Music
What I like to Listen To ...
Thelonious
Monk. Backstage,
Photo copyright 1989 by
Jerry Stoll
Good progressive
alternative; blues; reggae; jazz; baroque, zydeco... I like lots of
stuff. A column I wrote one year in the student paper can serve for now
as a sort of Manifesto of Musical Taste.
I’m sorely tempted
to post some mp3s here, just to irritate the licensing culture fascists. Instead, I will recommend a listen to KEXP Online. Best radio station on the web, and their “KEXP
Song of the Day” podcast (free on i-Tunes) is a terrific source of great new
music. KCRW also has a very worthwhile song-of-the-day
podcast. Also good is Radioio, especially Radioio Edge and
Ambient. Best internet radio station on the web.
Fight Corporate Intellectual Property Fascism
Finally, give a visit to the folks at Free
Culture. As they say on their page:
We're living on the cusp of a new age, one dominated by
the digital flow of information and the spread of ideas. The Internet gives us
the potential to connect many-to-many, offering the possibility of a new
structure to media, our culture, and our society. But nothing ensures that this
potential will be embraced: Will the future be one in which an open network of
ordinary people organized from the bottom up produces a global civil society
that can keep corporate power in check? Or will it be a world in which
technology serves as a means to extend and solidify that power?
We can't afford to let short-sighted interests endanger
the freedom to create, but threats to innovation and creativity are becoming
increasingly common. We have the opportunity to participate in our culture on a
scale that's never been possible before, yet relics of the 20th-century media
machine continue to push for tighter and tighter control over our common
culture.
It's time to stop complaining and stand up. Big media and
its lobbyists in
And I’ll ponder for a bit about what my favorite
song might be…