Crack Box and Crackheads

OK, I always thought of Animal Collective as good people, the Catsup Plate label as righteous, and Chris Freeman of Fusetron as one of the most honest indy distributors in the business, but the fiasco surrounding the creation of "Crack Box" has turned into an ugly thing of greed among people who are supposed to be above being greedy. Somehow, a three-lp set got inflated to a price of close to $100, then Fusetron's servers melted down trying to sell them, they sold out immediately, and people turned around within hours and tried to sell "Crack Box" for $500, $700, $1000, on eBay. Crack Box indeed, it's creepy crawlers for Crackheads.

I know, I know, it's like Bob Pollard says, "If you don't want it, don't buy it," but people can always download free live sets of Animal Collective from their fan web site, and I somehow feel that even participating in the Crack Box fiasco is like contributing to evil. Makes me very sad to see this. Particularly when we consider that the companies with the fairest prices for vinyl on Record Store Day in April were the supposedly evil, big multinational conglomerates. The most outrageous prices came from those scrappy small independent labels. Just goes to show that the evils of rampant capitalism can arise anywhere.