There’s a time to laugh a time to cry
a time to live and a time to die
a time to break and a time to chill
to act civilized or act real ill
but whatever ya do in your lifetime
ya never let an MC steal your rhyme

–Big Bank Hank from Sugarhill Gang, in Rapper’s Delight, 1978

Sugarhill Gang-Rapper’s Delight Part 1[14:36] (With Lyrics)
Sugarhill Gang-Rapper’s Delight Part 2[14:36] (With Lyrics)

And by the way, any band that features me in their acknowledgements if of course the best band in the world.

See them tonight in la Sala Monasterio

Read about the concert I saw by La Banda here.

The film deals with copyrights, copylefts, intellectual property and how the net is changing well established business models while allowing for reach and creativity for the rest of us.

In the documentary you’ll find:

• Danger Mouse talking about his highly successful The Grey Album where he mashed Jay-Z Black Album with Beatles White Album (thus The Grey Album). It violated all kinds of copyrights but it’s a masterpiece. Obviously it was downloaded by millions, earning Danger Mouse just credibility and respect. Fancy a torrent?

Here’s the video with John Lennon breakdancing to Ringo Star’s DJing.

• Musician Girl Talk. He performs live with a laptop mixing and mashing every conceivable sample creating new real time songs. He would be willing to pay the billions he should, according to current copyright laws, for using the original songs, but even if he had the money it would take him no less than 50 years to get all the permissions from the owners.
• The Brazilian DJs from the Techno Brega scene in the north of Brazil (a kind of Techno Kitsch, don’t try at home). They mix and remix whatever they listen on the radio and download from the net, Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy this time. After that they distrubute their CDs for free expecting to attract fans to their live acts, a business model that is catching up in the traditional music industry.
• Larry Lessig, author of Free Culture and creator of the Creative Commons licensing model, talking about the need to protect intellectual property but also on how too restrictive copyright laws hinder creativity and access to culture by everybody.
• The guys from Pirate Bay in Sweden. Well you know them.

Funny at the end when Girl Talk remixes Gnarls Barkley’s (Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse) remix of Crazy done by the Brazilian Techno Brega DJ, and turns it into something completely new. You could see him rocking the house with this small sample and his laptop.

Check the trailer at the Creative Commons website
Watch the movie online
Download Good Copy Bad Copy from The Pirate Bay

13,5 million views and counting.

He expects to save the world with this song and he will no doubt be the next viral video. I wish he would only save us from spam and links to virtual casinos as he says. Don’t miss the end part when he sings about “lots of videos of people lip synching to we are the world”.

Kudos to Tom Willett for this great country ballad!

Just enter your Last.fm user name, and the website will play YouTube videos from your popular Last.fm artists.

You get your own personalized MTV, playable in full screen with a unique URL for you to share with your friends. Cool!

Watch my Last.fm + YouTube MTV

Create your own MTV at tv.timbormans.com

Here’s a gem by a band called The Arcade Fire (never heard of them before) in the shape of interactive videoclip for their latest song Neon Bible. It’s a minimalistic piece of interactive animation where the linear structure of the song meets the non-linear interactive medium. A kind of Kraftwerk meets Jonathan Richman.

Here’s the video. Don’t miss it.

Spanish is a bonus as if you happen to understand it you’ll be able to hear/see how the words match the type and the motion graphics.

This video is no doubt a commercial application (rendition?) of some previous motion typography clips such as Pulp Fiction’s What Does Marcellus Wallas Looks Like? or Abbot & Costello’s Who’s On First. For more of the kind search YouTube by Motion Typography.

Cuarteto de Nos page on YouTube.

I bet the Adbusters guys must be really happy with this impulse purchase temptation right on the palm of our hand!

But it doesn’t stop here. A while ago there were some rumors about iTunes booths on Starbucks so customers could download via WiFi their favorite songs. Well it got actually way better (or worse) than that. Consider the following scenario:

You’re sitting in a Starbucks and you hear a song. You fire up your iTunes app on your laptop or on your iPhone and “boom” there comes the artwork for the current song plus the ten previous ones. One click or one tap and the song is yours forever (and your dollar is Apple’s).

Check Apple’s info on the matter.

The system could be generalized to any web based radio station or broadcasting platform for the matter opening new marketing opportunities in the music distribution arena. I bet Steve is on the job already.

Bonus 1: here’s the longest Starbucks order: Double Ristretto Venti Nonfat Organic Chocolate Brownie Frappuccino Extra Hot with Foam and Whipped Cream Upside Down Double Blended

Via Laughing Meme

Bonus 2: You get free WiFi if you own an iPhone or a laptop with iTunes.

Wu Tan Clan’s RZA and GZA will be fighting for glory, not with their rhyming weapon of choice and on a dancefloor this time but with chess on a 8 by 8 checker board.

A natural step as RZA himself says:

Hip hop and chess have a lot in common. Chess is a game of strategy, a battle and hip hop is a battle.

The goal of the Hip Hop Chess Federation (HHCF) is to find a way to use hip hop as an educational tool. For the creators it was too natural that the next element in the hip hop culture after djing, mcing, breackdancing and grafitti painting was chess.

Via current.com

Watch the Wu-Tang Chess Masters video