Duets-Viewed July 24, 2002

There are some words that conjure images unrelated to the meaning of that word.  For instance, "infamy" conjures up for me, December 7, 1941, A day that will live in infamy.  "Plastics," conjures up the scene in The Graduate.  Well "Duets" reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit where Phil Hartman does a dead on imitation of Frank Sinatra in the recording studio for his Duets album.  It also reminds me of Joe Piscipo and Eddie Murphy imitating Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder in a duet.  ("You are black and I am white. You are blind as a bat and I have sight.")    This movie had nothing to do with Frank Sinatra.  But I liked it.  And I liked it a lot. I checked out the professional movie reviews for Duets and this is what I learned.  This was the first movie directed by Bruce Paltrow, famous for directing/creating TV shows The White Shadow and St. Elsewhere.  The snide undercurrent to that piece of info in the review was he isn't capable of directing for the big screen.  I also learned Gwyneth Paltrow (Bruce's daughter) had just broken up with somebody, Brad Pitt?  By the way, is there any woman in America between the ages of 20 and 35 that hasn't broken up with Brad Pitt?  I also learned Brad Pitt was supposed to be in the movie, but dropped out when he dumped Gwyneth.  Brad Pitt was in a movie called "Snatch."  he plays a gypsy where the running joke is no one is able to understand a word he says.

Snatch is a very funny movie, but the language is rather course, so lock up the kids before watching. And it had a great soundtrack, including a song by Oasis called, "F***ing in the Bushes."  Generally I like movies that have a great soundtrack, or that have one or two great songs in them.  Duets has a few.  Gwyneth sings a terrific version of Betty Davis Eyes, I never liked the Kim Carnes version.  Huey Lewis does a great version of Joe Cocker's "Feeling Alright."  Paul Giamatti is tremendous on Todd Rundgren's, "Hello It's Me." and of course an absolutely beautiful duet with Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow, "Cruisin."

What I would really like to do is post a link where you could listen to the song. That would be cool. But the record companies are afraid of technology, so they won't allow it. As a matter of fact, the record companies are responsible for the death of the telecommunications industry due to their Luddite fear of technology. How is that you may ask. I'll tell you.

Napster, the file sharing program, used primarily to share music, accounted for 20% of Internet traffic at its peak (I have no way to verify that number, but I read it somewhere so it must be true). And Napster was the fastest growing application on the Internet. Napster is what we call a bandwidth hog. It took big fat telecommunications pipes to handle Napster. Napster was what is called a killer app, or killer application, the thing that everyone wants to have, so they rush out and buy a techno gizmo so they can use the killer app. Lotus 123 (murdered by Microsoft) was a killer app for PCs. Once Lotus 123 was developed, PCs became big. Everyone was wondering what will be the killer app for broadband, or high-speed, Internet. Napster was the killer app. The telecommunications industry was out laying fiber everywhere they could in order to satisfy this tremendous demand for ever greater amounts of bandwidth that was being generated, in part, by the growth of Napster. And all of the technology companies were developing new gizmos, like PCs and PDAs to access broadband Internet. If you look at the economy in the late 90's its growth was driven by capital spending, and a big part of that growth was telecommunications/technology and that growth was driven by expectations of broadband and that was driven by Napster. The day the music died was the day the record industry killed Napster.  That was the day they killed broadband, and that was the day they killed the economy.

Michael Powell (son of Secretay of State Colin Powell) is the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, FCC.  He is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of the local Telephone companies.  (I stole that joke, it is very funny because it is so accurate.)  MP in recent testimony to Congress said the reason for the current disaster in telecommunications (Worldcom, Qwest, Adelphia) is due to over-optimism on the part of these companies as well as fraud.  I agree about the fraud part.  And in the end they were over-optimisitc because Napster died.

By the way, I loved Napster. Used it frequently.  Not only was it a bandwidth hog, it was a storage hog.  MP3 files take up a lot of memory pretty darn quickly.  If Napster were still alive I can imagine people rushing to buy broadband, new PCs, more storage, more CDs, MP3 players, CD burners.  And all of that would require more semiconductors, which means more plants, more construction jobs and on and on.  Don't be fooled by any other cause for the death of telecomm and the economic weakness.  The record companies did it when they killed Napster

If you would like to write The Recording Industry Association of America, here is their web site:  www.riaa.org.

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