True Confessions and a Bottle of Rum Rock Me Like a Hurricane
by Amelia G : November 6th, 2008
I have a confession to make. You probably know I’m opposed to piracy. I’m especially opposed to the kind of modern large scale digital piracy which makes it pretty much impossible to make a living as a midlist band. The internet is great for giving nowhere bands a shot and it rules for creating record-breaking manufactured pop and blanketing the world with it. But it is a polarizing medium and, in the faint spotlight of the computer monitor glow, midlist bands have either rocketed to wild success or more frequently withered on the vine.
But nobody is perfect and I have committed piracy on two occasions. Ironically, the first was when The West Wing had a special episode with a fictional candidate political debate and I missed it. It was going to be at least a year before the debate came out on DVD or Instant Play on Netflix, there was no download option either on the official site or Amazon Unbox, and I wanted to watch the following episode. Technically, I was not the one who downloaded it off a torrent site, but I did knowingly receive stolen property.
The second time was when the Axl Rose project Chinese Democracy was leaked. I missed it the first time Antiquiet posted it, but I listened to it one of the times it was repeatedly re-posted in the Antiquiet comments. I could say that maybe there was some kind of justification in my head because I liked the writing style on Antiquiet. But really I took it for the same reason most people steal — I wanted it and there was not another way to get it.
I was terribly disappointed in what I heard. Appetite for Destruction changed my life and . . .
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