- Select a language for the TTS:
- UK English Female
- UK English Male
- US English Female
- US English Male
- Australian Female
- Australian Male
- Language selected: (auto detect) - EN
Play all audios:
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Joe Berkowitz at the Awl wins the morning in music blogging for his very funny and self-deprecating essay on the 16 months he spent touting Death Cab for Cutie’s “Narrow Stairs” to friends
after pirating it online. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize it was a cheekily mislabeled collection of songs from the quite similar German band Velveteen.
The tale is something like “Brokedown Palace” for music fans -- a small mistake in a morally murky subculture yields horrifying, humiliating consequences. But Berkowitz really breaks out the
lash when he comes to realize that digital culture may have cheapened music to the point where it doesn’t even matter if you have the actual songs at all.
“The Velveteen album served the same purpose and produced the same effect for me as the Death Cab for Cutie album it replaced for 16 months,” he said. “In doing so, it proved that as long as
our expectations are met, we’ll believe anything, even if we don’t buy it.”
Clicking on Green Links will take you to a third-party e-commerce site. These sites are not operated by the Los Angeles Times. The Times Editorial staff is not involved in any way with Green
Links or with these third-party sites.