wither in the light

Lawrence Lessig (I've written about him before) on the absurdities of our current copyright laws, bands suing their customers, and why Wilco is the future of music.

"Music," [Tweedy] explained, "is different" from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just "a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread." The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. "We are just troubadours," Tweedy told me. "The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves."

Lawrence knows what he's talking about... in the comic book that America has become, he's one of the few superheroes fighting the good fight. And Wilco... I'm sitting here in a 'This Mortal Coil' t-shirt blasting the Pixies on the headphones, thinking about how cool Wilco is. I've mapped a shortcut from Frank Black to Wilco, from "I break the walls and kill us all with holy fingers" to "I know you've got a God-shaped hole", that makes perfect sense. It might be another one of those water-heater things, but it works for me.