Bring on the Hate Mail!

I'm going to come right out and say it: Michael Jackson's death is no great loss. I'm actually surprised he didn't kill himself years ago. Now, before you get your Underoos and sequined gloves all in a twist, I'll explain my position.
First of all, he's a fucking pedophile, or more specifically, a pederast. Yeah, yeah, he was never convicted blah blah blah....what the fuck ever. That's just a prime example of our "justice" system being the best money can buy. Why else would he flee the country that loves him so much? Oh, that's right, to escape any further prosecution, if someone decided they needed more Hush Money. Only the Catholic Church spent more money in that area than he did, but let's be honest, they had quite a few more people to hush than he did, not to mention all those moving vans, more PR people, and all those out of work Fantasy writers who did their press releases, I'm sure it was a logistic nightmare.
Second, he was a complete fucking whacko. I'm not talking about the one glove or all the plastic surgeries (although that is a fucking horror show in its own right), or not wanting to grow up. No, I'm talking about the guy who slept in a hyperbaric chamber, bought the Elephant Man's skeleton to display at his house, dangled his newborn over a balcony, and the list just goes on and on. I think he single-handedly kept the Enquirer & other rag mags in business during the 80s and 90s. Don't believe me? Do a search for the "art" from Neverland, it's fucking disturbing.
Third, his legacy is a mountain of debt. He may have been called the King of Pop, but could have been King of Paupers. Some estimates give a figure near $400 MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS!
What the fuck? He's worse with money than Mike Tyson?

Here's how I'll always remember Whacko Jacko: holding someone's cock.

Then there were things he did that really made him look pretty much like a dick. He outbid Sir Paul McCartney for a catalog of Beatles songs, when anyone with any kind of class wouldn't even have considered bidding, period. I mean, McCartney wrote or co-wrote those songs, not to mention recorded them. Then he got a chance to shake hands with President Reagan, who I thought was also a huge prick. And when he shakes Reagan's hand, he left his stupid glove on. Talk about buying into your own hype! The only Americans that should leave their gloves on when shaking hands with the president are Servicemen in dress uniforms.
He's just another tragic figure in a long line of musical trainwrecks, but the way people seem to be carrying on, you'd think he was on a par with Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, or John Lennon. He's not. Not even close. Too many equate record sales with talent, and it's just not so. He was a decent singer that MTV, adolescent girls and good timing turned into a superstar, whatever that is any more.
Just another kid that got turned out on the airwaves of corporate whoredom. Like I said, no great loss.

Well, bring on the hate mail, with your pathetic bleating that will most assuredly fall on deaf ears.

Not Far Off The Mark

There are three kinds of people in this world that I despise: Thieves, Liars and Bullies, and the RIAA is all three in one convenient, easy-to-loathe package.
I'm old enough to have owned (and nostalgic enough to still own) vinyl LPs and cassette tapes. My friends and I shared all our albums with each other by taking the time to record them onto cassettes, and we all had piles of homemade cassette tapes. Some of them were even labeled as well. Why did we do this? It's called "sharing" and it's how we were raised. Also because it saved us money because we didn't have to buy that particular LP. I'm sure the music industry lost money from us doing that, but twenty or thirty years ago the government wasn't completely bought and paid for by big business.
File sharing is just like spending a rainy afternoon at a friend's house turning a stack of records into a stack of tapes. It wasn't called stealing then and it's no different now, it just doesn't take as long. I now have stacks of CDs and a CD recorder, and I will gladly copy anything I have for someone.
Do I make 1000 copies of a CD and sell them? No, because that is pirating, and I have no issue with arresting someone doing that. But when the RIAA sues some little kid for a ridiculous amount of money for downloading her favorite songs I have a huge problem with that. Way to take the moral high ground and make an example out of a hardened criminal! If you are savvy enough to not have to pay for your music, awesome! If your favorite band comes to town, pay for a ticket to see them live, because at least they'll make more than a dollar from each ticket, unlike their latest CD, which, even though it still costs $18, made the record company fifteen times as much money as the artist. And why do CDs cost as much now as when they first came out over 20 years ago? Especially when you consider the cost of a CD player started out at around three grand, and now you couldn't give one away because DVD players are so inexpensive now?
I know someone who worked in a CD factory 8-10 years ago, and they told me that, including the packaging, it cost about a buck and a half to make a CD. Even taking into consideration the cost of shipping, advertising, paying the wage slaves to move it from one point to another in the store, and what the artist is being paid (minus the advance they already got, thank you), the price of a CD should be under five bucks. The only reason, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that Cds cost as much as they do is corporate greed.
So share your files with your friends, neighbors, acquaintances, online friends, even complete strangers, as long as you're sharing and not making money off of someone else's work.