right down to the daft clothing and make-up. Everything Must Go ended a chapter and the chapter thta came afterwards was dull and uninspired. With Oasis, half of Be Here Now was fine, the Masterplan was great and then it all went down the bowl. I'll defend the first album against anyone, the second against most people but after that it becomes harder and harder with each release. All I see from people who like this record are words like 'nice', 'solid'... why not stick dependable in there? I speak as someone who saw them years ago, who told people everywhere that this tape of them was fucking great, that Definitely Maybe would sell and sell not because of basic hype and marketing but simply because it had fucking top tunes. There's never been any indie snobbery in me, all of my opinions are based on the music and their music now doesn't fire me in any way. It's a shame to be disinteretsed in a band that I used to love and will love in some way. That love shouldn't ever be blind though to the fact that they are releasing some awful records now.

Knowing how to spell a particular word doesn't always mean you know what the word means. Somewhere there's a whole battalion of people who look at you with a blank face when you ask them what a banana is.

Maybe everyone too busy wanking over Will Oldham releases to review country music...

I wonder if it's some kind of lame 'feminist' angle. Now that Madonna's gone completely batshitawful, which empowered white chick can the indie men jump on next? She's got that spurious 'punk rock' past/future/whatever she is at the minute, she's not conventionally attractive like Britney so let's grab her and make her out to be some fantastic performer with a message to say when it's clear she's another soulless crone in the pop world.

I agree that she's not a natural crowd worker and definitely needs to pick up on that. I don't think the music is the problem, she doesn't sound any worse than Peaches in terms of musical emptiness. When I saw her in Toronto, and from what friends of mine have said of other North American gigs, she can gig well, there's this sort of naive charm to it that is pretty entertaining. It makes a refreshing change to have someone who isn't full of ego and piss lamping around on stage.

That UK cynicism is clearly exhibited by the post above. 'How dare she work with Diplo, why does he waste his time with her?' Maybe it's because he likes her, fancied the gig and, more pertinently, isn't some precious hip-hop snob. When MIA started getting press in the US and Canada, for once it was a British act who wasn't hyped up to the eyeballs by the NME. I wonder if many people's opinion of her is simply stoked by the UK press hype and their opinion is formed way before listening to the music. That's the only explanation I can give why some people feel the need to chuck in the daft genre tags...

"grind-core-urban-pop-rap shit"
"chav-pop"

Well, at least she's all encompassing.

It's a term of affection dahlinks :)

No, that comment reeks of someone bored to the back teeth of "urban" music thasts supposed to be "cummin from da street man" except its not. Its actually being made by middle class ex-stage school students who should know better. Or maybe they don't? You obviously don't."

Tell it like it is. Hmm.

No, I'm someone who, as I said above, thinks that the Streets are a one-trick pony, and that that trick isn't very entertaining at all. He's a hugely overrated musician in every way. You and I have the same opinion on the Streets, so perish the thought that I think Skinner is some kind of genius and should be praised on a cerebral, emotional and ironic level.

I questioned your comment that people put on Jamaican accents based on listening to 50 Cent. It's more likely that your comment was a throwaway one that doesn't have much relevance to anything. I know you're aiming both barrels at people who adopt a specific persona based on their current musical fantasy icon and that is pathetic. I simply found your wording to be somewhat suspect.

"True, but unfortunately that is how supposedly educated but ultimately mis-informed and uneducated people perceive the so-called working classes to be."

Quit with all the 'working class suffering' going on here. It's what all factions do. Each shitty group shits on itself and on those above and below it. There's plenty of misconceptions over what the middle-classes and the upper classes are, it isn't just the poor old working class that suffers. There's as much bigotry and hate at the bottom as there is at the top. In your opinion, who currently makes the biggest misconceptions as to what the working class actually is?

Every lead singer in every band postures! Jagger did, Lydon did, Gallagher does, Iggy Pop does... Is it only offensive when it's a group like So Solid Crew trying to act a bit tough? Honestly, after re-reading John Lydon's autobiography, some of the phrases you use totally echoes the feelings the establishment had about punk.

If the majority of So Solid Crew grew up on council estates and went through serious shit that gets reflected in their lyrics and posturing, I fail to see how that can be classed as being fake and false.

Your major failing is that you've lumped in MIA and, to some extent, So Solid Crew in with this spurious term 'chav', surely destined to be as hopelessly misused as the words 'facist' and 'Nazi'. I agree entirely with you on Skinner and his laddish image appealling to the thug mentality. I heard the same arguments when I was 19 against Oasis and those arguments did have a basis to them. The thug mentality always needs an icon, I have no doubt that some of them probably like a bit of Morrissey now that he's flirting with guns and a bit of scrapping. Yet you focus on the shitty points of Mike Skinner and that leads me to wonder how the fuck you can bring MIA into that same bracket. What traits do they share? Did I miss her limited edition LP espousing the virtues of Stella and kebabs on holiday? Was there a B-side I failed to grab entitled 'Cor, Look At The Tits On That'? I saw plenty of US and Canadian press on her, saw her perform in Toronto and she was fucking great. There was nobody quibbling over what class she ripped off, no worries about her authenticity. All they saw was a British Sri Lankan chick getting up there on stage and slamming out some top music. There was no Burberry present, no laddish element (quite the damn opposite actually, as befits Toronto's reputation as a homosexual Mecca), she made a few little political rants and everyone had a great time. It's only back here that I've heard a few rather wanky mentions of her being some art school fraud and that is disappointing. In a time when the right-wing elements are gathering thunder, where major's vision of a classless Britain have finally been pissed upon, and the main Opposition leader can evoke Enoch Powell in his election campaign, the fact that there is this rather talented ethnic lady making music should be something to be proud of, not sneered at. I fail to see how you can lump in a young British Sri Lankan female who spends much of her time hopping around about politics and terrorists in with the lager and shit sportswear brigade. It smacks of cheap generalisation and nothing else.

Kudos for the juvenile Laurel and Hardy gag as well Mr G. I've always been more of a Buster Keaton fan myself. Does this make you Benny Hill? You don't sound like Benny Hill, there's far more Jim Davidson circa 1986 about you.

Mr Gourlay:

1. It may take half a day to respond because I have other things to do. Debates with anonymous writers online doesn't feature as a massive priority, more a light passing haze of fun instead. There was five hours between your post and my response. Curiously, there is nearly five hours until your next response. Is there some timescale that in your world bounces between 'fast' and 'slow' response time? Better get that stopwatch ticking!

2. Are you still claiming that So Solid Crew formed at stage school?

3. I can only find references to Asher D going to the Sylvia Young school. Please provide links showing other members to have been to stage school/ I'll happily call myself a big cunt if I'm wrong.

4. I quote from you:

"And yes, I do have an issue with some white arsehole in a Kappa shellsuit, sovereigns on each finger and a burberry cap who's been brought up in Beeston but has seemingly developed a Jamaican accent by way of his/her So Solid, Mike Skinner and 50 Cent records."

I would also like to ask what Jamaican accents you've heard on Streets and So Solid Crew records and whether you're entirely au fait with Jamaican patois.

5. Being patronising is one thing, hence my general hatred of the Rolling Stones possibly playing the Live 8 concerts. People who hate paying income tax preaching to the public to give money? Damn patronising! How are So Solid Crew and the Streets being patronising? By singing about where they've come from and grown up? MIA sings about Sri Lankan affairs: is that patronising?

6. Isn't treacle tart great?

7. What the fuck is working class to you anyhow Dom? People who work in shitty jobs with no aspirations? People who get pissed most nights, love Eastenders, people who think that opera is for toffs, like, that reading is boring? All of these artists may well be working class in origin and be entirely different in every single way. They aren't out giving some idea of what working class life is, they're out there talking about their life and their experiences. Did I give up my working-class background the minute I went to university? Did I regain it every summer holiday working 9 hours a day in a damn pie factory? I hate anyone who says 'This is what culture X is all about' because applying tags to a culture is like applying genre tags to music, ultimately restrictive and wasteful.

8. "As someone with a council estate background Furry, that is why I take great exception to crap like MIA, the Streets et al, because a) they are creating a completely false scenario that is sending out the wrong message to impressionable idiots and middle class wannabes who have proven - particularly throughout this thread - that they have no knowledge of what working class or being from a council estate means."

Find me an interview where MIA tells the interviewer what working class life is really all about. You've got your background, fair enough, it's given you an insight into what it's like at the bottom. I have my own insights, both in this country and overseas, so I'm sure we could make comparisons. I'd like to know who you think in this thread is a middle-class wannabe, it'd make for interesting viewing. You seem to have a very fixed idea of what 'working class' people are actually like, at times you almost sound like you're going to leap straight into Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Generally in my life I've found the people who harp on about the class system the most are usually the most close-minded of souls and often the most entrenched within that system.

9. How are So Solid Crew middle-class council estate wannabes when quite a lot of them grew up on council estates?

Dom, I'm writing a reply now. I just wanted to let you know just in case it wasn't fast enough or you wanted to make another rather wanky ocmment about taking half a day to respond. Ciao for now!

That's because some people here are happiest with limp white boy guitar shit. Damn these chavs, bring on the Ordinary Boys!

Do you take any responsibility for what you wrote?

First post:

"Great.
More chavpop.
Just what we really need..."

Second post:

"No, that comment reeks of someone bored to the back teeth of "urban" music thasts supposed to be "cummin from da street man" except its not. Its actually being made by middle class ex-stage school students who should know better. Or maybe they don't? You obviously don't."

I see more comments about social structure and social position than I do about the music.

Hush, stop speaking logic and sense, Dom will get angry with you and accuse you of making him out to be a member of the KKK.

Sorry to disappoint you Dommy boy, I'm not gunning on any sort of 'Dom is a racist cock' trip at all and haven't ever tried to snitch you on that angle. If your paranoid little mouse of a brain tells you that then tough shit. I'm not concentrating on the black members of any group. You denounced So Solid Crew as wannabe shitbags who formed at stage school, when the reality is that one of them went to stage school and the group had its origins in pirate radio. That's otherwise known as 'research', try using it before making up shit that isn't actually true. I addressed your point about the Streets having a stage school input with the paragraph beginning 'Who gives a shit where some bands meet?' Go back, read, understand. I personally don't like the Streets, I think Skinner's a one-trick pony and the music is rather poor. That still won't stop me defending him from rancid pissweak accusations from someone who clearly has some idiot chip on his shoulder the size of Nebraska.

Being a musician often involves pretence on many levels. Did Dylan experience everything he wrote about? Was Bowie really an alien? The opening track on Definitely Maybe is about believing you're a rock and roll star when you're actually some uneducated bloke from Oop North. Noel Gallacher was a fucking British Gas worker around the time of penning that album for fucks sake. Rock n' roll has been all about stealing from others, adopting a persona, being more than you are in many occasions. Do you hate the Stones for ripping off countless bluesmen? As Guntrip pertinently points out, since when did Mike Skinner start singing in a Jamaican accent? The whole point of him is that he was a common bloke with a common voice that lacked pretence. How the fuck does 50 Cent inspire people to have a Jamaican accent?

Even later on in this argument, despite evidence to the contrary, you're still spouting shit about people lying about their stage school background. Why the fuck is that relevant? You can be poor as fuck and still go to stage school, the same way you can be poor as fuck and go to university. It's incredibly hard but those who want it can do it. Fine, hate the white folk in Kappa shellsuits with their fake accents etc: the problem comes when you lump someone like MIA in with the fake Kappa crowd when it's clear that you know absolutely fuck all about her or her background. For someone who writes so much online and fancies himself a rock n' roll writer, that's shit investigative work and poor writing. By all means hate her music but the cheap genre references and even cheaper comments about the council estate people make you sound like the biggest type of snob imaginable.

I love you gunners :)

I haven't accused you of being racist at all. I went back through your lengthy ouevre and checked out the Oasis gig review you did. No mention whatsoever of chavs, chavdom, any of that. In this article on MIA, you quickly dismiss her as chavpop. Aren't Oasis chavpop? You seem to have this incredibly narrow spectrum through which you view things, hence being able to lump MIA in with Lady Sovereign, So Solid Crew etc. You still haven't explained what 'chavpop' actually is, instead prefering to defend yourself on the racism front when I haven't made that accusation of you. Read the question, answer it well instead of focusing on something small and bubbling the mouth off without saying anything. How can you dismiss MIA as chavpop and make comments about some groups being gutter trash yet Oasis aren't considered chavpop and trashy in the slightest? How is that you can say that a Sri Lankan immigrant female is some wannabe faker yet Lord Liam is given a free ride?

Who gives a shit where some bands meet? Lennon and McCartney had a slightly arty college background. John Lydon went to art school. All of these guys reflected their working-class background and continued doing so despite the rise in fame and wealth over the years. Why does going to stage school automatically mean you're somehow fake, an artsy wannabe with no honest bones in your body? Fucking nonsense. From what I can see online, Asher D went to the Sylvia Young school. He had been acting since he was a kid. Now some might applaud him for doing something with his life at a young age, that a kid from Peckham can go out there and get somewhere. If you'd like to research further, you'd find that the original incarnation of So Solid Crew met through involvement with pirate radio station Supreme FM. Maybe in your mind having one member who went to stage school makes them gloriously fake but that's your own personal mindless prejudice.

It's clear you don't like the music of So Solid Crew, Lady Sovereign, MIA etc. Again, that's fine, nobody has any issue with that. It's when you throw around cheap genre classifications and talk a load of addled horseshit that some people react to. It makes you sound like some kind of proto-Tory bastard talking down to the proles.

You talk about how ridiculous some genre titles are yet you happily throw around chavpop. Niiiiice.

'Wannabe council estate trash'... did it ever occur that maybe some of these people actually have spent most of their lives on council estates and that they aren't all wannabes? Chuntering away about white trash makes you sound like such a pompous prick. By all means say that you don't like her music, there's no problem with you saying that, but the crass cultural stereotypes you seem to specialise in is another matter. Is Liam Gallagher not white trash gutter material or is it different when it's a nice white Northern male and not one of these funny skinned women? Divorces, violence, alcohol and drug use... the line between iconic Britpop singer and Gourlay-chastised chav/pseudochav is clearly a very thin one indeed.

Fair enough. So why is MIA chavpop Dom?

Have a read of this, Alien person...

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/interviews/story.jsp?story=567566

Since when has Maya claimed to be 'urban'? Blame the record companies and media for having to slot everything into some kind of hole. I can't see how you can make any claim to MIA's music being 'chavpop', unless you know a whole sector of chavdom previously undiscovered that's pledged eternal support to the Tamil Tigers...

What credibility do you need to review a record other than a love of music? Spin, Q, Rolling Stone... fuck, why not just list 'The Lady' and Stillwater Trout Angler? Who gives a shit how many fucking records they have sold or how many concerts they have given? All of that is rendered null and void now a fucking comedy frog can outsell them. Simply, this album is pissweak compared to Definitely Maybe and they've been sliding downhill ever since that first fantastic record. That's not some fashionable bitch at them, it's just how this honest fan who still plays Definitely Maybe on a regular basis feels, the same way I haven't bought the last three Manics albums. Why? Because they suuuuuuuuuuck.

If there is future strike action, can we look forward to 'Tribute to Eric Clapton Day'? It's like Oasis are now the stop-gap measure to appease some of the masses. It's like dragging Cliff richard out for another Christmas special.

To be fair, since the Hutton inquiry and the chain of events that led to Greg Dyke stepping down, the BBC has trod ultra-cautiously over anything that could even vaguely be libellous. Check out the censorship that goes on inside some of the football forums on BBC Sport, even the cricket forums are not immune. Anything that might be libellous or could end up in court, however remote, is ditched. Instead of saying how shite the BBC is, people should be saying how fucking bastardlike Blair's boys are, for they effectively have been able to hold the BBC over a barrel since the Hutton inquiry.

Oh fer christ-s sake, loads of heckling goes on! All abnds get heckled!

If a talented singer is someone who should never be heckled, then the list of those who should never be heckled is enormous and ridiculous.

I asked why Natalie had this cred that differentiates her from someone like Dido. I still don't know what it is. Perhaps with a singer, it's some guts and passion, something above mere 'nice singing ability', the sort of thing that makes Janis Joplin different from Dido or Michelle Branch. Being a singer isn't enough to give you cred, the same way just playing an acoustic guitar doesn't give you cred. Credibility is a strange thing to gauge but I see nothing in Nataie Imbruglia that seperates her from a mishmash of mimsy major label female singers, Vanessa Carlton through to Delta Goodrem. The material they produce is very safe, very mainstream and very fucking boring. I don't see how Natalie has done anything to escape that bracket.

Everyone on Pop Idol, X-Factor etc etc etc will sing live but that doesn't give them any sort of credibility. Saying that all singers who sing have cred is daft, it's too close to the idea that people who 'play their own instruments' are better than those who DJ or sample. I agree that there's a lot of shit around right now but giving credibility to some watery-eyed non-entity like Natalie is hardly the way to make up for the talent deficiency.

So Natalie didn't mime Torn on TOTP and various other shows? The line between Geri and Natalie ain't that big. What has Natalie done that has given her all this extra cred? Shit movies? Being the face of some make-up boutique? Marrying a talented musician (snicker) like Danny Johns? Say it ain't so! Natalie's voice is nice in that nothing Dido kinda style but it's hardly anything special.

So more people on DiS defend Natalie from evil Danny than support him? Ha, why? If he'd heckled Geri Halliwell then you lot would have been right behind him. How does Natalie Imbruglia get any credibility or is it that large amounts of DiS's male readership will favour her because she's a bit tasty looking?

That's fucking wonderful news, I had many a night sleeping rough in Oxford after a gig when the last train back to Worcester had long gone. The West Oxford Health Centre is surprisingly comfortable. Now can we get the Point back?

*dances on the ashes of another chain pub dying*

Why sue the universities? They provided a network for academic usage, if the students then use the network for other illegal purposes then that's their fault and therefore get sued accordingly. Sueing the universities is like sueing British Airways for drug smuggling when someone flies in with a load of smack in their briefcase. Sueing a university is also harder work than it is sueing one skanky student at a time.

I agree with Guntrip who says that the people on DiS who use p2p networks aren't a representative sample. Here in Toronto on Yonge Street, many times I've ended up in one of the numerious internet lounges and Kazaa's been installed. Alook through the search list shows that it isn't really album downloads people are going for, it's singles, usually the most successful and commercial ones at that. The sort of person who reads Pitchfork and DiS is generally someone who will buy their music in my opinion.

The album sales figures in the UK have been going up each year for quite a while, it's generally considered that the mid-price sections have helped enormously to bring this figure up, and it's the mid 20's to 40s market that buy most albums. Total sales figures. ie. albums and singles. get brought down by the lack of energy in the singles market. I've asked this question before and it still applies: when it costs way more to make a pop video than it does to record an album, when it's well known that singles are not profitable at all, when it's known that albums make the profit for the companies, and when it's known that more moeny ends up promoting singles than albums, why the fucking hell do they keep pumping the cash into singles? It makes no financial sense whatsoever.

I remember an NME article a few years ago saying that Pulp's Different Class album sold over 100,000 copies to be number 1 and then (I think) Catatonia's International Velvet sold around or under 30,000 copies to become number 1. This was back in dial-up days at best so the p2p piracy issue didn't come into play. Are album sales less healthy than that time? I doubt it.

The copyright infringement notions are linked to this case, the Sony versus Betamax case, link is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._v._Universal_City_Studios

Thom, what branch of the population do you think buys the most music? I don't think it's students somehow.

I'm hoping she'll do a ripoff of Peaches and we can hear all about Kelly's exploits with shitty white boy punks.

Can someone tell me quite how MP3's of music don't actually exist? It exists as digital data as part of your hard drive, does it not? Simply because it then can't be thrown around like a CD doesn't mean it doesn't exist. A CD is just a plastic receptacle for digital information, a CD isn't designed just for music, therefore a hard drive is a receptacle of digital information that can incldue music. A cassette tape is the same thing so please, someone justify how an MP3 on a hard drive is not as physical as music on a tape.

Sharing music in Canada is not entirely legal so let's blow that 'truth' out of the window:

'In clarifying what is legal for Canadian online music fans, the Canadian Copyright Board ruled that downloading music files from peer-to-peer networks is acceptable. However, the board declared that uploading music files is illegal and also approved a levy on digital music players based on their storage capacity.'

http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/32400.html

I use Soulseek and Kazaa and use it to sample music, consequently I buy a lot of music and get poor because of that. I use p2p to find bootlegs as these are often more interesting than the studio recorded stuff, not to mention odd bootlegs of comedians (some great Bill Hicks stuff out there that will never be released). p2p is a good thing for advertising, in my opinion some of the major acts lose out through young kids downloading their latest single but many more leftfield acts find it helps them develop a fanbase, the recent BBC article on Jeff Tweedy and Wilco being a good example. I agree that the RIAA are greedy pricks only working to keep the fat bastard company CEOs loaded with coke n' whores but some attitudes here really do surprise me. Mr Diver says this:

"A pretty hefty 405 lawsuits are expected to be issued against students across 18 different US colleges. If they're anything like as financially 'comfortable' as I was at university, they won't have a chance of affording it. Why else would they exchange music in such a way?"

Isn't this just terrible? So many in the world are starving and being smashed by oppressive forces yet we should be concerned because kids at US universities might not be able to afford all the CDs they want? I know I'm taking this to the fullest polarising point but c'mon, let's keep things in perspective. How many of those poor impoverished lacking in CDs students are also going to be really fucking poor? People in the real poverty bracket in America find it incredibly hard to get to university with the extortionate fees charged. Mike, I'm not trying to bitch you out but I'm on a real hatred of the 'we want' society element right now. Living in North America with its constant fucking commercialism and consumptive nature drives me mad, people wanting everything and expecting to have everything. It happens everywhere, hence Britons being over a trillion pounds in debt right now. People don't have the patience to wait for products, they expect to own them and, really, if students are poor and can't afford CD's, then shouldn't you just say 'Tough shit'? Most people had it hard at university, I ended up working for one term as a postman for 60 hours each week (cue the ressurection of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch), but I also remember a lot of people who were pleading poverty driving around in cars, yakking on mobile phones and pissing away a lot of money. You can't always get what you want when you want it, something that much of the Western world forgets.

But yes, the RIAA are shitbags and Cary Sherman is a mouthpiece for Satan. Fuck 'em!