OK – that last post about Nas got me going. I went into the CD vault, and dug out a dusty copy of the sony music sampler which had the version of Nas’ Aint Hard to Tell that I wanted.

Now the version that’s on this sampler has a serious beat, not like the linked viedo below. After some sleuthing, I found that the Sony sampler is actually titled: Sony Music Black Music Month ’94 / You Can Hear The Future In The Music.

Anyways, that version is much nicer than the one on YouTube. Of course, the old Fugees Nappy Heads Remix Radio version is also nice.  “What was so wonderful about pickin cotton on the farm – Mr. Slaaaaaaave-Maaaaan?”

Making fun of Louis Armstrong is not nice, Mr. Fugee, but it does make me laugh.

Props to my cousin for turning me onto Nas back in the day (it aint hard to tell, I excel. . .) with the brilliant Illmatic.

In the 15 years since that introduction, I stumbled on Olu Dara (Your Lips, Your Lips, Your Lips, Your Lips They are Juicy!) with his release In the World: From Natchez to New York.

I am up late tonight working on a massive , complicated model to show how our business should play out, when on the TV here is Nas, with this guy – and I know that guy – that’s Olu Dara.

Nas keeps going on about his dad, and slow as I am, by the end of the song I figure out that Nas’ Dad is Olu Dara!

Nice.

They both kick buns, so check them out.

By the way – I bought my first track from Amazon’s MP3 service. They don’t yet have a huge selection, but I come from the days of vinyl and tapes, so I still operate in the gold / copy mode: I leave the gold copy at home, and take the copy on the road. The copy wears out ( I lose my mp3 player) and I still have the gold at home, safe. I still have a veritable vault of CD’s as well, but they collect dust now.

All that’s to say I want to have an unfettered mp3, at high quality, that I can copy to my mp3 player without fingling with every genius-scheme DRM encumbrance. That’s for the Man. I buy from Amazon.

And boy am I glad. Now – I have nothing against DRM except that it usually is horribly implemented so it penalizes the honest. The idea that you have to jump through hoops to show that you own some music just takes all the fun out of it. I’d rather stop by the CD store, buy it, and have the right to copy it to my MP3 player etc. to listen.

Amazon comes along, and provides DRM-free downloads, which is nice.  Now, there isn’t a perfect selection, so you have a few holes, like the wonderful, Mana-like Volver a comenzar by Cafe Tacuba, which is not available on Amazon’s downloads, so you would have to find it here.

If you’re in the writing mood, write a book called “Capitalism: It was nice while it lasted.” By the way – you agree that capitalism is over, don’t you?

Capitalism to me meant the idea of having ownership for the means of production in private hands, and the existence of a free market. Now, we all know that capital all over the world is in the hands of private folks, and that’s not a bad thing. But the Free Market is gone the way of the dodo.

Why? Large corporations are changing the playing field to their advantage – for instance via lobbying and corrupting the government – and impeding the free operation of the market via non-competitive means.

For most, it is clear that our society is ossifying, potentially with property price growth outpacing income growth, even turning into a stratified society where landowners are hereditary for the most part.

So there it is: write it up, make billions, and at least you’ll be able to buy a condo.

IBM, Novell, and Parity Communications are talking about blind encryption to allow internet surfers to anonymously visit, and indeed transact with sites.

Of course, their project is the right thing to do, in terms of privacy, security, and in keeping the status quo.

Now – the “status quo” statement above should make you think. Isn’t that changing the “status quo?”

Before the digital tech era, the “web” era (so let’s say 10 years ago for the average person) people couldn’t effectively track all of your purchases, what you looked at, where you went and what you were interested in, and then target you with advertisements.

Anonymity was the status quo.

Now – let’s consider why this effort is doomed in terms of commercial success. Even a nascent system, such as e-commerce over the web, has built up powerful interests and requires a somewhat stable transactional model. Today we know the game: You come to my site, I track you and entice you to disclose, I advertise to you, and then I sell you something (eventually).

If I can’t track you, and can’t profile you, and don’t know what you bought, and actually am thwarted from developing ideas about you, then my model is in trouble.

No web merchants are going to participate in transactions with this type of system voluntarily, and most will oppose it if necessary.

So success for this effort demands massive demand for incremental privacy from people like you and me, which history has shown virtually never happens — not for privacy or any other perceived incremental advancement.

There are a bunch of caveats, and there are ways that this could work, and I would love for that to happen.

But I’m not waiting around.