Going Through the Motions

That being the title of one of Aimee Mann's songs on her album that is posted, in its entirety, on her website. It also happens to be one of the funniest songs from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show's musical episode, written by the series' creator Joss Whedon and performed by the cast. It's brilliant. The Aimee Mann song has nothing to do with it; it's from her new album The Forgotten Arm; I stumbled across it when trying to figure out what QuickTime is all about.

Aimee Mann has always been one of my favorite artists since the days when music was to be found on CDs and opened eagerly (and with great endeavour to tear through the peoiple-proof packaging that it is shrink-wrapped in), in those prehistoric days just after records were invented as an afterthought to the wheel. I loved her voice and the poetry of her lyrics; her collaboration with the makers of the movie Magnolia; and also discovered she was tall and pretty to boot. She seems to be quite at ease with music in the digital age. Her website is one of those full of flash animations and complicated stuff that slide up and down; she has released an exclusive iTunes album; one of her videos was filmed in HD and is downloadable from the Quicktime 7 site; and finally there's The Forgotten Arm, the entire album, in a Quicktime stream on her site. A nifty window opens and presents rotating graphics along with the lyrics to every song as it streams. And I must say that this isn't Internet radio the way it used to be. You can skip through the songs, which just the slightest pause, look at the lyrics or do something else while it plays. And it's all for free.

Well, sort of. There are various ways to define "free" on the Internet these days, and here we run into the famous cultural distinction between the concepts of the public and the private and what is owned or not. Let's digress to the real world and compare American suburbia to a European city: the latter was conceived with a sense of public ownership; people live in cramped, not very comfortable or attractive flats; but outside they move about in well-designed public transportation; most museums are free; art is in the architecture, the spaces, the gardens, is free: as opposed to the American desire to capture, to own, to take home; they have a compulsive need to take snapshots or videotape experiences; they like to accumulate, to gather, to store; and isn't that what consumerism is about?

The thing about the Aimee Mann album as a Quicktime stream is that there is no way of capturing and storing it directly. As far as my brother is concerned, it can't be done; and I tend to trust him as the final arbiter of what the average netizen can or can't do. You can go to the website and click on it as many times as you wish, but you can't use one of the fiendish methods of capture to grab it. The only way would be to physically get another device and record the sound as it plays, which is like the old method of pirating movies (to hold a videocamera at the screen in a moviehouse for the entire film; this was before DVD cloning was the rage); it's like not being able to stop at admiring the painting in a free public museum and having a compulsive need to buy a postcard of it in the souvenir shop. True, nothing's permanent on the Internet, but chances are I'll enjoy listening to it enough before it gets taken down; and if it does and I really like it, I will go and buy a CD (which, incidentally, doesn't take up much space and is still an excellent medium for archiving, along with 78s. Incidentally, shopping at the online iTunes music store is rather like buying 78s, which was *the* standard for music distribution for a long span of time; each record held one song on each side (and some people even theorize that the technological limits of the 78 rpm shellac disc gave us the average length of the song as we know it today, about four minutes). At any flea market or attic you can buy these for just about a dollar; there was probably a time in its day when it cost about a dollar as well, though a dollar then isn't worth what it is today. I'd say that for a dollar a song we now get stereo sound processed by sound technicians and without a scratchy sound, so it's hard to say which dollar was really worth more.

So will I be going through the motions of trying to capture Aimee Mann's album to add to an already cluttered private space in the form of (god forbid! a tape)? For the sheer perversity of outwitting the system, perhaps; just as a sign saying "Do Not Tap On The Glass" makes you want to do just that. But in the long run, as long as she's not going hungry (and she doesn't look like she is), I'll stroll down the Internet the way one strolls along the streets of Paris, and enjoy the beauty that might or might not be there tomorrow (it's the city of light, after all, not the Eternal City). Here's to a beautiful woman who has just made the Internet landscape more beautiful by making her art public. Perhaps some regions of the Internet will look more like Milan or Prague and less like Deadtown suburbia.

www.aimeemann.com
Aimee Mann Video