WILDLIFE

I have been playing around with Spotify for the last few weeks, and I have to say that not only am I seriously impressed, but that if I was anything to do with any of the major record companies (like I was a decade and a half ago) I would be terrified. Because this application is going to change the way that we listen to music forever. The traditional publishing world has already been turned upside down by people like me using companies like LightningSource, and for people like me who's world has basically revolved around books and music for the past forty something years the world will never be the same.

Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing, remains to be seen, but that is not what I actually set out to blog about this jolly spring morning. The thing about spotify is that it looks set to change the ownership concept of music once and for all. I bought my first LP (by Gong) in the summer of 1974, and by the time I sold my vinyl records to pay for the expenses of my divorce from my first wife, I had ammassed over 7,000 LPs in various states of repair.

I kept my CDs though, and even after doing a massive prune of my collection which ended up with me giving five or six hundred CDs to my two nephews David and Ross, I have well over 1800 CDs left, and in the past six years I have also amassed an enormous collection of MP3s - probably another 50,000 songs. But I no longer have any money - the recession has hit the CFZ badly. (The good side to this is that I was forced to give up smoking seven months ago, which has to be a good thing, but the sad thing is that I can no longer afford to buy records). The glory days of illegal downloading are now far behind us, and it is no longer safe to do so.

But along comes spotify, and I can continue doing what I have been doing for years; listening to music. Because the truth is that a large proportion, certainly well over half of my records and MP3s I have only listened to once or twice. Until now I have had to pay for the privelige, but now the game has changed beyond all recognition.



But what has this got to do with fortean stuff?


Hush now. I'm getting to that.


I have been a Beatles fan for years, and until I sold my LPs back in 1996, a large subsection of my collection was of Beatles and Beatles-related records. I collected all the solo stuff, and all the releases from Apple records, and anything any of them played on, until the shelves of my makeshift record cabinet were bulging with stuff that I never listened to (and didn't really want).


Now with spotify, I am listening to some of that stuff again, and finding that my opinions have changed drastically from when I first heard it. Take the first record from Paul McCartney's band Wings for example. The accepted wisdom is that it is diabolical, and proof (as if any proof were needed) that Paul McCartney is, was, and always has been a pompous, trite, self-serving sonofa.......

Well, you get the idea.

The truth is very different. It's actually really nice, in an early 70s slightly trippy singer-songwriter sort of way. In fact it has a lot more substance than a heck of a lot of more obscure, arty records, that are now heralded as classics. And the reason that the album was given such dreadful reviews was for one reason, and one reason only: Paul McCartney wasn't a Beatle any more, and furthermore it was he that was usually percieved as having cast the `fab four` asunder. Probably not true, but you know what people are! And for 38 years I have agreed with them, despite the fact that I have probably only listened to it twice in the time since I first bought the bloody thing.

I only discovered this earlier today, as I was trawling through spotify looking for music on the theme of `wildlife` for something else that I am planning to write. But it got me thinking. It is not just LP records which, as a cultural event, become tainted by whatever is happening alongside them.


In the same way as the first post-Beatles ensemble album has been unfairly tainted by events over the past forty years, quite a few pieces of fortean zoological evidence have been similarly tainted - also to the detriment of the truth.


The Captain Ahab factor (he smelled land where there was no land) came into effect for many of the most iconic photographs of cryptozoological history. The Mary F Photographs, for example. They are crap aren't they? Ignoring the wish-fulfillment fantasies that we all have, they are really rubbish. And if we are brutally honest so is the Tim Dinsdale film, the Robert Rines photos, and most of the other pictures that are published.


Throughout my life, people have asked me what I do, and when they find out that I am a cryptozoologist, a large proportion of them invariably say proudly (and not a little pugnaciously) "Well I believe in the Loch Ness Monster!"

Of course they don't believe in anything of the sort. They have never been to Loch Ness, studied any of the evidence, or even read any books on the subject. What they mean is that they are desperate to be seen as open minded, and not hidebound or conventional. And after all "everybody knows" that there is a monster in Loch Ness, just the same as "everybody knows" that Oswald didn't do Kennedy, Kennedy did do Marilyn Monroe, and the CIA did the WTC. And "everybody knows" that Paul McCartney split up The Beatles, and as a result his first album with his new band has been described as "awful" foir the past 38 years.

See what I am getting at?