Before This Damage is Done

My CD of Arcade Fire’s new album has finally arrived, two days after MP3 buyers were able to snap it up for a few quid on Amazon. I’m still glad to have gone for the disk, though, and not just because of a 40-something attachment to physical objects and floor-to-ceiling shelves. When iPods all have 2 terabytes of flash memory I’ll be able to re-rip all my CDs to lossless and have portable music that doesn’t sound washed out in the loud parts, and where will everyone else be with their 128kbps AAC files then, eh? Not re-listening to albums they bought twenty years ago for a rush of nostalgia for the Australian summer, I expect, so they won’t really care; but then most kids haven’t yet experienced the powerful connection between music and nostalgia. Arcade Fire fans, though—us kids know.

Canon Rebels

A slightly modified version of a comment posted to FreakyTrigger’s canon discussion in March, which I meant to post here but didn’t get around to at the time.

Better Take Cover

Men at Work have just lost a case brought by Larrikin Music, a song publisher who bought the copyright of “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” from the Australian Girl Guides in 1990 and in July 2009 claimed that the flute riff in “Down Under” plagiarised it. Colin Hay and Ron Strykert are now facing a payout of up to sixty percent of their writers’ earnings from the song, depending on the judge’s final ruling.

Writing songs with a mate down under,
Looked around for some riffs to plunder.
Said to him, “Do you think we’ll risk it?”
He just smiled and handed me a Girl Guide biscuit.

And I said, “Ohhh! ‘Kookaburra’ is huge down under,
And one man’s ‘quote’ is a judge’s ‘blunder’.
Can’t you hear the reporters thunder?
We better run, we better take cover.”