It's nine am and I am where I usually am at nine am on a sunny but cold Californian day: sitting at my beautiful, loyal friend, HPee, typing away and listening to VH1. And I think I'm in love. Jason Mraz's music is his name. It's his new 'You and I both' and it's a thing of beauty that reminds me how good it is to play.
The music video tells a story about a boy who has his eye on a simply pretty girl who works as a teller at the bank under this old sleezeball. Mraz keeps trying to get an audience with her - armed with piggy banks that he dopely drops and scatters coins over the floor - but is always duped at the last second. One day he manages to get to his lovely. He hands her a piece of paper that says 'Give me what I want' - she smiles but her old sleezeball boss looks over her shoulder and chaos ensues when they think that he's trying to rob the bank. What follows is a hopeless dance routine in the style of a musical by the less-than-coordinated locals of Skopskietfontein.
Anyway, you'll have to watch the video to find out the end of the story, but the best thing is that Mraz is one of the few progressives that has actually put recordings on his website to download for free. Mraz has obviously realised the value of making certain recordings of his work available for people to copy for personal use - knowing that once people get a taste, they will go out and buy the full recording or the albumn itself. This is the aim of the Creative Commons project which maps out a set of licenses that people can use to allow others to copy and distribute under certain conditions - the South African legal adaptation is under way and will hopefully be launched soon.
Watch this space and go check out Mraz - and please hold thumbs for me: I waited too long to buy tickets for his show at Stanford and now it's sold out. I'm hoping that the gods will deliver just one ticket to my door so that I can be deliriously happy for just a few hours. Here's hoping.
