Free Beethoven

No, that headline is not a political slogan--though I can't begin to tell you how many times I wish I'd picked up a "Free James Brown" T-shirt during that forgotten liberation movement. And it's not an appeal to fans of the titular St. Bernard from the well-regarded cinema quintuple feature, Beethoven, Beethoven's Second, Beethoven's Third, etc.

Rather, BBC Radio, in a typically beebish gesture, has made Beethoven's nine symphonies available for free download at this website. You already missed your crack at one through five, which is fine because who really needs more than four? If you don't want to be a jerkoff, you might consider waiting until my downloads are finished, as the files are dribbling in at 3kb a sec--a rate so slow that I could probably inner-tube across the North Atlantic and pick up a cassette, or have someone cable over a string of 1s and 0s by morse code.

The cheap man, as is so often the case in this world, is a frustrated man.

This post represents the first in what I imagine will become a series dedicated to the places where mp3s still roam free. I started with Beethoven mostly because I have a hunch his name hasn't appeared in City Pages this decade, and probably won't again. Unless Grodin is signed on for Beethoven's Sixth.