Monthly Archives: January 2006

Download Cheater’s Blues

Download Cheater's Blues

Once upon a time there was a magical kingdom, ruled by a magical king.

The king had himself once been a knight errant but through his adventures he’d earned a small fortune — more importantly, he’d learned magical powers from the wizards of the east.

In those days, the most powerful magic in the in the land was so potent, it was known by just three letters — IPO. Even today, though the magic has faded, those letters are still very powerful.

But, in those days, the magic of the IPO was everywhere.

And most notably in the magic kingdom founded by the wandering knight. Through the magic of IPO, the knight was able to raise almost a half billion pieces of gold. (In our time, that would buy 33 thousand Toyota Corollas, fully equipped with factory air and power windows and locks.)

But the magic of the IPO required that the kingdom appear to be a happy and prosperous kingdom — so the king decided to give money to his citizens every time someone heard one of their songs. (Did we mention this was a kingdom of musicians? Weird, huh?) The king called it Pay for Play… PfP.

As one might imagine, this was greeted with great joy by the citizens of the kingdom. Most of them had never received a single shekel for their music and never expected to.

But with great good fortune, sometimes comes danger. And in the magic kingdom, this danger showed the face of greed. Soon, the musician citizens were learning devious magic of their own, pretending to listen to each others music, and pocketing the money.

The king seemed oblivious to the trouble in his streets. But he must have realized that, in a kingdom of musicians, there could only be so many people listening at a time — for he tried various means to lure travelers in to hear his musicians.

One of the lures was in the form of big lists of the most popular songs, which he called “charts.”

Soon, the biggest cheaters in the land were at the top of the charts, based on music that no one really heard. And sometimes the greedy musicians were also magicians and they plied the devious tactics of their trade, esoteric magic like IP Masking. They even used soulless robots to listen to music for them…

But a few musicians in the magic kingdom raised their voices in protest [that’s where today’s song comes in. —TK] , calling out for their fellow musicians to eschew greed and trickery… to do the right thing and to stop tricking the king and working the evil magic that kept the banal and vapid music of IT wizards at the top of the charts.

But it was already too late.

Unknown to all but those who were conversant in the esoteric writings of The Business Section, a strange and terrible new magic was eating at the very foundation of the magic kingdom…

And it was this strange and terrible magic which brought down the magic king, who was forced to sell the magic kingdom for little more than a song to one of the old kingdoms once known as The Seven Sisters. But that’s a story for another time…

[I’d like to acknowledge that the story above is hardly the first fairy tale telling of the rise and fall of a rags-to-riches-to-rags internet/IPO story — probably not even the first to apply such a format to the story of the not-quite-named startup above. BTW, all that remains of that once-high-flying company is its dot com nameplate, now simply a portal for commercial music promotion.]

Download Cheater’s Blues

Spent all night on the DSL
downloading music straight to hell
I got the PfP
Download cheater’s blues

I’ll download your page you stream mine
Neither one listen that’ll be just fine
I got the PfP
Download cheater’s blues

I used to play music now I just swap downloads
cause sharpenin’ my chops is too darn slow
I got the PfP
Download cheater’s blues
I use to play music now download swappin’s all I do

Didn’t I see you
on the bulletin board
You were waving your T1
and lookin’ to score
You had the PfP
Download cheater’s blues

Y’ offered two whole pages
for just one song
you seemed kind of desperate
seemed like something was wrong
You had the PfP
Download cheater’s blues

You said I.S. was on your trail
they were sniffin your packets
like a hound after quail
You got the PfP
Download cheater’s blues
And you thought chart position
was the only thing that you had to lose.

[bridge]
I used to write songs I don’t do that no more
Now I spend all my time on the bulletin boards
With crazy vampires, psychos and more
just swappin those downloads and bumpin the score
I used to love music and I listened all day
Now I ripped out my speakers and threw them away
Cause there’s swappin to do and there’s stations to play
I got 5000 songs to download to day

Spent all night on the DSL
downloadin music straight to hell
I got the PfP
Download cheater’s blues
I’ll download your page you stream mine
Neither one listen that’ll be just fine
I got the PfP
Download cheater’s blues

Mountains Come, Mountains Go

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Mountains Come, Mountains Go

In 1999, I collaborated over the ‘net with an English techno kid named Deakin Scott. He’d heard my trip hop stuff on the old mp3.com and he asked if I wanted to write a vocal part for a 140 beat per minute mix he was working on.

He emailed me a work mix as a guide. I listened over and over, playing with different ideas. Finally, in frustration, I picked up my acoustic guitar and started hashing out some classic rock and roll chords, unrelated to Deakin’s music.

There was, in that first exploration, a kind of teen angel sort of vibe and when I surrendered to that vibe, the lyrics below pretty much came out whole. They play off the teen tragedy vibe, focusing on the protagonist’s feelings in the moment of loss.

I don’t mean to trivialize the emotional resonance of the lyrics for me, though, at all. I really wanted, in my small and clumsy way, to explore the tragic beauty of love and inevitable loss. But… see… you can’t talk about that. Or it sounds like, well, that, and, yet, is simultaneously somehow too personal. So I like the ironic distance afforded by reworking a classic form.

The chords I came up with are reflected in the version below, for the most part. The delivery to Deakin’s 140 bpm music precluded conventional singing, so what melody there was was somewhat irrelevant. Nailing the lyric rhythmically at that tempo was challenging, but after much work I came up with a set of vocals I could really live with.

I emailed them the vocals (bare and attached to his mix as an example/guide) with careful instructions on how to set them on the beat in the mix, since there’s a fair amount of syncopation. Somehow, those instructions must have got lost.

Deakin’s music sounded even better than the guide track I’d worked with — but the vocals I’d sent him were dropped in just a tiny bit off the mark. I explained my concern to him, but he said he’d fallen in love with the mix just the way it was (which I usually take to be code for I’m working on my next project, shouldn’t you?) Anyhow, I can’t make my mix available for download, but broadband users can hear it here (or at the link below).

You’ll find a link for a ‘studio version’ as well — that’s my music and vocals — and while the chords are essentially those I use in the AYoS version, here, the production and arrangement are considerably different… so three three quite different versions.

Today’s acoustic version:

Deakin Scott/TK Major (TK’s Mix):

Mountains Come, Mountains Go

Mountains come and mountains go
but a love like ours will surely show
the stars themselves to be a fling
I’ve seen the End of Time
It’s no big thing

The ocean deep is just a pond
I throw my coat for you to walk upon
The waves are tears that mist my eyes
The mighty wind is
just your sleepy sigh

When I sing to you the angels sing along
and yet I know there’s something wrong
The sky above is in your eyes
and I know that means
you’re lying on the ground

The sirens freeze my blood is cold
suddenly the world’s just too damn old
the future fading in your eyes
time and space collapse
in one last sigh

Mountains come and mountains go
but a love like ours will surely show
the stars themselves to be a fling
I’ve seen the End of Time
It’s no big thing

1999 08 01
(c)1999 TK Major

Government Witness

Bold & Rational Men

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Bold & Rational Men

In the early 70’s I decided I needed to feel out what a worldview without God would be like. Maybe, in an odd kind of way, I was taking John Lennon up on his imagine challenge.

At the time, a massive wave of fundamental evangelism was sweeping America and I felt that one thing was sure — if what they believed in was “God” — I must be an atheist.

After a while, I began to tell people when they asked that I considered myself “spiritual” but that most people would think of me an atheist.

In a way I think I was also trying to synchronize my intellectual notion of God — which reflected the deist philosophies I grew up with — with my emotional sense of God, which was highly paternalized and, I’ll admit it, in some aspects had the cartoonish sentimentality of the popular culture notion of God.

If I was ever to grow up spiritually, it seemed clear to me that I had to stop thinking of The Unknowable as a kindly older man with everybody’s best interest at heart.

I felt like I wanted to really understand what the universe would feel like as a place without that God. And I explored that on an intellectual, emotional, and to the extent that I could, mystical or spiritual level. The interesting thing is that, for me, the universe never felt empty or scary or purposeless. Life might occasionally scare me… but that big, ’empty’ universe didn’t.

Without the magisterial God of my juvenile imagination and the dualistic notion of an independent soul, I was suddenly struck by what a, you should pardon the expression, miracle human consciousness is. Sure, we can carefully analyze the processes and patterns of human consciousness, mapping and measuring our abilities and limitations, tracing our emotional lives through the complex interaction of brain chemicals and neural messaging — all that is understandable, measurable.

But consciousness — that’s something else, again. Complex, interdependent processes… kid’s play. But experiencing them. Wow.

All of a sudden that “empty” universe seemed very magical. If the raw materials of consciousness — let’s get megalomaniacal here: my consciousness — are part of the universe, then the universe is, as far as I’m concerned, a pretty magical place.

Bold and Rational Men

Come now y’ bold and rational men
and march y’ straight ahead
y’ fear not the fire of the dragon
nor the carious teeth of death

And come now, lad
fear not the gods
you’ve often said we’re all alone
d’n’cha see your where your path must lie
straight into the unknowable
good speed now
you’re on your own

But wait now put your hand on the earth
and see where your life flows from
this good dark earth
is the mother of us all
y’know you are her son

and come and gaze into the sky
see how dark and deep
you are the prodigal lost in time
lost in a dream kept sleep