Once in a while we come across something that's just so right-on that we can't resist featuring it in full.

For the record, boycott new CD’s, by Steve Stajich, a Santa Monica Mirror contributing writer, is one of those.

Read it and roll (around the floor : )

======================

Any day now somebody is going to start publishing a magazine called When Music Was Cool. Fans of MOJO magazine might argue that publication has taken the lead, with articles that provide deep background on bygone, mostly dead rock artists. It’s a kind of 'Rolling Stone: Time Tunnel Edition.'

What I think will drive new publications about old rock is that the mainstream record industry, especially as represented by the repressive RIAA, is eating itself alive. The prognosis is not good.

The RIAA or Recording Industry Association of America is described on one anti-RIAA website as 'a killer octopus whose tentacles are always reaching out for prey'. That prey would be us, the music fans, and even the recording artists themselves.' (Personally, I prefer the more compact moniker 'suits.') Edgy artists like Sheryl 'I’ll be appearing at the new Albertsons store” Crow and The Dixie Chicks, who now check weather forecasts before taking a stand, have put their signatures on RIAA anti-file swapping threats.

Yeah, that’s right. Threats. The record industry should theoretically be one of the most open-minded and progressive industries in America. Their products are essentially messages of love, poetry and freedom, personal and otherwise. Songs are reflective creative works that probe the human soul.

But at this moment in entertainment history, the RIAA prefers to function as a police force ready to push down doors to nail anyone copying a music file. In newspapers across the nation, they’ve printed full-page announcements of their intent to sue private file-swapping citizens.

The record industry ignored computer music technology, didn’t bother to stabilize its position in that cosmos, and is now litigating instead of building bridges to the 21st century. Coming after the industry’s long and proud history of screwing artists — notoriously in blues and rhythm and blues — out of royalties and payments and credits, it’s time that consumers sent their own full-page message back to the RIAA.

Simply do not buy any new compact discs for one year. Boycott new CD’s until July 4, 2004 … Independence Day.

I’m asking you to do this for the clean, crisp, refreshing feeling that comes when you stop contributing to repressive capitalism. It won’t necessarily change the RIAA’s bad attitude. Looking at our planet right now, the RIAA might not seem a priority. But why submit to being pushed around and played like a harmonica by corporate entities so consumed with profit margins that they actually choke their own customers over alternative technology issues?

I apologize to artists that are, in fact, hurt by file swapping. They won’t like you boycotting new product for a year, either. But exactly where do consumers enter the dialogue here? How would you like to be sued by Sony Pictures because you didn’t go see the 'Charlie’s Angels' sequel and instead borrowed a friend’s old VHS copy of a good movie?

For one year, instead of contributing money to an industry that has loudly announced that YOU are the enemy, buy used CDs or burn copies of a friend’s CD or make cassette tapes or get CDs at your neighbor’s yard sale or turn on a radio or play your old LP records or wind up a music box or play a guitar or beat the daylights out of your congas or whistle. Utilize any of the alternative sources of music that are, at the time of this writing, still legal in America.

Remind the RIAA that it needs you.