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Secondhand Smoke
Since the dawn of time, The Man has had much hate for secondhand anything. Why? He can't make money on it directly. It gives you choice and cuts the price of great stuff - I doubt I'll ever buy a new car as even the dearest motor loses a third of its value before the engine is properly burnt in.The sickness of our mess-age is partly due to companies wanting to control Everything, Everywhere. If the specs behind CD, DVD and even Blu-Ray were written today, they would contain a Poison Pill to ensure that only the first buyer could use them without an additional fee of some kind. The brilliant but overrated Philip K. Dick wrote in his masterpiece Ubik about a world in which your own door would have a coin slot - everything is "monetised" and life is a Fruit Machine where you always lose.No-ones favourite country pop campster, Garth Brooks, wasted the early 90s telling anyone who vaguely cared that his lack of royalties from second hand CDs was outright stealin', and his worthless noise could not be sold new and nude anywhere you could get anything secondhand. I doubt our Great Tartan Terror, Tom, who was active in the record space at the time, was even aware. His guilt now must be as overwhelming as a tsunami of imaginary traveler's diarrhea.For reasons only known to Them, Tom is still plugged in to the whole world of the music business, so hears and smells things before I do, and even those horrors that would pass me by. One of these scatological bits of genius is the threatened emergence in the UK of a USA non business yet money making idea we should all support - ReDigi.The idea is you pay for these worthless bits and bytes and then think you might get sick of the plastic ringtone tuneage and want to get a bit of cash back - just like if you bought a dodgy CD and would rather like the option to "monetise" it.The labels and money trough monsters did not think of this, and like the idea of it even less than that. But the geniuses behind ReDigi have called that guff bluff, and offer a chance for sheeple to sell their file piles and the next lot of gimpage to roll up and buy the same load of abstract nothing for half price. A Trip to their homepage reveals a monstrous catalogue of the foamy mainstream - David Guetta, Blink 182 and Buns N' Noses.Which is all rather different than what Rat offers you in the New In this Saturday:Heaps of Reggae I.E : Lovers, Roots, Ska, Soca, Calypso LP's and compilations, beautiful condition.Including Artists :Burning Spear, Culture, Johnny Clark, Jackie Opel, Mutabaruka, Don Drummond, Misty in Roots, Winston Wright, Bob Andy, Rico Rodriguez, Rupie Edwards,The cables and The Pioneers.More Artists from the same classic rock and hip hop collections as last week : Robert Johnson, Kraftwerk, Johnny Cash, Isaac Hayes, Brian Eno, MC5, Bob Dylan, The Who, The Doors, Neil Young, Taj Mahal, Lou Reed, Boogie Down Productions.Tomorrow we will be pricing more Reggae 7's, Indie, Alternative rock, Hip Hop and mid 90's - mid 00's Electronica, Plus those original soundtracks too that Philippe is pricing now.Feel it, live it and love it this Saturday!
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