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Great Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher aka The Iron Lady is alive and well. But Chumbawamba    , one of my favorite bands, is always ahead of the curve: they just announced on their MySpace blog the completion of a commemorative EP, already recorded, pressed and ready to be shipped the day Thatcher dies:

Featuring several new songs commemorating the most viciously dismissive and destructive leader we’ve had since long before any of us were born, this CD has the peculiarity of not having a fixed release date. [...] Pay your £5 now in the knowledge that, come the morning after the glorious day, you’ll have this exclusive and unavailable-elsewhere CD dropping tombstone-like onto your doormat.

You can pre-order your copy here.

I have never heard of Oren Lavie        , nor his song titled Her Morning Elegance, until today. Both of them came to my attention hours ago when the music video for the song climbed to the top of ViralVideoChart.com:

Oren Lavie sounded like an Israeli name and so I was somewhat intrigued as I could not recall an Israeli video that ever went viral. Sure enough, it turns out that Lavie, an unknown Israeli singer, took a giant step towards fame by releasing a stop motion video last week. Within that short period of time, the video has been viewed almost 400,000 times, and was blogged about 1500 times (now 1501). Have a look-see:

Now, I know it is quite easy to dismiss this as one of the many viral videos that enter and exit our screens every week, but I think this is much more than that:
We live in an exciting period of time when new business models are developed and adopted right in front of our eyes and the very nature of art and commerce is evolving. Not everyone is excited about it, though: like the Luddites who destroyed mechanized looms in the early nineteenth century trying to resist the inevitability of the Industrial Revolution, the music industry had spent a decade trying to convince people that there is nothing wrong with the old business models and that sharing music is a crime. When everyone around you is committing an illegal act, including the kid next door and his father the policeman, it is quite difficult to treat piracy like the trouble it is made out to be. Home cooking is not killing the restaurant industry, and home taping is not killing the music industry -- it didn’t during the 1980’s when cassettes were used, and it is not killing it nowadays when peer-to-peer file sharing protocols are in use. In ten to twenty years, we would wonder what the fuss was all about, and would find it hard to believe that artists stubbornly refused to adopt new technologies, new ways of communicating and new ways of earning a living.
Allowing people to download your music for free? Of course! How else did you plan to make money?

Fill up your dosage of free culture here, here and here.

Artist: Ké Track: Strange World Album: I Am [ ] Genre: Rock Label: RCA Release Date: 1996

Ke (aka Kevin Grivois) – Strange World Lyrics

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Is this our last chance to say all we have to say
Hiding here inside ourselves we live our lives afraid
So close your eyes and just believe in everything you’re told
‘cos in this land of great confusion it’s easy to give up control

Strange world people talk and tell only lies
Strange world people kill an eye for an eye
Strange world dream one day we’ll see the light
Strange world believe and everything will be alright

And this is the place where everything begins and ends again
No secrets left to find no seven deadly sins
This world that we have wasted has kept us very well
When science now is sacred who will save us from ourselves

Strange world people talk and tell only lies
Strange world people kill an eye for an eye
Strange world dream one day we’ll see the light
Strange world believe and everything will be alright

Strange world people talk sometimes I wonder why
Strange world people kill still no one hears their cries
Strange world burn these thoughtless tears out of my eyes, eyes

Strange world people talk and tell only lies
Strange world people kill an eye for an eye
Strange world dream one day we’ll see the light, ahh, ahh

Strange world people kill and people hate and
People talk and people kill and still I wonder wonder why, why

Every Jewish person that becomes successful abroad is treated here as an Honorary Israeli: Natalie (Hershlag) Portman, Gene (Chaim Witz) Simmons, the girl in the Yes We Can video – basically if you have experienced worldwide success, no matter how vague your connection to the Holy Land, or how long it has been since you last visited – Israelis will find a way to not only prove you were always one of us, but that your success is directly linked to your being one of us.

I tell you… those Israelis will grasp at anything…

Singer-songwriter and Honorary Israeli Regina Spektor      was one of the artists chosen to sing for the new Narnia film released last week. Have a listen and see if you like the song as much as I and Perez did:

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Buy the entire album in MP3 format or in CD format.

Regina Spektor – The Call – Lyrics

It started out as a feeling
Which then grew into a hope
Which then turned into a quiet thought
Which then turned into a quiet word
And then that word grew louder and louder
’till it was a battle cry

I’ll come back..
When you call me
No need to say good bye

Just because everything’s changing
Doesn’t mean it’s never been this way before
All you can do is try to know who your friends are
As you head off to the war

Pick a star on the dark horizon
And follow the light
You’ll come back when its over
No need to say good bye
You’ll come back when it’s over
No need to say good bye.

Now we’re back to the beginning
It’s just a feeling and no one knows yet
But just because they can’t feel it too
Doesn’t mean that you have to forget

Let your memories grow stonger and stonger
’til they’re before your eyes

You’ll come back
When they call you
No need to say good bye
You’ll come back
When they call you
No need to say good bye