Which Way Do We Go, George?

The last couple of months I've been talking about censorship and how it's just about going to cripple our nation, if we don't get ourselves first. I'd like to remind you that there is this thing called an on/off, or power, switch, which you can press any old time you don't want to be "offended." And now, with that out of the way, I would like to say that charity begins at home.

In other words, you are what you eat. You have the power to forge ahead or stay behind. Don't let other people tell you what to do. Think for yourself…which is easy sometimes, and sometimes not so easy.

Say you come to a crossroads out in the desert. It's the middle of nowhere, it's 4 a.m., it's raining, your name is, inexplicably, George, and the top on your car won't come up. Plus, you've forgotten how to get where you're going. With nary a landmark to guide you, you find yourself at a four-stop-sign intersection somewhere in the great blue yonder. Just as you pull up, so do three other cars, all of which are the same model as yours (a 1962 Dodge Dart, black, bench seat, go-by-the-grace-of-God engine and tires as bald as an 8-ball). You start to feel vaguely psychedelic. Which of these cars is mine?, you ask. Then you look for the answer in the faces of the other three drivers, all of whom look exactly like you. Your whole life flashes in front of your glazed eyes. You consider flooring the gas, but think better of it when you start adding up the cost of repairs in your rain-soaked head. So you get out of your car, look around you as you turn around in a complete circle, and you take a short, rubbery walk to one of the other drivers. He is also getting soaked and is vaguely nervous about meeting you under such odd circumstances. You going nowhere, too?, he asks. You stutter knowingly. That seems to be the case, you say, but I'd rather have my head screwed on straight. And then you wake up from your nightmare, shivering because you think your head is wet and you feel like you're catching cold. You wrap a blanket around your head, or is it a towel? Hard to say, but you soak up the supposed moisture anyway. And then you wake up again.

Now, say you are a music lover and you're on the prowl for a great album you've never heard before. You ask everyone you know about this album, but nobody knows what you're talking about. Must be pretty obscure. So you scour the Internet for anything you can find out about this masterpiece, but you don't find anything. Nobody in any of those crazy newsgroups even knows what you're talking about. So you find yourself at a crossroads. Where do you go from here?

Let's say you're the president of a big record company. You've had maybe two big releases in the past year. Your stockholders are breathing down your neck. Do something or look for another job, they say, their hot breath scalding your epidermis. What do you do? You turn to your fellow record company executives, who profess that they, too, have been the recipients of hot, scalding breath of late, and they're in the same boat you are. They join you at the crossroads, in the desert of night, the rain beating down on them, and wonder just what it is they can do to get the sunshine to cut through the clouds.

So, the question is: What do you have in common with the record company executives that bonds the lot of you? You have decisions to make. You want to get where you're going, and they want to find a way to take you there.

Say you're the kind of person who buys, rather than trades, music. (Come to think of it, you're a buyer, anyway, because you're more likely than not to buy something you've heard as the result of a trade than you are if you just saw a CD in a store and came to a crossroads about whether to buy it or not.) You have a choice as to how you're going to buy a particular CD. You can get your friend to burn a copy for you and take the music for a test drive and then buy it if you like it, or you can listen to a 30 second sound sample on the Internet and buy the album, or just a particular song from that album, if you like it. Or you can buy the actual CD, either over the Net or in the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar way.

Which way do you choose to go? Well, you have a few more choices to make. If you're only going to listen to music at home, a CD is probably the way to go, but wait-what if you're the type of person who hooks his MP3 player up to his stereo instead of fussing with CDs? Well, if you're that type of person, you can have the physical CD for the purpose of looking at the packaging and credits and rip the music to your player. But what if you don't care who wrote the songs, or who produced them, or what the name of the artist's manager is? Then you can just download the album from iTunes or Rhapsody or one of the myriad services that specialize in this sort of thing.

Now, what if you don't have an MP3 player? Well, then a CD is for you. But, wait-there's more! Maybe you don't listen to CDs in your living room or play them in your computer's CD player. Maybe you just listen to music that's stored on your computer, that you've paid for and downloaded. In that case, you really don't need the CD.

But what if you're the type who's fickle and changes his mind every so often? Maybe you'll start getting into physical CDs again, liking the feel of that comfy couch over that ever stiffer computer chair. Maybe you ought to buy the CD after all.

Ah, choices. What do you do?

Well, the record companies have had to make the choice to start offering their wares as downloads because the public has wrapped their ever-loving arms around MP3 players like they're going clean out of style. Perhaps you have one. Don't have any use for one? You say you don't listen to music in the house, or in the car? Do you jog? Work out at the exercise club? One of those snazzy new mini-iPods that you can wear on your arm might be just what the exercise guru ordered. You might just want a player to jog with, or for those long walks that get your heart pumping.

What do you do?

Choices are a bitch. You might well pay less for a CD in the form of a bulk download than you will at the store, but then you wouldn't have the experience they used to call "browsing," where you go into a music store for a particular CD only to find yourself thumbing through the stacks and finding a couple of other releases you really have to have. Or simply buying something you didn't know was out, and it's really going to mean much more to you than what you went in for, so you buy it. It's a kind of thrilling feeling, when you trip over something really great. You can kind-of "trip" over albums "thumbing through the stacks" on the Internet-say at the iTunes store-but it's really not the same thing, is it?

The answer to that question depends on how old you are, and what your experiences have taught you. When I was a kid, we just had vinyl, and there was a certain and immediate thrill to thumbing through stacks and stacks of albums, traded in by everyone from kids to little old ladies from Pasadena to DJs whose personal music inventory would swell each time a shipment came into their radio station from any and all record companies. Lugging those finds home, you wouldn't worry that you were suddenly poor again. You had all of this gold to listen to.

In other words, it was work, back in the day, hunting for Emitt Rhodes' American Dream album (I found it in a cutout bin in some long-forgotten record store in New York City, I believe). Now, it's almost too easy to find what you're looking for. Anyone with even a half-assed mastery of keyword searches can find just about anything with a couple of keystrokes. It's as easy as 1-2-3, at two in the afternoon or two in the morning.

But, on the other hand, it is easier to find what you're looking for, and that turns out to be a good thing, saving you countless flaps of shoe leather and time you probably need for doing something else. Like answering all of these questions I've just put forth.

We grapple with questions every day. What do I have for lunch? What's for dinner? Do I turn left at the light, or right? Should I tell my coworker that she's pissing me off? Should I finish reading my book tonight, or wait until tomorrow?

The answer, as the Quiet Beatles once said, is at the end. It's when you meet your hopes and dreams at the crossroads and decide which way to go. As far as music is concerned, it's still too early to tell which direction will tell the tale. Everything is changing so fast. A couple of years ago, the idea of carrying around a tiny hard drive and listening to music on the run was unthinkable. Now, not so.

We are at a crossroads, people-you and me and the record companies and the artists who record for them. Which way we go will define our future music-filled lives. I don't know how it will all turn out, but I do know one thing: I'm going nowhere without my umbrella. In case it rains in the middle of the night, out in the great blue yonder.

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