October 17, 2005  

When the original just won’t do

So what happens when you find out that an album you downloaded illegally because you were so anxious to have it that you broke a longstanding pledge not to deal with sketchy P2P networks and with every intent of actually buying the album when it was released — hang on, let me catch my breath — OK, so what happens when you do buy the album legally and you find out that five of the tracks on the album are fake, or maybe not fake but certainly not from this album if they are in fact by the same artist at all and that you in fact like those tracks better than the legitimate tracks (of the same name!) on the officially released album? What happens then, I ask!? You’re in a real pickle, I’ll tell you.

You know by now that I really love the new Boards of Canada album. 10 of the 15 tracks I had downloaded are identical, so it is safe to say that 66% of it my initial reaction is unqualified. But the other five tracks — they are so typically Boards of Canada and fit in so well musically that I am almost incapable of admitting what is obvious. Someone — maybe BoC themselves — released a bogus copy of the album on filesharing networks. Yet, two-thirds of the tracks were legit. And the non-legit ones might as well have been from the same band they are so musically identical.

There’s raging debate over whether these tracks are from another band or from early BoC — and in fact there appear to be different bogus albums out there — but the point is that I fell in love with an album that was musically holistic, but which I now know to be not what the artists’ intended. But, truly, the “fake” tracks make a better album.

This is like falling in love with the cover of a song before ever knowing the original and not liking the original when you finally hear it.

Bad John, bad. Filesharing bad!