The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

You may not remember the technology, but before the World Wide Web that we know and love today, there was Gopher, its spiritual predecessor. Gopher became available in the late spring of 1991 and was a system that let you read text files on other computers on the internet. Unlike the web, where you click on links to navigate, Gopher was meant strictly for text-only display; you navigated through a series of menus.

As a computer science student at Crazy Go Nuts University, I became aware of Gopher sometime in the fall of 1991 and used it to find computer science papers and tutorials. Along the way, I discovered that it was also a great source of non-course-related reading material. One of my favourite finds in “Gopherspace” was a thesis that someone had written, examining the meaning and symbolism in the lyrics of Don McLean’s American Pie. “You can get a degree for this?” I asked.

Apparently you can, and here’s present-day proof. By way of my friend Miss Fipi Lele, I’ve come across a master’s thesis that examines, of all things, the album Loveless by British “shoegazer” band My Bloody Valentine, which was released on my birthday in 1991. It’s an excellent album and considered a landmark created during a time of great change in popular music, with Public Enemy and De La Soul redefining hip-hop, Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden redefining metal, the “Manchester” bands mixing dance and rock, the rise of techno and industrial music and Lollapalooza. Yes, it’s one of the best albums of the nineties in my opinion, but is it worth a master’s thesis?

Here’s a snippet from the first paragraph of chapter 1 of the thesis, titled The Origins of the Shoegazer:

From the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004, I was a member of a rock

band that I considered the culmination of my musical creativity up to that point called

The House Project. It was not a rock band in the MTV or modern radio sense of the

term, rather the experience was more like four disgruntled musicians with bachelors

degrees in music pounding out their frustrations with a corrupt mainstream music

industry on their instruments—an industry that seemed to place more emphasis on image

than on artistic creativity and the music itself.

Wanker sense…tingling!

I don’t know about you, but any professor I had, even those in my arts electives, would’ve handed me back any paper that opened with that claptrap.

If you want an amusing read, here it is: My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” [366KB PDF], “A thesis submitted to the College of Music [at Florida State University] in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music”.

Today is Bum Rush the Charts day, a day on which we’re supposed to send a message to the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) by voting with our dollars. I’ll leave it to the folks at the Bum Rush the Charts site to explain:

People are sick of the watered-down, cookie-cutter content that networks and record companies expect us to enjoy. People are tired of watching friends and loved ones get sued by record labels who only care about profits and nothing else, not even the artists they supposedly represent.

We want and deserve more. On March 22, 2007, we’re going to change that with your help.

We can do better. We can match and exceed the reach of big media, corporate media, labels, and the entrenched interests. On March 22nd, we are going to take an indie podsafe music artist to number one on the iTunes singles charts as a demonstration of our reach to Main Street and our purchasing power to Wall Street.

Better still, some of that money will go to college scholarships:

What’s more, we’re going to take it a step beyond that. We’ve signed up as an affiliate of the iTunes Music Store, and every commission made on the sale of “Mine Again” will be donated to college scholarships, partly because it’s a worthy cause, but also partly because college students are among the most misunderstood and underestimated groups of people by big media. Black Lab has taken it up another notch – 50% of their earnings are going to be donated to the scholarship fund as well.

Sending a message to the RIAA and helping people with their education? All for the price of 99 cents (the cost of a song at the iTunes store)? Sign me up!

The song in question is Mine Again by Black Lab. Black Lab were dropped from not just one, but two major record labels — Geffen and Sony/Epic — and in the process, they had to fight the labels to regain the rights to their music (when you sign with a major label, the rights to the music you created go to the label, as your work is considered “work for hire” — see this entry for more details). You can listen to Mine Again — a tune reminiscent of How to Save a Life by The Fray — on their MySpace page.

(I’ll admit, Mine Again isn’t my cup of noise, but it might be yours, and the cause is just.)

I’ll leave the last word — in both text and video form — to the Bum Rush the Charts people:

If you believe in the power of new media, on March 22nd, 2007, take 99 cents and 2 minutes of your time to join the revolution and make iTunes “Mine Again”. If you’re a content producer (blogger, podcaster, etc.), we’re asking you to join up with us and help spread the word to your audience. Nothing would prove the power of new media more than showing corporate media that not only can we exceed their reach and match their purchasing power, but that we can also do it AND make a positive difference in the world. If we can succeed with this small example, then there’s no telling what can do next.