A Shot of Incilin

For the first time since Kanye West’s Late Registration, I feel compelled to buy an album. No, its not Eminem’s Relapse - an album I have such mixed feelings about I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to write a proper review. The album I want to buy is Danger Mouse’s blank CD.

The musical quality of the album has nothing to do with why I want to buy the album. I loved the first Gnarls Barkley album as well as Demon Days, I thought The Grey Album was a clever idea that was long overdue. But even then, I’m not the biggest Danger Mouse fan. And I don’t even know who or what Sparklehorse, the collaborator on the album, is. But none of that matters. The reason I want to buy the album is because of what it represents.

Buying Mouse’s blank CD is pretty much the same as me buying any other album with actual music on it. All CDs are coasters to me, no matter how good or bad the music itself is. If I were to buy an album today, like Relapse for example, what would I do with it? I don’t owe a CD player. I’d have to rip the CD unto my computer, and then upload them to my mp3 player. Ripping takes a while and naming tracks is annoying. I’d could download the album faster than I could rip it, plus it would already come to names that only need light editing. Which is exactly what I would have to do with the Danger Mouse CD.

I understand Mouse is steaming his music online and is releasing the CD as a form of protest against his label. I support Mouse in all his battle and hope he comes out on top because he makes great music. But I don’t want to buy the album to support Mouse. I want to buy it so I bask in the irony of buying a blank disk because that’s exactly what labels are selling these days.

There are very few compelling arguments to buy real music these days. And there’s no real comeback to the fact that you can get whatever you want for free.

But sometimes you just want to support your favorite artist right? Well that’s what I was thinking when I bought Late Registration a few years ago. I went down to the Virgin Megastore on Times Square and bought it. While I was down there, I decided to go ahead and buy some of favorite albums since they were on sale for only $10 bucks. I bought one of my all time favorite records, The Marshall Mathers LP (as well as The Infamous, Ready To Die, & Liquid Swords).

When I got home I deleted the MMLP tracks off my computer and replaced them with the ripped tracks from the album that I had just bought. I figured at least I could get the highest quality sound for the songs, even though that wasn’t really worth the $10 bucks. I uploaded them to my mp3 player and let the album play while I played Solitaire on my computer. MMLP is a classic so I played it from beginning to end.

One of my all time favorite rap verses is the last verse on “Criminal.” I was excited to hear the track with that “high quality CD sound.” But just as the last verse started, the song got messed up. The music cut off with this shrieking sound that was so annoying I had to throw my headphones off. I snatched the CD out of my disk drive only to see that the CD was already scratched up. I tried ripping the tracks again but still got that shrieking sound. So I said fuck it, downloaded the track, and replaced it.

The downloaded version played just fine.