UPDATE: Take a look at my colleague Gregory Lewis' post on what to do with "Swanee River." There is a difference between his recommendation and mine, but I think it's matter of emphasis. I may be envisioning a slower ride into the sunset than Lewis is for Florida's out-of-date official song.

Here's an AP story about Florida's conflicted relationship with the official state song: Stephen Foster's slave-era pastoral, Swanee River (1851), which Gov. Charlie Crist declined to have played at his inauguration.

After spending more than a year trying to come up with a new song to replace the Stephen Foster classic Swanee River — with lyrics some found racist — Florida politicians are expected to keep the song but update its lyrics. That is, if they do anything at all.

The song, also known as Old Folks at Home, would remain the state's official song. As a compromise, a song chosen in a statewide contest, Florida — Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky, would be added as the state's anthem.

"I'd be thrilled and honored," said Jan Hinton, the Pompano Beach music teacher who wrote the winning song.

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AP reports on the increasing popularity of homegrown (and not entirely legal) music video, wherein somebody takes a song they like, and pairs it with clips from a movie they like, or shoots clips to set to music. Bands, for the most part, seem to be playing along.

Acts are increasingly giving up at least some control, leaving them sometimes wondering what their role is in this new post-MTV democratic world of music videos.

The AP article includes links to several examples posted at YouTube. Strictly as public service, here are the embeds.

- Two Israeli teenagers rock out to the Pixies' Hey, a legit online hit with more than 19 million views.

- The Arcade FIre's My Body Is a Cage meets Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, an eerily apt pairing praised by none other than Bruce Springsteen.

- Song by Built to Spill, reel by BtS fan with access to Library of Congress footage.

- Highly homoerotic Star Trek remix of Nine Inch Nails' Closer, with Kirk and Spock experiencing the agony of violent attraction (Note: explicit language, mature themes and lots of grainy film stock in the style of Mark Romanek's original, official Closer video.)

- Someone's taken an instrumental called Heaven, by a band called Health, and set it to a ski-jump sequence from a Werner Herzog documentary. A match made in heaven, and one of Pitchfork's best videos of 2007.

- And finally, Spoon gave its blessing to this unofficial vid for Don't You Evah, starring a little robot called Keepon.

As the AP's Jake Coyle notes, "If you look closely ... you can spot Spoon frontman Britt Daniel on an escalator - only a background figure in his own video."

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Here's a story from our sister paper the Los Angeles Times about the city's Media Arts Academy, sort of a last-chance charter school for troubled teens. Hip-hop and music-making aren't the school's only teaching model, but they're an important part of the daily instruction and the incentives. Kids who do the assigned work and follow the rules get studio time to write and record music.

I know what some people might be thinking - that hip-hop is part of the problem, a glorifier of the mayhem these kids live through in their home neighborhoods. But music isn't immutable that way. Context matters. A kid in school writing songs to describe his life and environment is not the same thing as a thug using music as an enforcement tool.

Also, music ought to be a bigger part of the cirriculum. So, to paraphrase Mike Huckabee, bring on the weapons of mass instruction. As Huckabee has pointed out (and this is not a candidate endorsement), very few people who played football in high school can - or should - do so as grownups, whereas there's every reason for the kid who picked up an instrument at 10 to still be playing at 80.

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Here's an interesting Times story about hip-hop in the French city of Marseille. On the left side of the page are full-length streams of five Marseille-made tracks.

The port city has poor, underemployed immigrants living in close quarters, yet Marseille did not experience the rioting and car-burning that shook ghettoized suburbs of Paris and Toulouse in November. The story doesn't say hip-hop alone keeps Marseille comparatively quiet, or that Parisian gangsta rap caused the violence there. The writer notes there are patterns of community, urban design and migration that distinguish Marseille from other French cities. But the article points to hip-hop as a form of expression that reflects and reinforces the local culture.

Stéphane Gallard put it another way: “Paris is more hard-core.” He is the quiet, suave young man in charge of music programming for the nonprofit Radio Grenouille, the city’s most popular hip-hop station. “The fact that hip-hop artists sell their music on their own blocks contributes to their identifying with Marseille, and this explains why there’s no car burning,” he said. “Different communities in Marseille are still quite separate, there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which you have the freedom to move among communities if you choose.”

It’s also true that this city has a contrarian streak going back at least 2,000 years, to when it backed Pompey over Caesar. You might say Marseillais rappers reflect the tradition of “pays,” or local communities, to which their inhabitants maintain more powerful loyalties than to France. At the same time, it’s a place proud of its old Corsican and French-Italian mob heritage (a popular downtown clothing store was named for a famous mob boss), and the prevalence of drug dealers and North African gangs does partly explain why there’s relative calm in destitute areas: Calm is maintained for the sake of their businesses.

Unemployment nears 40 percent in those same parts of town among those 18 to 25; it’s 13 percent citywide, much more than the national average of 8 percent. So clearly job opportunities alone, or their lack, don’t account for the absence of urban violence recently.

It helps that an old, Mediterranean-style civic patronage system doles out favors to earn loyalty and keep the peace. And, as everybody says, unlike Paris, where immigrant poor occupy huge concrete blocks cut off from the city center, Marseille has its neighborhoods, like Noailles, that are smack in the middle of town, while the hard-pressed quarters to the north are linked to the center by cheap public transport and remain inside city limits. So residents feel that they belong to Marseille, because they do, and in turn they feel that Marseille belongs to them.

Out of these communities, where musicians have their own version of a patronage system, the hip-hop scene has emerged — besides PSY4 de la Rime, IAM and Bouga, others, like Keny Arkana, FAF Larage, Fonky Family, DJ Rebel and Prodige Namor, have made it big here.

“Marseille rap never integrated violence the way Paris did,” Philippe Fragione told me. He’s Akhenaton, the leader of IAM. He, like other older musicians here, supports younger Marseille rappers. It was his studio in Grottes Loubières that PSY4 was using. Marseille rap is “more socially conscious,” Mr. Fragione added. “That’s because there is a real sense of community.”

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... but my colleague, arts writer Emma Trelles, did. She's been posting daily testimony from the Miami Beach expo, where art world MOUs (masters of the universe) are clustered to buy, sell and display.

I've linked to Trelles' Day 2 installment because it writes up Wednesday night's free outdoor concert by Iggy & the Stooges, and because her account of "the usual Basel malarkey" contains this chestnut:

At the press center, there is a ridiculous women dressed in gold sandals and a yellow sundress. Here ensemble is not what makes her ridiculous. It is the fact that she is holding up a line of twenty crabby journalists at 10 a.m. so she can retake the photo for her press pass. She has them take it about a half dozen times. In between she powders her nose and checks her lipstick. Each time she does this I imagine flinging my 5 lb. Art Basel catalogue at her head. Then her picture would be of her unconscious on the carpet, which might sell at the fair.

Which reminds me, I heard from another concertgoer that Iggy Pop greeted the audience on Wednesday by saying, "Hello, dilettantes."

I missed bad ol' Iggy because I was in Miami for the second Soda Stereo concert at AmericanAirlines Arena. I enjoyed it, but nobody in Soda Stereo said anything that funny.

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AP says:

Evel Knievel and Kanye West have worked it out.

The 69-year-old iconic motorcycle daredevil said he and West met at his Clearwater condo recently. They settled a federal lawsuit over the use of Knievel’s trademarked image in a popular West music video.

Knievel sued West and his record company last year. He took issue with a 2006 music video for the song “Touch the Sky,” in which the rapper takes on the persona of “Evel Kanyevel” and tries to jump a rocket-powered motorcycle over a canyon.

Story here and video here.

UPDATE Dec. 4: Knievel, you know by now, died last Friday. He had settled one dispute. But another, older one lingers, and it occasioned this eye-catching lede:

Of all the bones Evel Knievel broke over the years, the costliest may have been the left arm of a PR man by the name of Shelly Saltman.

I was trying to find video of the excellent CBS Sunday Morning obit, narrated by Charles Osgood. No luck. But here's Knievel's almost-made-it jump at Caesar's Palace. I wouldn't call the wipeout a "failure," because that's not the correct word for any jump that didn't kill him. Knievel practically invented the concept of the motorcycle stuntman, and he pretty much invented himself.

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I've been collecting "song of the day" cards at Starbucks outlets for a few weeks, and today I went to the iTunes online store to redeem my swag (if not myself). I had 14 cards, each bearing an illustration of the artist or group along with the title of the giveaway song. On the back was an access code: Type in the code, and there you go.

Almost. While I had the iTunes software, it turned out I needed an iTunes account.

E-mail address, password, and ... done. I logged in to claim my loot. But now they wanted a payment method, an address and a phone number. This was beginning to feel invasive, considering I wasn't actually buying anything. I complied, anyways, and soon had my 14 tracks.

The standout was a Latin swing dynamo, Sacala Bailar (Take Her Dancing), by Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Consider Me Gone, by Boca Raton native Hilary McRae, was interesting for the deep, almost masculine quality of McRae's pop-soul singing style.

Less distinguished was the work of several young, photogenic female singer-songwriters who seem to be the coffee chain's preferred style of pop-music artistry. Very quickly, it got difficult to tell a McRae from a Sonya Kitchell from a Brandi Carlisle from a KT Tunstall from an Alice Russell from an Alice Smith from an Emily King. All that learned, capable, Jonesian (Norah) songcraft started to blur.

Do some of these musicians need to rethink the corporate partnership? On the one hand, Starbucks has proved it can sell CDs by newcomers and established players alike. McRae, for one, has signed a deal with Hear Music, Starbucks' record-label partner, and as a "song of the day" pick she's already benefiting from the company's considerable power to promote.

But there are downsides to inclusion in the Starbucks catalogue, with its safe, quiet concept of salable music. As far as I can see, you will not be purchasing Lady Sovereign or Soulja Boy CDs at your nearest Starbucks anytime soon. The "Most Relaxing Coffeehouse Music Ever" compilation would come first.

Don't get me wrong: I've had a few "Hey, what is that?" moments standing on line at Starbucks. The place has introduced me to songs that I made a point of tracking down once I heard them in the store. I love the Trojan Records classic ska and reggae compilation I bought there.

And among the cards I picked up were enjoyable tunes by people who have thrived without superior-blend coffee tie-ins: Dave Matthews with Tim Reynolds; Angie Stone; and Bebel Gilberto.

There were guys besides Matthews & Reynolds in my group of 14, specifically the bands Rogue Wave and Band of Horses. Starbucks also picked a winning remix of Heaven, by the L.A. club-pop duo Bitter:Sweet. But there's a predictable, distaff bias to Starbucks' official taste in music, especially in the giveaway program. (The next two cards I've picked up since are Suzanne Vega and a single-named songbird named Sia.) I'm not sure how well the favoritism serves the artists over the long term.

Until the chain becomes less stuck on Lilith Fair 'tude, and branches out beyond self-consciously tasteful pop - i.e. nothing too unhinged or startling - the women in particular risk being thought of as mere accessories to somebody's grande soy latte order, or just pretty faces on trading cards.

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... and they're a lot like us.

I have a theory that Australians are becoming more American than Americans. It's not just that Aussie bands such as AC/DC and INXS have prospered over here, that Aussie film stars play American roles by the bushel, or that one such actor, Nicole Kidman, married an Australian-born star of American country music, Keith Urban.

There's also a shared sensibility that may come out of similar histories. Both people settled a sprawling continent - irking Brits in the process - and both have a romantic attachment to wide open spaces. Both cherish the hardy, self-reliant individual. Both cultures also have complicated relationships with the original inhabitants of the land.

Australia's a little wilder, a little more undeveloped and untamed (See: Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe). Their vegemite is like a feral version of our Cheez Whiz. The Australians I've met here tend to be more than just at ease in the U.S. of A.; they go at their time in America ravenously.

Now, it's not Australia's role to remind America of what a swell country we have. But often that's what visitors - from anywhere - do. They reacquaint us with our own surroundings.

All this is a roundabout way of mentioning this weekend's Australian Festival at C.B. Smith Park in Pembroke Pines, and one of the musical performers on tap: Kate Russell. Like Mr. Urban, she's Aussie and she's country. She's got a video for Powerful Stuff, the title track of her debut CD, playing on CMT. She sounds a bit like Bonnie Raitt. And her band is from Nashville.

Russell performs 2 p.m. Sunday at the park. The festival runs Friday through Sunday. Details at http://www.australianfestival.com/.

p.s. The strongest sign of the Aussie-American bond? Classic cute-critter TV shows. We had Flipper, the "precocious pet dolphin" who frolicked and splashed his way into our hearts from 1964 to 1967. In Australia, they had Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, the trusty marsupial who was a friend to man from 1966 to 1968.

As you'd expect, both shows had annoyingly hummable theme songs.

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Time magazine's Richard Corliss may be underestimating kids' interest in the '60s. iPods and YouTube have turned a lot of teens and twentysomethings into archivists. In any case, check out his dual review of Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, set to the music of the Beatles, and Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, in which six actors including Cate Blanchett play biographical variations on Bob Dylan.

And yes, I did say Cate Blanchett.

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That's the Rev. Steven Thomas's description of the switched-on services at St. David's, an Episcopal church in Wellington. A live band at St. David's covers some of U2's most spiritually conscious songs, and this form of worship seems to be catching on. It even has its own name.

The Sun-Sentinel's Stephanie Horvath explains:

U2charists have popped up in churches around the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Rock bands and loud music in church services is nothing new in some Christian circles. But for the Episcopal Church, heavily steeped in tradition, the U2charists offer a way for it to experiment with contemporary worship. And many of them find the services invigorate younger members and draw people who might not normally attend church.

As a St. David's parishioner notes, U2 concerts often feel like church. So it's a short step from the arena to the chapel.

p.s. I wonder if this means ASCAP, et. al., are going to start hitting up churches for licensing fees (if they're not already). Don't put away that collection plate just yet.

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I can't remember a CD review causing more reader blowback than last week's writeup of The Real Testament, the major-label debut of a Fort Myers rapper named Plies (pronounced "Plize", tall 'i', silent 'e').

We picked up the review from The New York Times and ran it on the cover of last Tuesday's Lifestyle section. Critical e-mails, phone calls, letters to the editor and online comments poured in.

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The ad touting the iPhone's video capability just aired a moment ago while I was watching some old media - a ballgame on TV - and I've decided this commercial does an excellent job of summarizing where we are today:

"You'll be surprised by some of the stuff you find on YouTube, but when it comes right down to it, maybe the biggest surprise is finding YouTube on your phone."

Put another way: It's really not about the content anymore, be it a YouTube video of a skateboarding dog or this week's podcast of two guys talking. Content doesn't change much; only the means of delivery. And what "surprises" us most nowadays is the platform - the technology for transmitting the call, the song and the TV program. Apple is being coy when it says "maybe." People don't listen to all 2,000 songs on their iPods. Having the iPod is the point. Likewise, placing a call on your iPhone is mostly about the pleasure of state-of-the-art, since any phone will do.

Unless content undergoes some sort of revolutionary change - and what is there, really, beyond text, sound and imagery? - technology will continue to generate most of the excitement, and attract most of the creative energies of our best and brightest.

As for the idea that content is itself magically transformed by its interaction with newer, faster ways of displaying and multiplying same - well, this is the sort of dizzy talk designed to make us look upon Steve Jobs with awe. You could argue that iPhones and X-Boxes and Nomads have turned content into a mere commodity - just more stuff to put in the pipeline - but I don't think that's what the bards of tech-topia had in mind.

Or maybe it is. The inventors of these media toys might be perfectly happy with all the world's musicians, novelists, filmmakers and videogame code-writers just toiling away in their fields, producing raw material for technology's greater glory.

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Is the proliferation of rappers surnamed "Yung" and "Young" getting old fast? So far I count Yung Joc, Young Buck, Young Jeezy, Young Breezy, Yung Berg, Young Dro, Young City and Young Hot Rod.

The tag is so viral it attached itself to a rapper who didn't ask for it: St. Louis teen-ager Jibbs, a kid with a ringtone hit (2006's "Chain Hang Low"), is often referred to as Young Jibbs. But if the title of his debut album, "Jibbs feat. Jibbs," sent any message, it's that he wanted no part of that modifier. That's a wise young man.

p.s. This form of cloning is not limited to rap.

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The campaign to raise awareness of global warming may have succeeded too well: I couldn't watch yesterday's Live Earth concerts without wondering how much carbon tonnage these productions were putting out.

I don't endorse Roger Daltrey's sentiment that "The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert." But inside his blanket condemnation is a useful point: Rock tours and stadium concerts can only be so eco-friendly. Green them all you like; they're still going to suck up electricity, burn fuel (jets ferrying entourages, trucks and buses carrying gear and people, cars filled with ticketholders converging on stadium parking lots) and leave a Kong-sized carbon footprint. That some of the more conspicuous emitters are the ones calling for change is cognitive dissonance, defined.

On the other hand, if Live Earth's meta-goal was to beat back climate change by influencing thinking and (potentially) behavior, speaking strictly for me, it may have worked. By the time I was done dipping in and out of yesterday's coverage, I had counted how many household incandescent bulbs I could swap for compact flourescents (ten). It ocurred to me that walking or biking short distances, instead of driving, could double as exercise and carbon cutback.

I also took a test to see how much carbon I spew in everyday life. Apparently, I need to be restrained: My score was 12.95 tons of carbon a year, not quite double the 7.5 tons that the average American runs up. Test questions included, "What % of your electricity comes from clean, renewable sources such as solar and wind?"

Uh ... none?

And how much carbon did I add to the aerial compost just by turning on two appliances - my computer and television - to keep tabs on different Live Earth programming outlets? You can see where this leads: Think too much, and you won't even sit up in bed for fear of committing some ecologically damaging act, like yawning.

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On tonight's Marlins-Rays telecast, commentator Joe Magrane noted that disco singer Gloria Gaynor was scheduled to give a post-game concert at Dolphins Stadium.

"She'll be performing a medley of her one hit," Magrane said.

That's pretty funny, but not wholly accurate.

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South Florida singer-songwriter Jim Wurster sent me this note about a writeup of last Sunday's Kenny Chesney concert.

In your review today, you referred to You Never Even Called Me by My Name as a David Allan Coe song. Although Mr. Coe had a hit with the song, the author was Steve Goodman. Steve also wrote The City of New Orleans, made famous by Arlo Guthrie, and Banana Republics, popularized by Jimmy Buffett.

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One of the (almost) ironclad rules of fiction that Alec Ounsworth says he learned in college was, don’t write your dreams. They and their seeming portents are to be treated as a third rail of literature. Tap them as source material at your own considerable risk of bad writing.

It’s a rule that Ounsworth has pretty well observed in his current line of work — singer, songwriter and lyricist for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the Brooklyn-based indie rock band playing Revolution in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday. Ounsworth writes short, direct songs that get plenty of grist from the strangeness of our waking hours.

Still, the stuff of dreams will sometimes creep in.

Take Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning? a song on the band’s recently released second album, Some Loud Thunder. As Ounsworth sings about a character gripped by self-doubt, he references somebody famous in literary circles for violating the heck out of the don’t-write-your-dreams rule:

Like Berryman
Bed-wet poet fears
That better men drink taller beers

That would be the late John Berryman, a brilliant, troubled writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dream Songs, an epic in verse form. Berryman, as noted at the Modern American Poetry web site, considered the insights he gleaned from having his dreams analyzed in therapy “publishable.”

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah isn’t running a dead poets society, but as the band worked on Some Loud Thunder at a rural studio house, Ounsworth was deep into The Dream Songs, a text composed of 385 individual poems relating a dialogue between a self-hating everyman and his imaginary friend.

So is Berryman the secret influence behind Some Loud Thunder? “Maybe subconsciously,” says Ounsworth. He does believe a poet and a songwriter have similar jobs: to describe the indescribable — the feelings and sensations that pass through us as we live our lives and react to our surroundings — and to do it succinctly.

“The idea of not wasting words is a goal that everybody strives for,” says Ounsworth, “and in poetry I think it’s at its highest form.”

Here’s Berryman on Ounsworth’s craft:

I consider a song will be as humming-bird
swift, down-light, missile-metal-hard, & strange
as the world of anti-matter

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Misery gets the company it deserves.

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One defense of Don Imus is comparative: In saying what he said about Rutgers' lady basketballers, the recently fired radio personality spoke no worse of black women than many rappers do.

So does a ranting rapper get a free pass that's denied to a ranting DJ? Certainly, both are there to entertain, amuse, provoke and possibly enlighten. Why does the rapper enjoy more artistic license and freedom to slur?

Well, there are differences between a black male rapper spewing insults at black women in the context of a song, and a white male DJ doing it within the context of shtick. Set aside the racial element for a moment and concentrate on the delivery system: The rap song is a representation of something -- a character, a scenario, a set of life experiences or a state of mind. It may or may not reflect the rapper's own feelings.

Can Imus make the same claim for his banter -- that it's just entertainment, and that the words are just representations, like a rapper making up a story or Norman Lear putting bigoted opinions in the mouth of Archie Bunker?

I don't think he can. Talk radio is a different animal, and Imus has thrived in the medium partly on a reputation -- which he himself cultivated -- for straight talk. He's proud of his artlessness and he says what he thinks, correctness be damned. He has made a living off bluntness, most of which he had aimed at people his own size: the heavyweight politicians and celebrities who either appear on his show or have as much access to a microphone as he has.

Something changed when Imus went after people with fewer defenses: a group of young women who were playing ball, going to school and basically minding their own business. Now that an unprovoked remark has blown up in his face, Imus has to live with the consequences of his reputation for candor.

Plus, there's a matter of history. Mysoginist male rappers have been insulting women for decades. Bigoted white people have been insulting black people, female and male, for centuries. Granted, the intent may be similar: Insult is a form of humiliation, and humiliation is one way of maintaining power and a pecking order. But the social arrangements that such slanders helped to enforce are, historically speaking, very different depending on who's doing the talking. Black rappers have not disparaged women in order to promote slavery, segregation or assumptions of racial superiority.

So a phrase like "nappy-headed hos" is a lot more freighted coming from Imus than it would be coming from Snoop Dogg. He should have known as much when he spoke.

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I've got a story posted today that talks about the cloning of American Idol competition. Bands and musicians of all kinds are now deluged with opportunities to formally compete for careers.

It's not just American Idol, Rock Star or Nashville Star anymore. There's also this, this and this. Every week brings notice of some new music contest to my e-mail box.

Is all this a good thing? I talked to a handful of South Floridians who've had varying degrees of success with these career derbies, where musicians square off either in person or online, and a mass audience helps decide who wins the ultimate prize -- usually a record deal. The musicians were not opposed in principle to having their art handled like a playoff or a game show, and they recognize the fast-tracking potential of public competition.

But the experience also left some of them bruised. Rejection happens to every aspiring musician, but in an Idol-like contest, losing may hurt more because until you've been sent packing, there's enough hype and dazzle built into the concept to continually feed your hopes and play on your vanity.

Granted, a less simulated approach to career-building -- playing clubs, floating demos, posting songs online -- can appeal to hope and vanity, too, but not in the same way. Because it's a slow climb, the old-fashioned route (for lack of a better term) also has the power to frustrate and discourage at every step, and to force a musician to reassess. Idol competition is designed to obliterate self-reflection: Contestants forget themselves in the heat of the chase, and the producers dangle the big prize like the new car parked on the set of Wheel of Fortune.

Define "competition"

While collecting string for this story, I also talked to an executive at MTVu, MTV's college campus network. MTVu recently upgraded its "Best Music on Campus" search from once a year to several times a year. Each winner receives a small record deal for an EP (a CD of about four to six songs) and a video. MTVu also created a "Best Music on Campus: Artist of the Year" finale, which offers an even bigger record deal and even greater TV exposure. The smaller, recurring contests act as feeder competitions for the big "Artist of the Year" showdown.

So has MTVu built a contest assembly line? MTVu's director of programming, Ross Martin, took issue with any comparison of "Best Music on Campus" to American Idol. "I don’t see it as a competition," he said. He called it instead "an incubator for incredible student music talent, and it's filled with opportunities for students to connect with audiences and to build a career beyond what they would have throught possible before.”

In short, the idea is not to crown winners, but to join listeners and emerging musicians. For people who visit "Best Music" online to sample the music and vote their favorites, "There never has to be one winner," said Martin.

It's true that a music fan could come away having heard 5, 10 or 20 great bands, regardless of who wins. But competition -- the drama of a showdown for a coveted prize -- is arguably a part of what drives the "Best Music on Campus," and gives the concept some of its energy and identity, and some of its attraction for an audience. You can argue whether competition is the point or just a fringe benefit, but either way, I would respectfully submit that the contest gene is encoded into what MTVu is doing.

“It’s like the counterculture’s American Idol, you know what I mean?” said Jesse Ponnock, the University of Miami sophomore who just won a record deal from "Best Music on Campus."

Who's the decider?

Another feature of the new breed of competition is the audience. True, hired judges or the contest's sponsors leave themselves room to influence or decide the outcome. But where the prize is a record contract, a label is surrendering some of its judgement about what's good, and what's appropriate for the label, to the masses.

If you know anything about the egos at record labels, you know that's no small surrender. Geoff Mayfield, the director of charts at Billboard magazine, says a little democracy in talent selection is a good thing, and that the there shouldn't be anything too sacrosanct about the old "A&R" process, wherein the people at a label's "artists and repertoire" division -- industry insiders all -- do the spotting and signing of acts.

I agree. But in some cases the new order gives me pause. Consider two record labels that have participated in MTVu's "Best Music on Campus" searches: Epitaph and Drive-Thru. Both are independents, unconnected to major media conglomerates, and both have specific identities. Drive-Thru is emo and punk-pop. Epitaph is punk, post-punk and hardcore. Both are run by people with a particular vision of music, and they pick who to sign accordingly.

I don't think it would have been easy for either label to share that decision-making with a large, anonymous bloc of voters.

Given the record industry's freefall, maybe more record executives feel they have to participate and have to try to tap into the excitement of competition in order to sell CDs and remain profitable -- on the theory that it's worked so well for American Idol's major label partner, RCA Music Group. Maybe, as South Florida-based musician Bryan Adams (no relation) suggested to me, the labels need contests as much as the aspiring musicians.

Would anyone at Epitaph and Drive-Thru agree? I don't know. Through their spokespersons, executives at both labels declined to talk to me for this story.

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Just in time for the Langerado festival, I'm treating you to a 78-page legal paper on the virtues of jam band culture.

Don't be afraid: I've read it so you don't have to, but if you've got some free time, I recommend "Fear and Norms and Rock & Roll: What Jambands Can Teach Us About Persuading People to Obey Copyright Law." It dates to 2005 (I only learned about it today, so it's news to me). It's written by a law professor with an easygoing, readable style, and a well-developed sense of history and context. And its main point is intriguing. The author, Mark F. Schultz, argues that jam bands in the mold of the Grateful Dead and Phish offer the mainstream music industry a workable, less confrontational way to keep downloaders from destroying their business.

Interestingly, they do this by encouraging free trade of their music -- to a point.

The typical jam band, of the sort that you'll find at Langerado, doesn't generally have to sue or threaten to sue in order to get a financial settlement -- tactics the major labels have adopted as part of their ongoing campaign to discourage unauthorized song-swapping.

Jam band fans tend to obey whatever restrictions the band cares to place on copying. They do so partly because there are so few restrictions. Fans are encouraged to tape the band's live shows, make copies of those recordings and trade as many of them as often as they please. Schultz notes that taping wasn't invented by the Grateful Dead or Deadheads, but that band and its fans "institutionalized" the practice and showed the way.

For upcoming Langerado acts such as Widespread Panic and moe., free fan taping and tape-trading in live shows is as much a part of the experience as touring, selling t-shirts and putting out studio albums.

The modern day jam band draws the line at a couple of places. Tapers may not sell or profit in any way from these free concert recordings. And when it comes to studio albums, fans are encouraged to buy those at the retail price and to not upload-download them at will unless the band has said it's OK to do so. Overwhelmingly, fans comply, because that's the handshake arrangement they entered into as tapers or supporters of the band.

Jam band culture, in short, has developed rules that require little or no legal enforcement because everyone agrees they work and everyone opts in. Schultz writes:

Jambands can trust their fans because the fan community has developed social norms against copying music works that jambands have designated as "off limits." ... The community enforces these norms internally and externally, sometimes even reporting violations to the bands' attorneys.

The fan pays for a concert ticket (and he may have gotten first dibs on good seats by being a loyal taper or member of the band's fan club). But he gets to record the show for free and receive free recordings of other shows from other tapers. Call it legal, nonprofit bootlegging.

The band, in turn, gives up some of the income it might have earned as the sole distributor of its concert recordings. But giving up most control of live tape traffic promotes affection, goodwill and loyalty -- feelings that make it easy for the fan to open his wallet come tour time or upon the release of a new studio album.

And the band has another ace up its sleeve: the official version of the same tape-traded show, this time exquisitely mastered, mixed and packaged. Pearl Jam -- hardly a jam band despite the name -- embraced this two-tiered approach: Pearl Jam lets tapers tape, but the band also makes its own soundboard recordings and then releases literally every live show on CD, often within months of the concert date.

The Grateful Dead camp, meanwhile, is still making money by putting out CDs and DVDs of shows that have been circulating free of charge among Deadheads for decades.

Is there a lesson in this way of doing business for the mainstream music industry? Schultz doesn't say to give up enforcement, but he does suggest that enforcement alone -- lawsuits, cease-and-desist orders, threats of prosecution -- cannot change hearts and minds. It's also going to take patient persuasion, and a set of practices that make music fans feel good about respecting limits on file-sharing. Shultz writes:

Digital distribution -- both legal and illegal -- is bringing about the demise of the old business model. No longer can the music industry rely on one-hit-wonders to sell relatively high-priced pieces of plastic or vinyl containing one or two hits bundled with less desirable songs. People have choices now, and among those choices is the choice whether to comply with copyright law. The music industry thus needs to think in terms of building loyal communiities that have reciprocal relationships with artists rather than merely moving physical products into the hands of consumers.

He also notes that technology has its own force of gravity, and that the migration of recorded music to the Internet is inevitably causing more bands, "jam" and otherwise, to strike up more of these two-way relationships. Songs and videos are streamed and shared, and other information is exchanged, through communal sites such as MySpace and YouTube. Bands, and record labels, give away some of their work in hopes of attracting people who will pay for other offerings.

This sort of exchange becomes habit-forming for bands and fans, and impossible to stop once it starts. Over time a more intensive kind of sharing and interacting with the music becomes natural -- and expected. And it doesn't necessarily depend on touring and taping. Some bands have handed out master recordings of individual tracks and allowed fans to remix the songs and share the results online. Bands that don't want to live on the road can surely find other ways to give and receive.

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I have never rooted for Britney Spears. I liked Toxic as much as anyone required to form an opinion about it, and if you elbow me I'll admit I've heard a great cover of . . Baby One More Time (Fountains of Wayne? Teenage Fanclub?)

But the phenomenon demanded more attention and energy than Spears' talents warranted. I was compelled to sit through four Britney concerts between 1999 and 2004. I also reviewed a Britney album and a Britney movie. By the second concert I could feel the oxygen leaving my brain: Spears' career was becoming an entity, the kind that eats planets in Star Trek. It would attract coverage all out of proportion with the actual value of the product. And there was only so much consolation in snark: Railing ad nauseam at her weak singing, insipid ballads and bad taste in wardrobe did no good, anyway.

Her fame was established through music and video, but it grew huge on a diet of gestures such as the Madonna kiss and the short-lived union with Kevin Federline. You wouldn't have known there was any meaningful difference between the two feats, Madonna and marriage, judging by their treatment in the media. Everything she did seemed designed to keep "Britney" high on the list of Web searches and page views. Her public life has been an experiment in the physics of fame: Can empty notoriety take on weight and meaning if you just keep feeding it, inflating it and repeating the name?

Now we know. The answer to both is yes, but probably not as intended. Consider the photograph on the front page of the New York Daily News: an enraged Spears -- hair shorn, face drawn -- attacking a car with an umbrella. Short of O.J. cowering in the Bronco, I have never seen such a damning depiction of celebrity downfall. It's too sad to be funny. The weight of Spears' fame turns out to be crushing, and the meaning of her life is close to being permanently cautionary.

"Close" because Mariah Carey rebounded from an astonishingly public meltdown. There's a telling difference, however: Mariah can actually sing. Carey had some innate raw talent as a vocalist and musician to limit how far she might fall and to stand her up again. Talent enabled her to climb back from bad career choices and public embarassment.

Spears has no such gift. She mastered a kind of hall-of-mirrors celebrity, where the music and the publicity reinforced one another and sustained an aura of pop-culture relevance. But ultimately, Spears' reputation as a pop star was an expression of other people's talents: the songwriters, producers, sound engineers, choreographers and video directors paid to make her sound and look attractive. She has a Rolodex, but what else?

You can't rule out a comeback in this day and age. There may be a "survivor" storyline waiting for Spears if she's clever and resourceful enough to take hold of it. But the gap between Spears then and now is so great it's almost shocking: the tousle-haired kid in the Catholic schoolgirl outfit who winks at the screen; the rehab escapee who looks like a Charles Manson disciple. The second picture will be difficult to erase because it contrasts so violently with the first.

Writer Charles Shaar Murray once said of fame that you can have it, but you can't give it back. But maybe you can disappear. Make use of invisibility and time away to recover your health, dignity and humanity. At this point, the prospects for a "comeback" has to be the least of Spears' worries.

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I've never had my Top 10 list vetted for communist sympathies and anti-American bias, but then, I no longer work in Washington, D.C. Pity the critics at The Washington Post, whose own best-of-2006 roundups are being deconstructed by the conservative Media Research Center, where they're still partying like it's 1959.

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I've got a Showtime column this week about one of your neighbors and mine: Peter Lavezzoli. The Fort Lauderdale native is a drummer and percussionist who plays in the Grateful Dead cover band Crazy Fingers. He's a not-infrequent guest host of Evening Jazz on WLRN (93.1 FM) in Miami. He's also the author of two books about underappreciated developments in music.

The first was The King of All, Sir Duke: Ellington and the Artistic Revolution. There, Lavezzoli showed that Ellington's influence goes way beyond jazz: Ideas that Ellington developed as an ensemble leader found their way into many genres, with everyone from George Clinton to Sun Ra benefitting from Sir Duke's wisdom.

Lavezzoli's newest book, and the subject of the column, is The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. Anyone who's heard George Harrison play a sitar will understand the basic premise -- that Indian classical music is embedded in the sound and texture of Western popular music. But Lavezzoli demonstrates how deep the connection goes, and that with Indian music came an embrace of Indian culture and spirituality. Yoga, meditation, vegetarianism are three commonplace practices in the West, thanks in large part to a fascination with India that really took hold, through music, in the 1960s.

I asked Lavezzoli for some essential recordings marking Indian music's pathway through Western music. He picked five ...

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MTV News led its home page earlier today with a complaint from Miami's own Trick Daddy. The veteran rapper says he's unimpressed by most of what he's hearing from his peers.

"People aren't trying different things with their music," he told MTV. "If it weren't for r&b, the [hip-hop] business would be [expletive], to be honest."

Something else seems to be gnawing at him, too. At an Orlando awards show in August, Trick performed Breaker, Breaker, from his forthcoming album. One passage had hip-hop watchers wondering whether Trick might be upset with his neighbor, rap newcomer and self-proclaimed "Mayor of Miami" Rick Ross:

"Let's set this record straight/ N---a, I run this whole state/ There's only one mayor of Dade/ And y'all n---as is my protégés."

Trick told MTV the line was a bit of bravado for his fans, and not aimed at Ross: "Listen, man. I'm the first [person] that told anybody that Rick Ross was good at what he do. ... And one thing about me: I don't sneak dis."

You could also say Trick left room in the municipal scheme for two mayors -- the city of Miami and the county of Miami-Dade being separate entities.

Rap is in a funk right now. Sales are down. Hits are scarce, unless the rap is hitched to an r&b song. Everyone sounds cranky and tired.

On the upside, Ross is off to a promising start. Atlanta's T.I. -- a King among mayors -- has one of the year's best-selling albums. An old Trick Daddy collaborator, Cee-Lo, is having a blast of late in Gnarls Barkley, a hip-hop and soul project with DJ Danger Mouse. Everybody loves the new Roots album.

But the Roots and Gnarls Barkley are more popular in student unions than they are on Main Street. Trick is talking about rap made for the masses when he says there's little that's new and improved. But he'll get his chance soon. Trick's new album, Back by Thug Demand, is scheduled for release Dec. 12. He's shooting a video for a track called Bet That with Chamillionaire and Gold Rush on Monday and Tuesday in Miami.

Two more acts with big followings, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg, have new albums on the way. Lupe Fiasco, from Chicago, has a lot of people excited about his debut. Maybe rap's mood will improve by Christmas.

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