Unearthed unearthed again…
Box sets are the perfect cop-out Holiday gift. It’s right in the meat of that obligatory good friend price range, and since you don’t have to dig too deep to remember (or guess at) the music tastes of most friends, browsing through this section of any music store can bang out a dozen Christmas gifts in as many minutes. Some years back, my friend Abbie dropped such a box on me a few days before Christmas. In it, Johnny Cash’s Unearthed.
At the time I wouldn’t have called myself a Cash fan. I’d heard most of the popular stuff, even bought a few old vinyls, but to me most of his work just struck me as a little kitschy. On the other hand, I dug the deep baritone and the droning alternating base notes, so I dropped it in my stereo started hitting play before I went to bed each night.
It didn’t take long before I started noticing myself mouthing the words while laying there — words I’d consciously neglected but which somehow managed to stick in the depths of my head like shoes on the floor of a College Park bar. Maybe it was just the pure repetition, but the first song I really grabbed ahold of was the first track off the first disc of set.
I recently read about a challenge laid down to Hemingway where he had to tell a story in just six words. His story, For sale: baby shoes, never used, were in his mind, the finest prose he’d ever penned. There’s beauty in simplicity, and I think that’s what draws me to this song. It’s not a very complex song, not lyrically and certainly not musically, but in just over three minutes, it manages to tell an epic most movies struggle to squeeze into two hours.
Now as far as uploading a full, copyright work, I can’t speak to the legality of it, but doubt I’m alone in saying piss off, RIAA. It’s a review (and a positive one at that), and I’d wager the benefits to the copyright holder far outweigh any potential costs. While I understand this calculation isn’t mine to make, what costs are there, anyway? It’s buried in a Flash file — not exactly easy to download and add to a music collection. Still, I wonder how long it will take for Vox to get a DMCA takedown notice? At least they won’t be bothered to have to prove they own the copyright!
Update: I don’t have access to this particular mp3 on my Ubuntu box here at the office, so I can’t test how it works in WordPress. You can still find it here on Vox…