Roxanne

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The iCollector
There's a history to this file-sharing thing that can help us
anticipate its future
BY CARLY CARIOLI
The Providence Phoenix (Rhode Island)


I PROBABLY INHERITED the record-collecting gene from my father. He
grew up in the era of the 45-rpm single, and he owns hundreds if not
thousands of them — the R&B, soul, and funk sides of his youth,
bundled on shelves in satisfyingly uniform rows, each disc in its own
hand-numbered sleeve. His favorites are loaded into a refurbished
1960s-era jukebox, which sits in the dining room with a small wicker
tray of quarters balanced on its lip. No one's collecting the
fee, of course, but you still have to pump the machine full of change
to make it sing.

This is a story about a jukebox big enough to store every record in
my father's collection and small enough to fit in the palm of his
hand, but it begins with an album I had when I was 12 called The
Complete Story of Roxanne. It was a fly-by-night knockoff album —
just a couple of studio hacks recording cheap cover versions of a
group of popular songs — but it is also part of the history of an
argument that took place on the radio in 1985 and 1986, beginning
with UTFO's novelty hit "Roxanne, Roxanne." In the song, the
Kangol Kid, Doctor Ice, and the Educated Rapper relate their attempts
to woo the new girl on the block, all of which end in abject
humiliation. Soon after the song became a hit, a teenager calling
herself Roxanne Shante recorded a withering answer track
called "Roxanne's Revenge." UTFO, realizing the commercial
potential of a feud, found their own claimant to the throne in a
young woman who called herself, in an explicit challenge, the Real
Roxanne. Thereafter, a flood of bewildering answer songs was recorded
by a mystifying array of artists. The fad lasted the better part of
two years, and by the end it had become a sour joke.

Many years later, I stumbled across another copy of the Complete
Story of Roxanne and went online to see if I could find out anything
about it. I was surprised to find an item on Allmusic.com claiming
that there had been more than 100 Roxanne-answer songs — 103, to
be exact. This would almost certainly qualify it, by an immense
margin, as the most answered song in history. But Allmusic's
claim turned out to be nearly impossible to confirm. I found
estimates by people who were making Roxanne records at the time that
placed the figure as low as 20. Still, I felt something forming in my
gut: I wanted — no, I needed — to find every Roxanne-answer
track ever made.

Despite its uncanny specificity (103?), I suspected the Allmusic
figure was apocryphal. The ambivalent nature of the quest became part
of its allure: no one knew how many there were for sure, and it was
likely no one cared. Without much problem, I found a few of the easy
ones — the original and various salvos from Roxannes Real and
Shante — for a few dollars. I put together a list of every
Roxanne-answer song I could find mention of and came up with more
than a dozen, including "The Parents of Roxanne," by Gigolo Tony and
Lacey Lace, a Miami bass duo; "Roxy (Roxanne's Sister)" by D.W.
and the Party Crew; "Roxanne's a Man," by Ralph Rolle;
"Roxanne's Doctor (The Real Man)" by Dr. Freshh. Then I forgot
about them for a while. But one night, about a year later, I came
across a listing on eBay for a single I'd never heard mentioned
before: "Roxanne's Real Fat," by a group called the Potato Chips.
My heart skipped; I felt a telescoping vertigo. Here was a record by
an unknown group on a tiny imprint; maybe there really were dozens
more just like it out there, slowly going to warp and to scratch in
basements and old warehouses. Maybe there were more than 100, and
they were just waiting for someone to rescue them.

This set me off anew, and after a flurry of e-mails, telephone calls,
and Googling, I had a somewhat larger list, as well as a handful of
tantalizing leads, like the girl in England who said she vaguely
recalled a Roxanne-answer song called "She Died," but couldn't
remember by whom. I found copies of the Korner Boys' "Saga of
Roxanne," Zelee's "No More Roxanne," and the East Coast Boys'
"The Final Word (No More Roxanne)" — it seemed somehow very
Roxanne that when the cycle reached its d?nouement, even the
backlash had become over-subscribed. But after a time my enthusiasm
waned. Occasionally I'd see a record on my list for sale online
or in a shop, but in the years since I'd started looking, the
prices of old-school hip-hop records had soared, and I found it
increasingly hard to part with $15 for a single that, I could be
almost certain, was going to be, at best, sublimely ridiculous.

I MIGHT NEVER have picked up the trail again if it weren't for a
peer-to-peer file-sharing program called SoulSeek. One night, at
about 2 a.m., I was using it to troll through a music library on some
distant user's hard drive. SoulSeek, which can be downloaded at
www.slsk.org, began as a haven for fans of dance music and
electronica, but soon metastasized into wider use thanks in part to a
simple organizational principle: the folder.

Since Napster died, networks like Kazaa and Morpheus have absorbed
most of the mainstream traffic, and most of the litigation, in file-
sharing. But the available material there tends to be skewed to new
and popular songs, and, since the music industry has gotten wise to
downloaders, these networks are often littered with dozens of fake
songs meant to throw file-sharers off the scent. Because Kazaa and
Morpheus are used to trade songs more than albums, their users
typically keep all their music files in a single folder on their
computers, and these folders are like messy rooms: haphazard junk
boxes full of disorganized songs.

SoulSeek users, on the other hand, arrange their files in collections
of folders. Usually, one folder contains a complete album, often with
cover art or text files (the folder's title might even contain
the year of the disc's release and its label). This folder, in
turn, might be contained in another folder that houses all the
user's albums by the same artist; and a group of artist folders
may be collected in a folder tagged by genre or year. In other words,
it's a downloading service that works like a record store
tailored for music geeks. It has attracted a discriminating sort of
user who is more likely to have indie-label, back-catalogue, and out-
of-print material than you'd find anywhere else on the Web. If
you're looking for the Bright Eyes Christmas disc, or a live set
by Grandmaster Flash from 1981, or DJ Whoo Kid's latest 50 Cent
mixtape, or the complete Carter Family discography, or Liz
Phair's original "Girlysound" demos, this is where you'll
find them most readily.

Downloading on SoulSeek is a bit more congested than on the major
file-sharing servers: it uses a system of queues, by which
downloaders wait in a kind of electronic checkout line to access
tracks from the computers of other users. Sometimes these lines are
very long — up to 1000 users can be found waiting their turn to
download. But you can keep track of your place in line — like
taking a number at the deli counter — and if the line is too long
for your liking, you can search out another user with the same
material. This encourages users to make connections with each other
via a buddy list that gives confederate users preferential line-
cutting privileges in each others' queues, making SoulSeek more
like a bazaar than a supermarket. Instead of using the system's
search engine to look for specific songs or albums, I often find
myself browsing the collections of users with fast connections or
interesting tastes. Which is how, on that late night, I stumbled
across a folder marked "Roxanne Phenomenon (Roxanne's a What?)."

After years of digging in used-record shops and scouring online
record stores, I clicked once on the folder and — 40 minutes
later on a broadband connection — I had on my hard drive nearly
every Roxanne song I'd already collected, plus most of the songs
I'd been searching for, and another half-dozen whose existence
I'd never known about. Clarence "Blowfly" Reid's "Blowfly
Meets Roxanne." The Invasions' "Roxanne's Dis." Overnite
Bandits' "Roxanne's Baby." Tanganyika's "I'm Lil'
Roxanne." And the elusive "She Died," by Rocksann. Somewhere, someone
had had the same dream, and had put considerably more effort into the
quest. Not only had this person compiled a body of obscure and long-
out-of-print recordings of dubious merit, but he or she had taken the
not-so-easy step of converting the analog sources — vinyl records
- to
digital MP3 files, and then packaged them as a discrete, shareable
entity. The question was, why? Even before I was finished downloading
the Roxanne songs that night, I beheld an answer: the folder that
contained them was in fact a subset of a larger folder. That larger
folder was labeled "iPod."

THE iPOD, Apple's sleek and stylish portable MP3-playing device,
is slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes and can hold up to
10,000 songs. That's big enough to hold most people's entire
music collections. Thanks in part to its clean, simple design, it has
managed to avoid the image of a nerdy, techie gadget and instead
become an instantaneously iconic accessory. "Having fun racin'
all your hotrods here/downloading all your music on your iPods
there," Jay-Z rapped recently. The first thing one sees in the video
for 50 Cent's latest hit, "P.I.M.P.," is 50 himself, dressed in
an immaculate white suit, cuing up the song on his iPod while
surrounded by half-naked women — thereby inaugurating the device
as a touchstone of gangsta style.

But the iPod threatens to be more than a mere fashion statement: it
has the potential to change the way people listen to music, perhaps
even more so than the Walkman did. And that's because Apple
understands music consumers better than the music industry itself.

Why do file-sharers go through so much trouble to put music they
already own on their computers, where the fidelity is sure to be
subpar? When Napster was in session, the answer turned out to lie in
the CD-R (recordable CDs), sales of which spiked dramatically —
in some cases, more than a thousand-fold — at exactly the same
time Napster became popular. Users were uploading and downloading
their favorite songs to their computers in order to burn their own
mixtapes — or else to burn copies of their albums for their
friends.

The iPod effectively removes the need for CD burning, while at the
same time practically demanding a sharp increase in CD ripping. For
the first time, MP3 isn't merely a way station for music on its
way from a mass-produced CD to a home-burned CD-R: it's a
functionally viable format in its own right. With an iPod, the MP3s
one downloads are liberated not only from your computer but from the
CD itself: an iPod can be configured to broadcast via a signal
through a car radio, or it can be plugged directly into your home
stereo system as a component. So if the iPod is really going to
become the next standard portable music device — and with over a
million sold so far, this appears plausible — then its users are
going to have to transfer their existing CD collections into MP3s.
The last time users switched formats this way, the music industry
cashed in: when consumers bought CDs of albums they already owned on
vinyl, the industry was swept out of its mid-'80s slump, and
earnings grew at an enviable rate for a decade. But with the iPod,
there's one major difference: since consumers can convert CDs to
MP3s on their home computers for free, the music industry won't
see a
dime.

In 1999, the year Napster caught fire and sales of recordable CDs
began rising exponentially, the music industry was developing two new
and similar formats, DVD-audio and the super-audio compact disc, both
in competition to replace the CD. The lesson the industry had taken
from the CD boom was that it could make people pay more for discs
that sounded better. And in the late '90s the labels were betting
they could do it all over again. But what file-sharing and CD burning
said about consumer desire was that people wanted to pay less for
music, and that they wanted instantaneous access to it via the Web;
that they wanted more control over how they listened to the music
they owned, and that they would sacrifice sound quality in order to
get it. Meanwhile, the more recent lesson of SoulSeek is that people
are willing to wait in line for the kinds of things an online store
might offer: a sense of organization, complete albums without the
threat of bum files, some semblance of an album's packaging.
Those concerns are addressed by the iPod, with its nearly
inexhaustible storage capacity and almost endless portability, and by
Apple's iTunes store, which offers instantaneous downloading of
songs for 99 cents and albums for $10.

Still, while the iTunes store has sold more than 10 million songs in
a little over four months, Apple also sold about 300,000 iPods, with
a combined capacity of three billion songs, in the same period. The
iPod is creating a demand that far outweighs what iTunes provides in
supply. Which means one of two things: iPod owners are downloading
music for free, or they're burning their existing CDs to MP3 via
their computers, where they'll probably end up in folders
called "iPod" that will be searchable on networks like SoulSeek. The
person who created "Roxanne's a What?" was not alone. Here's
a sampling of what was in a folder one SoulSeek user
titled "ipod_sync": full discs by Alice Cooper, Cabaret Voltaire,
Can, Caravan, David Bowie, Dead Can Dance, Deep Purple, Dire Straits,
Brian Eno & David Byrne, Genesis, Gong, Joy Division, Kevin Ayres,
Mike Oldfield, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Wings, Pere Ubu, Pink
Floyd, Robert Calvert, the Rolling Stones, Steely Dan, Talking Heads,
the Birthday Party, the Cure, the Fall, and the Sisters of Mercy (and
that's not even a third of the contents).

SOULSEEK SEEMS better prepared than Morpheus, Kazaa, and iTunes to
deal with the onslaught of iPod users, who will presumably be looking
to fill their 30-gigabyte hard-drives with many albums' worth of
songs. And it's better prepared to deal with the interesting
things that begin to happen when music is freed from the confines of
its earthbound vinyl and plastic casing. The Web site BoomSelection
tracks developments in the mash-up craze (the world's first
Internet-only music genre), in which bedroom auteurs produce
unlicensed remixes of pop and rock songs like Freelance
Hellraiser's "Stroke of Genius," where Christina Aguilera appears
to sing over the Strokes. Last year the site was faced with the
dilemma of what to sell, since all the genre's songs had always
been made available free on the Internet. The document it eventually
produced, Nevermind the Bootlegs, was a 400-song compilation issued
in MP3 format on three CD-Rs.

What do you call such an undertaking? It isn't quite an album
— as a collection of conventional CDs, it would outweigh all but
the most outrageous boxed sets. But it is definitely something.
Even "Roxanne's a What?" is something: it exists, if only as a
numbered selection of songs contained in an electronic folder. With
its networks of folders, SoulSeek has institutionalized a simple tool
that functions like an album — it contains a set of related songs
— but is much more flexible. And as users, empowered with the
ability to compile their own collections, have begun organizing their
songs this way, the folder, as a mode of presentation, has begun to
dwarf the scope of the album.

"Roxanne's a What?" is not an isolated case. I once came across a
folder on SoulSeek labeled "The History of Miami Bass" — that is,
the subgenre of hip-hop, perhaps best exemplified by 2 Live Crew,
which prizes an earth-quaking rhythm section and sensationally crude
lyrics. The files in the folder were arranged chronologically, and
began, fantastically, with a recording of Orson Welles's 1938
Mercury Theatre of the Air production of "War of the Worlds," and
progressed through the decades with dozens of selections including
Ray Charles's "St. Pete Florida Blues" (1951), James Brown's
"Doodle Bug" (1959), Betty Wright's "He's Bad Bad Bad"
(1968), Miami's "Chicken Yellow (Let Me Do It to You)" (1974),
and the Jimmy Castor Bunch's "Bertha Butt Encounters Vadar" (1978)
— all recorded prior to the first hip-hop single — before
compiling an encyclopedic discography from 2 Live Crew to Fannypack.
There were about 3000 songs in all; a note on the folder said it
is "updated daily." There is a folder floating around titled "The
Paul's Boutique Crates," made up of every song that was sampled,
however marginally, in the Beastie Boys' landmark hip-hop pastiche
Paul's Boutique. I once saw a folder that attempted to compile an
MP3 of the best-selling songs of each year from the invention of the
phonograph up through the end of the 20th century.

Until recently, these kinds of collections would have been pure
folly — it would take weeks to download them, and then what would
you do? Burn them to CD? Haul a sleeping bag and a refrigerator into
your office and listen to them on computer? There is no other medium
in which something like "The History of Miami Bass" or Nevermind the
Bootlegs or "Roxanne's a What?" could reasonably exist — even
if you could miraculously license every track, the manufacturing
costs alone would be prohibitive. But they all can exist comfortably,
with room to spare, on SoulSeek, and an iPod would not even so much
as wince at them. The shape of my father's obsession is his
jukebox, right down to its fetishistic genuflection to the rituals of
commerce; the shape of what is to come is an iPod, the emblem of a
frictionless future in which no obsession is too large, and you
don't have to pump the machines full of change to make them sing.

Carly Carioli can be reached at ccarioli@phx.com