Tuesday, May 01, 2007

No Drought?


So rapper Lil Wayne’s new free-to-the-internet mixtape – Da Drought 3 – is supposed to be totally amazing, as Wayne free-associates daffily and quasi-illegally over other people’s tracks (Ciara's "Promise," Clipse’s “Grindin,” Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” etc.) for the length of two cdrs; Julianne Shepherd has a considered examination of the anti-release here, Nick Sylvester an equally interesting followup counter-commentary here. So I guess my question is: if a dynamite free mixtape crashes the internet and no-one can hear it, does it make a sound? I ask this question because I wasted a stoopid ungodly amount of time over the past weekend trying to download and burn this behemoth, with zero success. A number of sketchy sites loaded with porn links, xxx ads, and pop-ups were hosting the album (not to mention getting yours truly paranoid about a spyware infection) but some sort of decoding/torrenting BS was necessary in every case and I couldn’t suss it out; then the file-sharing service I consulted had most of the tracks, but apparently they were corrupted and my burner was all nuh-uh. Ideally, Da Drought 3 could be hosted on a legit server traditionally (ala http://www.archive.org/) where the curious could simply click’n’download one song at a time – but seeing as this whole enterprise (like most of the 1,543,000 mixtapes floating around online and offered for sale on urban street corners) ain’t exactly above board, I can definitely appreciate the importance of guerilla/insurgent style dissemination tactics. But dang, I wanna hear this thing.

No comments: