***6***Downloading With Your Mom
I feel like the guy from So I Married An Axe Murderer. No, not Mike Myers. The reporter guy that helps him. Anthony LaPaglia, the on-his-way detective who takes the case. His thing was that he never felt his boss, the chief of police, was hard enough on him. He’d actually coach his boss to yell at him until he was the hard-ass bastard Anthony always wanted him to be.
My editor here at Inside Pulse just asked me to make sure this story doesn’t stray too far from music, because, well, it’s in the music section. This is the first criticism he’s ever given me, even though I’ve been subtly poking at him for a year about him. To rip off the excellent Jonathon Safran Foer novel “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”, I feel like one hundred dollars.
It also happens that I have absolutely no problem talking about music, because on my computer right now are ten Clash albums. No, I didn’t buy them. I hit “download” on a website and it gave them to me. I realize this isn’t anything new for most people (and it certainly isn’t anything new to ME) but that doesn’t mean that it makes any sort of sense.
I talked about this issue in one of my columns on this site a couple of months ago, when I downloaded every single Radiohead album (and just got a nice piece of fan mail about it last week, too!), but I think there’s still some things that can be said about downloading music illegally. I say this because two weeks ago my mom asked me how to do it.
My mom, bless her, should not be downloading music. She lives in a nice house full of nice stuff and takes my brother to soccer practice on Wednesday nights. She watches Survivor and reads Diana Gabledon. She has a minivan, and I’m not making fun of her. Everything about this picture is perfectly fine. There’s really nothing wrong with any of it. But it was wrong in thirty thousand ways the second she asked me how to download music off the internet.
So long as there are people that are “better” than downloading, illegal pirating will always be as it always has been; something a small percentage of the population can do because they get away with it while enjoying the thrill. My mom (and your mom) should be better than this. Hell, anyone over the age of 25 should be better than this. I’ve always said that if I had $40,000 coming in every year then I’d have more than enough to buy every album I want, and it’s not crazy to think that this makes sense for everyone else, too.
I’m not saying this excludes people over the age of 25 (or my mom, for instance) from enjoying mix tapes and the occasional pirated movie from her son, but as soon as she becomes the pirate herself then the universe will implode on itself. I’m a 22 year old college student. It’s absolutely expected of me to do what I can get away with. But mom? No. Mom can’t do that. Because if mom is doing that, then there is absolutely no reason why everyone who watches Survivor isn’t doing this. And a whole lot of people watch Survivor, folks.
All of a sudden, the percentage of people downloading stuff multiplies by crazy amounts. Everyone is stealing. Nobody is actually paying for anything (it’s scarily feasible how easy it is to steal internet, and given how accessible free entertainment is online, the only thing anyone would have to pay for is the Video Ipod). Soon enough, we’re living in a culture of piracy, and in no way is this good.
For obvious reasons: with more people stealing, laws will no doubt get changed. Sure, it’s illegal now and you pay ludicrous fines, but how many people actually get arrested per capita? One might expect this to change.
For less obvious reasons: With less revenue coming in, movie and music studios will have less cash to “blow” on projects not proven financially sound. No matter what your taste in films or music, there will be less and less of it, with producers sticking to the tried-and-true script more and more.
For even less obvious reasons: In a “free” culture, the entire definition of “value” changes. I used to think it was cool to tape a couple of episodes of the Simpsons. Now I’m pissed off for days if my Season 12 download is missing episode 3. Ask anyone who ever had a Pokemon cartridge sealed in their Game Boy; Collecting them all is something you will go to crazy f*cking lengths for. Nobody knows why they wanted 400 cute maiming machines, but they did. In droves. They didn’t call it “Pokemon Fever” for nothing, folks. They weren’t healthy. And neither will anyone be if this entirely insane idea of owning everything (easier and easier since it’s all free) keeps up.
So, back to my mom. I came up with this argument pretty much as soon as the words “how do I…” came out of her mouth, and she immediately agreed with me. She IS better than this. She’s got way more important things to do. For this, I consider myself a good son. I stopped (perhaps only temporarily) my mother from needlessly wasting her time breaking the law when she damn well knows that it should be my job to needlessly break the law.
Okay, so to go back to all these Clash albums, I can’t help but wonder, what would a guy like Joe Strummer think of this. I’d imagine if some tool interviewer ran up to Joe before he boarded a train to Germany or something, Joe would say “Piss off.”
Sometimes we have to work with what we’ve got, you see. And if you look at it this way, Joe would be absolutely spot on. The fact is, nobody takes any of this shit seriously, and I am the sixty thousandth internet writer to comment on it, and it’s all so goddamn pointless. If a freak electrical storm wiped out every pirated CD on the planet, not even the hardcore pirates would mourn, because they especially know how much bullshit the entire endeavor is.
See, that’s why it’s fine for folks like me (and most likely, you). We do it because if we didn’t, we’d just fill up our time with something equally not really worth our time. It’s scary because you’d think our parents would see that, but sometimes they don’t. If you think about it, that fear of people ahead of you making the same mistakes you know you’re making is really strong. It’s like you realize that they’re not really in charge, and when that happens, it’s easy for the ground to fall out from under you. Not unlike Anthony LaPaglia, we sometimes want that tough chief of police, if only for the reason that it makes sense in your own head.
