Since I have about 40 unwatched divx movies sitting on my hard drives, I’ve reallocated some bandwidth to mp3 downloads on IRC. Good discovery (for me) of the day is Badi Assad, a Brazilian singer and acoustic guitar player with a good voice and a great sense of rhythm (which explains the title of the album I’m recommending).
My buddy Monsur would love to manage a collaborative musical blog, with samples to listen to and discuss, and how do I love the idea! But this is not going to happen till we get rid of a whole generation of record company executives who manage to be crooks, Luddites, the worst marketers since Spanish Inquisitors, and pushers of the worst crass soup in the history of music.
When the "new" product is compilations of random 00’s mash-ups of cheesy 90’s eurodance remixes of bad 80’s pop copies of lousy 70’s disco songs, you know this can’t possibly get worse. Though, in an ironic parallel to the stock market, we never know whether we have hit the very bottom yet (too bad there wasn’t a boom in good commercial music in the late 90’s.) Hopefully, mediocrity piled up this high can’t escape the law of physics, and surprise, surprise, gravity is making its full power known to the CD market. What will eventually rise from the pile of smoking rubbish should be interesting, as good music always has been and always will be (no matter how hard they try, they can’t take that away from us).