Richard Wright dies and....

all we hear from the traditional media is [cricket, cricket, cricket].

But if Britney Spears poofs out a silent but deadly, it even makes Fox "news".

Here is a guy who was an original member of one of the most popular rock bands ever, and I didn't even hear about it on the news last night. (For those of you in the cheap seats, he was a member of Pink Floyd.)

Gad, when a minor news figure, Tim Russert, died this year, you'd a thought that we'd lost one of the most important people on the planet ever. But when we do lose someone whose music has been heard by nearly everyone who isn't deaf, and certainly by everyone who went to college (read: "got high"), we don't even get a text scroll at the bottom of a screen (the modern broadcast news equivalent of a reach-around).

I mean, wtf?

I guess this is what we get when the "reporters" who still have jobs today managed to do so by asking presidential hopefuls if they'd ever smoked a joint or not.

Anyway, if you want some details, read this and this.


In other music news, I enjoyed this posting entitled "How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself"

Short version: when a label realized they had a hit, they would suddenly pull the downloadable version from iTunes and Amazon so people couldn't download only the hit in hopes that they would then go out and buy the CD.

The music industry - or more accurately, the corporations who sell music and not so much the artists - is still in denial that the huge album sales they enjoyed for a while in the 90s and early 00s are gone. Prices were unrealistically high, legal MP3s weren't available yet, and they controlled the radio and TV media's music playlists, so it was a false bubble that was going to pop regardless. (See this recent post and go search on the top 5000 songs of all time and look at the first couple pages. You'll see the songs that were part of this bubble - there's a lot of suckitude there. Clearly an artificial situation.)

But, there's hope. Just the other day I was talking to a guy who's been in on iTunes since the beginning, and he's finally said he's gonna start buying the DRM-free MP3s from Amazon. I think a lot of folks are gonna go, "Wait, I can buy a song I can play anywhere for under a buck? Really? I don't have the buy the rest of the album if I think it's dreck? And the albums usually cost $9 if I want the whole enchilada? Sign me up!" ... "You mean I don't have to sign up at all, just go buy it?"

Once the music industry just lets us buy music the way we want without a hassle, I think they'll be in better shape. Kottke and Co. agree.


Finally, to be totally incongruous, this next piece is not about music, and I'm praising a journalist even though I dissed the profession at the start of this post.

I love the phrase that ends this excerpt from Anne Lamott's article on today's Salon, because she's probably right - only Germans might have a word for it.

When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, "Don't you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?"

And he said, "Absolutely. They are everything He or She hates in a Christian."

I have been in a better mood ever since, and have decided not to even say this woman's name anymore, because she fills me with such existential doubt, such a sense of impending doom and disbelief, that only the Germans could possibly have words for it.