Don't get me wrong: I'm well aware I have pretty much the best job ever. It's tough not to be properly appreciative when your workday consists largely of sitting around and listening to CDs. Even better, my sideline gig is in culinary writing, including a column consisting of reviews of junk food. So I've made a career out of pop music and snack foods: I swear, if I could figure out how to get paid for watching TV and/or masturbating, then my adolescence will have been more profitable than a Harvard M.B.A.
Still, any job has its annoyances, and the one that's frustrating me most currently is the trend of promo CDs that are watermarked by paranoid record labels so that they will neither load nor play in a computer's CD drive. Although there are a full half-dozen CD players in active use in our house, almost all of my work is done here at my office desk (with a nice pair of Henry Kloss bookshelf speakers patched in, just in case anyone thinks I'm only listening to music on those tinny, underpowered nuisances Gateway shipped with the computer), for the simple reason that, y'know, this is where my computer is, and that's where I do my writing. Standalone CD players are fine for passive early listens of an album, when I'm first getting a feel for it. But when I'm actively listening to an album, trying to discern what instruments are being used in the arrangements or deciphering a particularly marble-mouthed lyric, I like to be able to sit here at my desk and rewind, fast-forward and otherwise futz with the songs. This is not an unreasonable desire on my part, and one would think that labels would encourage reviewers to have such dedication to their craft.
Still, this watermarking of CDs has gotten to the point that I now have a policy about them: I will not review a CD that I can't play on my computer, no matter how much trouble that gets me into with the editor who assigned the piece. What puzzles me is how capricious the decisions are about which discs get watermarked: the very first one I ever ran across was a best-of disc by German industrial pioneers Einsturzende Neubauten. Now, like many folks who grew up under the spell of '80s college radio, I love me some Neubauten, but really. Does anyone truly suspect that The Kidz, with their dedicated T1 lines and their P2P networks, are hankering for a historical overview of the sound of mid-'80s art-Krauts taking welding tools to car bumpers as a musical statement? Meanwhile, CDs that more than a few people might actually want to hear, like Thom Yorke's new solo album, loaded right in. (By the way, it's about as boring as Radiohead always is, just in a different way.)
Normally, the watermarked CDs go right in the recycle bin without a second thought, but this week, I got one that just bugged me. I don't want to name names, because I know it's not the band's fault, but the geniuses at their record label. This is one of those bands who hipster music critics are supposed to scorn while heaping praise on the new albums by Beirut and the Sails (which are both terrific, incidentally), but I can't help it: I've been a fan since college and I make a point of going to see them every time they come through town. Although they managed a couple of big radio hits in the late '90s and they're huge in their home country, they've mostly been a cult act in America, idolized by smart-alecky ex-English majors like myself and otherwise ignored to the point that they're no longer signed to a major label.
This is a band that's always prided itself on its connection with its fans, and the irony of the fact that I can't listen to their new album on my computer is that said album is being released in a special online edition that's over twice as long as the CD itself. For a variety of reasons, it just rankles that their label has chosen to start from the position that music critics are such bastards that they can't be trusted not to leak the album all over the net. It's a much smaller and less malicious version of the same mindset that allows me to wander through a department store without a uniformed security guard trailing six steps behind because I'm of the correct ethnicity, or that let me get married because I don't have the same bits as my partner. This whole Us Vs. Them bullshit is what's gotten the world in such bad shape over the last six years.
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