Napster nation, continued

by Carly Carioli

Metallica's Lars Ulrich has likened Napster users to shoplifters, and that's exactly what it felt like -- it was akin to breaking into a record store. Or like eBay without money changing hands. There was an illicit thrill about it, as if a gate had been unlocked, as if an iron curtain had fallen. I giggled: "Elvis and Cartman singing `In the Ghetto'!" I sniggered: "They've got Mr. Bungle covering Britney Spears!" I cackled: "When did Nick Cave do `I Put a Spell on You'?" I gasped: "Look look look -- Danzig singing Misfits songs with Metallica!" The next thing I knew it was five hours later and my sister's hard drive had expanded its library by about 50 songs. I could've continued all night -- I hadn't even scratched the surface, and I still haven't.

For casual fans or hardcore record fetishists (who savor such things as packaging and serial numbers and first pressings), Napster might -- as has been suggested by the company's lawyers -- serve as a consumer resource, a way to sample before buying. But for music junkies like me, it's is nothing short of compulsion-inducing, at least at first. My sister recalled her first encounter with Napster in much the same way that several other friends subsequently described their own introductions: a period ranging from several days to several weeks spent obsessively grabbing as much as they could, hour after hour late into the night and early morning, following tangents from artist to artist, song to song.

A brief and subjective glimpse: Black Flag's "Six Pack." Kate Smith's "God Bless America" (the version generally credited with winning the Philadelphia Flyers several Stanley Cups). G.G. Allin. Django Reinhardt. The Descendents' entire Milo Goes to College album. Art Pepper & Chet Baker. Sixties GI-garage-rock obscurities the Monks ("Drugs in My Pocket," "Nice Face, Shame About the Legs"); Thelonious Monk; plainchanting monks. Songs called "Night Train" by Wes Montgomery & Jimmy Smith, the Ventures, Oscar Peterson, James Brown, Guns N' Roses, the Bill Black Combo, Boots Randolph, and Bruce Cockburn. Vivaldi compositions performed by Yo-Yo Ma with Bobby McFerrin, Wynton Marsalis, Mike Oldfield, and an anonymous techno producer. A Rolling Stones unreleased Decca live album from 1972. Freestyles from the Wu-Tang Clan. Forty or 50 Anal Cunt songs. Eighties thrash kings Nuclear Assault covering Venom. A bootleg of the Beatles practicing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." Bob Dylan's "Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues." Elvis stoned out of his gourd and forgetting the words to "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Prince and Miles Davis doing "Let's Go Crazy" at Paisley Park.

Everyone, it seems, has two favorite Napster stories. The first is about that initial, mad rush of discovery, like homesteaders staking out their 160 acres. The second story is about some unbelievable obscurity he or she has downloaded -- a white-label Slint live album, or Lowell George on the radio with Linda Ronstadt in 1975. And the overall lure of Napster is something between these two, between the overarching, all-encompassing nature of its enterprise (it's got everything), and the personal specificity of singular buried artifacts (it's got my thing). I know I have at my fingertips access to today's Top 40 (and tomorrow's: as Madonna and Metallica have found out, upcoming singles have a way of making their way onto Napster's lists before their official release). But I also have a mental checklist I run through every time I log on of bands who might show up (and occasionally do!) against the prevailing odds of their making an appearance on a platform as mass-culture-friendly as Napster: Teengenerate, Son House, Backyard Babies, John Zorn.

If pop culture is fragmenting into ever-smaller sub-audiences, Napster seems to be an agent for navigating pop music in an age where consensus is but a memory. You could read Napster as a direct result of that fragmentation: if its runaway popularity says anything about consumer desire, it's that the traditional means that fans rely on to evaluate and keep in touch with the pop market -- radio, MTV, magazines, record stores -- are failing them. It seems obvious to me that the transactions made using Napster constitute a violation of at least the spirit of the copyright laws -- if they didn't, we wouldn't be here. But the major record labels have done such an exquisite job of squeezing profits out of consumers and artists alike that it's hard not to think of this as payback time.

Although Napster is unlikely to displace the industry, it does offer a tantalizing glimpse of what ordinary people might choose to listen to if the industry and its conventions didn't exist. It begins to smooth out the differences in accessibility between such market-imposed distinctions as rare and abundant -- Captain Beefheart outtakes and import B-sides are as accessible as the new 'N Sync album, regardless of how many people want to hear them. The prohibitive costs of manufacture, distribution, and promotion no longer apply, since the only requirement for distributing music via Napster is that a single person own a recording and be willing to share it.

Last Thursday it appeared that the RIAA had finally rung Napster's bell, and a court injunction was in place to take the service off-line. With a mere 27 hours to go, Napster's servers were packed, and it took me a half-dozen attempts to log on. There were 7000 users, 800,000 songs. I typed in searches, frantic: Hellacopters, Gluecifer, Backyard Babies. Results, bingo: the Backyard Babies covering Social Distortion's "Mommy's Little Monster" -- go, get it. More: John Williams conducting the Boston Pops in the Battlestar Galactica theme. Metallica's "Jump in the Fire" live from 1983, with Dave Mustaine on lead vocals; Rob Zombie interviewing Glenn Danzig. I did a search for Sonic Youth and found them backing David Bowie on a version of his "I'm Afraid of Americans"; SY's collaboration with William Burroughs; Pavement doing "Expressway to Yr Skull"; versions of "The Diamond Sea" ranging in length from 3:52 to 11:01; SY's cover of the obscure Nirvana B-side "Moist Vagina"; a live version of "Schizophrenia" recorded in July of 1995.

When I logged off, there was a message on my telephone-answering machine from a friend of mine. She'd recognized my screen name on her upload console. "You're totally downloading Backyard Babies songs from me!" she gushed. It's easy to dismiss the notion that a real community is emerging on the byways of Napster amid the hustle, but this chance encounter, like bumping into an old acquaintance in a crowded subway, seemed to confirm that a community is being built, perhaps even in spite of the software's original purpose. For cheap thrills, you can comb through lists of users and rummage through their libraries, looking for their guilty pleasures, reminding yourself that people's tastes bloom irrespective of the confines of genre and focus groups. The gospel fanatic with Reverend James Cleveland songs out the wazoo who also has Beck's "Sexx Laws." The jazzhead teeming with Ornette Coleman, Arto Lindsay, Dexter Gordon -- and Juliana Hatfield. The black-metal fiend with the Christina Aguilera house remix. Voyeurism reigns: you can listen to Courtney Love ranting on a journalist's answering machine, or Fred Durst chewing out the band Taproot for signing with another label after he'd courted them.

In just a few months, Napster has even begun to foster its own idioms. A genre has emerged on its byways in which two different artists' hits are spliced against each other -- for instance, Metallica's Anti-Nowhere League cover "So What?" answering Britney Spears's "Crazy" -- in a manner that, however frivolous, makes Negativland's infamous U2-sampling culture-jamming stunt appear tame by comparison. Scads of novelty numbers and song parodies are being produced on low budgets by artists who suddenly have a huge audience just a few keystrokes away. There are some two dozen parodies in which Bill Clinton impersonators are heard to sing pop hits -- "Gettin' Sticky with It," "Mo' Booty, Mo' Problems." And that's not the only politics to be found -- there's Winston Churchill's "finest hour" speech, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, Marilyn Monroe singing happy birthday to JFK, Jello Biafra lecturing on the subject of Mumia Abu Jamal. That, to this particular pirate, is the most astonishing revelation to be found in Napster's cyberspace: the spectacle of free music evolving into a new paradigm of free speech.

Page | 1 | 2 | Back