Flak Magazine: Music Best of 2002: Introduction, 01.31.03

Editor's note: Now that the feature has been up for longer than a month, some of the mp3s have been removed from Flak, per request of the record labels involved.

Last year, Flak's music reviewers presented their favorite music of 2001 via a hypothetical mix CD called Gold Teeth and a Curse for this Town. A handful of Flak regulars boiled the year down to 21 songs and talked about what made them so special. This year, we're doing the same thing, with a bit of a twist: We're offering mp3s or streaming audio of some of the songs, thanks to some of the artists and labels we're covering. Like last year's round-up, the main mix of the 2002 incarnation is joined by writeups from indvidual Flak writers. The graphic, once again, owes a debt to decades of 7" single design. (A full-size version of the cover can be seen here.) Our compilation this time out takes its name from a lyric in Elk City's "Summer Song," which kicks off the compilation.

It'd be easy to introduce a mix CD called Got No Songs on the Radio by aiming at that wide, wide barn known as Clear Channel, which went from owning 40-some stations in 1996 to owning somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,240 today and is widely believed to be responsible for the death of Radio As We Know It.

But while musicians, record labels and music aficionados line up to bash the 500-pound-gorilla of radio and concert tours, they're forgetting one thing: Radio sucked when Clear Channel owned 40 stations; that it sucks more now that they own 1,240 stations is unfortunate but not worth getting excited about.

What's worth getting excited about is that dissatisfied consumers should be fleeing commercial radio, MTV and their rapidly shrinking playlists in droves; they should be logging onto a vast array of Internet radio stations and file-sharing services like Napster and Kazaa and seeking out music they've never heard before — whether it's the latest hip band from the latest trendy city, the original version of their favorite booty-shakin' tune or the songs great-grandma listened to back in her flapper days. It should all be out there and it should all be free, ready to be lapped up by eager ears.

But, as parents and politicians are so fond of saying, with freedom comes responsibility. Sure, it's easy to blame the decline of online music distribution on the Recording Industry Association of America and commercial radio, with their highly criticized, highly foolish moves against file-sharing services and small Internet radio outfits. But some of the blame must fall at the hands of the record-buying public or, rather, the nonrecord-buying public.

The music industry is an industry, not a nonprofit, subsidized cultural treasure. Record labels and artists seeking to make a profit can't give their entire catalog away for free via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. And while some of us are perfectly happy listening to music recorded for a nickel on some cheap boombox, sampler or four-track, it won't work as a model for the industry.

It's time for the online community to start acting like responsible consumers. Ethically speaking, unauthorized downloads of a song here and there for reference's sake are perfectly acceptable behavior, the shop-at-home version of the listening stations you'll find in your local Virgin Megastore. But for the love of god, if you download a few tracks by an artist and you end up liking them, be a socially responsible consumer already and reward the artist and record label by buying the album, whether that purchase comes in the form of a CD, paid download or a good old-fashioned vinyl record. Don't log on to Kazaa and get the entire album for free, complete with album art and liner notes. If online music distribution is going to dovetail with the current retail environment it's gonna be, at least in part, because consumers got honest and started paying for shit they should have by all rights been paying for.

That's not to say the recording industry doesn't have a long way to go. The labels need to stop insulting their customers and stop the inexplicable escalation of CD prices during a time when production costs keep getting cheaper. Similarly, the industry needs to stop stifling innovation in online music distribution. It needs to sit down with file-sharers and programmers and say, "How can we move this forward?" It needs to lead the way in making Internet radio feasible, possibly by setting up some kind of online equivalent to ASCAP funded by licensing fees or a tax on ISP charges.

Here at Flak, we've tried to do our own, very small part to show how things ought to be done by providing access to a good number the songs we're covering. (Due to the agreements we have with the record labels, some of the songs will disappear from the site, though they should all be up for at least a month.) We're hoping you'll read our reviews and check out the music. If you like it and want to hear more, then do your part and pay for a legitimate copy of the album. Now start clicking and reading and see if you can help fix this broken online music thing.

Introduction
Tracks 1-5 | Tracks 6-10
Tracks 11-15 | Tracks 16-21
Personal annotated mixes:
Lavina Lee | Wayne Lewis
Yancey Strickler | Eric Wittmershaus