My flight ran a little late so I didn’t actually get to my hotel until around 4:15 by which time I was pretty much guaranteed to arrive too late to see the opening band. This turn of events didn’t really bother me too much as I was only going to the concert to see one band and that band was the headliner. After dropping off my luggage at the hotel, I caught the airport shuttle back to O’Hare airport where I then took a CTA blue bus to Rosemont station. There, I finally caught the CTA blue line train which took me into downtown Chicago where I easily found my way to the House of Blues after a quick detour for some McDonald’s. 

When I entered the building to pick up my tickets from the Box Office, I could hear that the first band was already playing on stage. Apparently, they keep a tight schedule either on this tour or at The House of Blues in general. The concert doors opened at 5:30 and it seems that the first band Toxic Holocaust began playing at 5:45. As one guy waiting in line with me commented, that’s pretty amazing for one of these shows. Usually, you stand around for a long time after the doors open before any music starts and often there are long periods in between bands.

With ticket in hand, I headed into the club and made my way to the back where I purchased for myself an At The Gates “Suicidal Final Tour 2008″ t-shirt. By the time I finished and returned to the main concert room, the first band had packed up and been replaced by the night’s second act: a neo-thrash band called Municipal Waste. They were actually quite entertaining with their tongue-in-cheek lyrics and more-Slayer-than-Slayer sound. The place was already packed to the point of bursting so I had to enjoy the band from way back near the bar, but I still found the view good and the band’s energy and songwriting won me over quite quickly which usually doesn’t happen with opening bands that I’ve never heard before. For the last song in their set, their energetic front man eagerly whipped up the center crowd into a frenzy with calls to form opposing sides that smashed together in a ‘wall of death’. He then followed up with a call for the crowd to form a “circle of pain”. Quite thrilling stuff to watch from a distance although it makes me pine a bit for the time when I may have leaped into the fray myself.

After Municipal Waste wrapped up their show, there was a huge stream of metalheads flowing from the center of the crowd out towards the edges of the room where bars and restrooms stood to receive them. This temporary dispersal gave me the chance to make my way to a nice position just three to four bodies away from the stage where I often find myself as I never seem to arrive early enough to actually make the front row. Having staked my claim to a nice spot near the front, I planted roots and was ready for At The Gates to take the stage.

Unlike most concert venues that I’ve attended, the House of Blues has a big curtain on the stage that they use to hide the stage in between acts. So as the thinned crowded began to fill up again, we could hear the sounds of stage crew testing out various instruments and the mikes but all without actually seeing the, and therefore there were no incidents where some excited fan mistakes a roady on stage for a band member heralding the start of the show.

When the filler music cut off, it wasn’t At The Gates that took the stage.  Apparently four bands were performing on this leg of the tour despite the bill on listing three. The penultimate act was a band called Darkest Hour. They struck me as another generic and uninspired metalcore band with nothing that really hooked me. However, there were several people there who seemed to be really into them, and perhaps, they might have faired better with me if I had been more familiar with their material. Given that I was not, I simply tapped my foot politely and occasionally nodded my head to the beat while waiting for them to leave the stage and make way for At The Gates.

During the next round of filler music between acts, I and apparently several other fans were pleased to hear Slayer’s Angel of Death blasting from the speakers (a MIDI-based sample of this track is my current phone ringtone). A large group of fans standing behind me matched singer Tom Araya for every word and scream during this classic thrash track, and I found myself joining along before the end of the song. After that song finished, I was excited to hear the opening riffs to another Slayer song - God Hates Us All - only to have it cut off abruptly. At first, this was a welcome sign that At The Gates would play soon which summoned forth a lot of excited cheers, but these cheers turned to a few boos and a sigh from myself as the excellent Slayer track gave way to a merely okay Pantera song Walk.

But before this song could quite finish, the speakers went silent, the lights dimmed, and the curtains drew apart. At the Gates were ready to take the stage! This was the moment that many of us had waited twelve years to see – a moment that it seemed might never happen with this group long gone to the dustbin of broken-up bands. After a few heartbeats of atmospheric sound samples, the band members had all made their ways to their assigned positions on stage and without further delay, they burst into a blistering rendition of Slaughter of the Soul.

Instantly, I knew this was going to be a rough but thrilling crowd. Within seconds of the sonic attack, the mass of frantic fans behind me crashed forward like some wave of human bodies, and I found myself being crushed into the people in front of me, struggling mightily with my arms around my torso in an outward straining embrace designed to keep me from getting squeezed like a grape in a wine press.

It’s at moments like these when you’re sweating like crazy, your heart is thumping for all its worth, and your limbs are energized by the primal violence of the music that you truly capture the complete feel of the metal concert experience in all its adrenaline powered joy. While sometimes uncomfortable, the overall experience eclipses any minor nuisances like having an elbow slammed into your kidney or the flailing foot of a crowd surfer slapped against the back of your head.

Next up, the band smoothly moved into Cold followed by the excellent Raped By The Light Of Christ off their second album With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness. This is a “slower” song as At The Gates songs go, and so the crowd settled down a notch giving me the “pause” necessary to attempt recording some video with Melinda’s Flip which she kindly allowed me to take on this trip.

It would have all worked out marvelously, and by rights, I should have been able to post a link to a nice clip on YouTube featuring the band’s awesome performance. All of this would have been so if I had actually managed to press the Flip’s big red record button properly. Unfortunately, I only succeeded in turning on the Flip itself, and my pressing the button didn’t quite take hold so even though I held the Flip up and made every effort to move it around to capture the action of all the band members – I was actually capturing squat. Towards the end of this song, the Flip decided to shut down seeing as unlike me, it was perfectly aware of its idle state and decided to conserve energy. Puzzled (I didn’t figure out what had happened until I got back to my hotel room), I turned the Flip back on, and this time successfully hit the record button so that I managed to capture a measly fifteen seconds of the song’s end.

Oh well. At least, I managed a decent screen capture from that footage:

At The Gates continued ripping through songs from all of their releases including my favorite All Life Ends off their first release the Gardens of Grief EP. Every song they nailed with precision like the versions found on the albums only with that extra energy that gets captured in a concert setting by the best of bands.

For the encore, they performed three more songs kicking things into overdrive with Blinded By Fear during which crowd surfers started getting tossed like crazy and the churning swarms of moshers acted like a giant vortex that threatened to suck me into its hungry maw on a couple of occasions. Next was Suicide Nation, and in keeping with the concerts from their early days, they finished with the awesome Kingdom Gone.

At the end, the band threw a few things into the audience such as guitar picks, drum sticks, and the set list. One lucky person managed to grab both a drum stick and the set list and posted a picture of them on MySpace:

Afterwards, I left an exhausted but very happy man. This was pretty much the best concert that I’ve had the pleasure to attend, and I half-seriously looked online to see about booking a flight to Houston, Texas to see their next show this Thursday, but ultimately I couldn’t justify the costs of the airplane ticket let alone the price of a hotel. 

It seems that like another fan commented bittersweetly, this was my first and last time seeing this amazing band play live.

I can only hope that they follow up the tour by releasing some an awesome DVD with footage from various shows!

As the show draws near, I’ve been thinking about the musical evolution of various forms of extreme metal music and how sometimes you can pick out a clear path from one end of the spectrum to the other. For example, one can easily trace the development from Black Sabbath to At the Gates:

1. Black Sabbath Black Sabbath (1970): proto-metal with traces of its blues origin
2. Black Sabbath Paranoid (1970): early heavy metal
3. Judas Priest Sad Wings of Destiny (1976): beginning of classic heavy metal
4. Judas Priest Stained Class (1978): classic heavy metal with first hints of speed/thrash metal
5. Slayer Show No Mercy (1983): early speed/thrash metal with clear lineage from Judas Priest’s sound
6. Slayer Hell Awaits (1985): thrash metal – much darker with proto-death metal elements
7. Possessed Seven Churches (1985): proto-death metal with traces of thrash origins
8. Death Scream Bloody Gore (1987): early death metal with most thrash elements stripped away
9. Morbid Angel Alters of Madness (1989): seminal early death metal
10. Entombed Left Hand Path (1990): death metal with early hints of the melodic death metal sound
11. At The Gates Gardens of Grief (1991): early At The Gates with only hints of their future sound
12. At The Gates With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness (1993): Early melodic death metal sound
13. At The Gates Slaughter Of The Soul (1995): Classic melodic death metal album

I was extremely pleased with the results of my gamble.

This album is really quite charming, and I found myself listening to Lucky Soul’s smooth neo-50s-meets-indie-pop sound in constant rotation for several days after purchasing it. The musicians keep things interesting and very catchy from one solid song to the next while singer Ali Howards delivers a nice range of vocals that hit everything from sexy and fun to sharp and poignant.

Highly recommended! Especially if you like the Life-era sound of The Cardigans.

For those of you unfamiliar with Pandora, it’s a great service that I highly recommend to any fan of music. You go to the Pandora site, enter the name of a musician or song, and Pandora creates a custom radio station that plays music that Pandora thinks you will enjoy based upon a sophisticated analysis of structural properties of the input music or the typical music produced by the input musician. It’s a cool and innovative idea that has allowed people like me to found all sorts of interesting musicians that they would have never encountered otherwise.

So you can see why this news about the decision of the Copyright Royalty Board on behalf of the recording industry is highly upsetting to me. I encourage people to visit the SaveNetRadio website and contact their representatives in government to try to apply some popular pressure to counter this decision and save internet radio stations like Pandora.

But there’s more to this decision that gets under my skin than just the potential loss of a valued service provider. You see, I have a big problem with the notions of copyright, patent, trademark, etc and all the other things that are increasingly referred to as intellectual property.

Which is highly ironic and an endless source of cognitive dissonance for me since I write software for a living at a company that sells its software and fiercely guards its so-called intellectual property rights.

So what exactly is a copyright?

A copyright is a set of laws passed by governments to restrict the use of particular expressions of an idea or information. Likewise, if you research patent, trademark, etc. on Wikipedia or Google, you’ll find that they are similar sets of laws that also restrict the usage of ideas and information. Each of these ideas applies to a different domain and has different alleged goals, but they all share the common effects of restricting our freedoms while allowing certain individuals or groups to extort money for lengthy if not indefinite periods without engaging in productive labor.

I will henceforth refer to these ideas collectively as information monopolies and the laws associated with them as information monopoly laws. The reason I wish to refrain from using the phrases intellectual property and intellectual property rights is because words have connotations and the words property and rights are heavily charged in a way that makes these phrases deceitful and hurtful to the cause of freedom and to the social usefulness of the various industries that have been tainted by information monopolies. To call a copyright on a song intellectual property is to suggest either an absurdity or to make a very bad analogy. Obviously, intellectual property cannot be thought of as real tangible property. You cannot hold a song in your hand. When someone makes a copy of an MP3 or copies the score to a song, the holder of the song’s copyright doesn’t lose the song. To the extent that the holder of the song’s copyright could ever be described as possessing the song, the holder can still be said to possess the song even after the copier makes a copy. This is true from the very first copy up to the seven-hundredth copy, ad nauseum.

So why would someone wish to refer to a copyright on a song as an intellectual property right when the concept fits so poorly? The reason lies in the charged term property. The notion of property rights in most Western cultures runs very deep. Property rights have their foundation in the naturally occurring idea that people should be able to do what they wish with things that they possess. Once you bring the idea of property into the mix, you can start using even more sharply charged words. For example, you can describe my sharing a piece of useful software with a friend as piracy and thus equate it with imagery of barbaric men stealing wealth, cutting throats, and raping woman. It should be obvious that these two acts are very different.

Let us not contribute to the propaganda of software giants, the recording industry, and Hollywood by using their extremely warped terminology. To use the phrase intellectual property serves only to muddy the waters and pollute or kill the discourse on how better to achieve the noble goals to which copyright, trademark, and patent are outdated and failed solutions.

To engage in this conversation, we need to examine why governments invented information monopolies in the first place. The modern copyright was invented in the 1700’s as an attempt to encourage creators to create books, music, and works of art for the public good. The idea was that giving a creator a monopoly on his creation for a limited period of time would provide an incentive for creators to share their creations with the public. The patent was invented as a similar effort to encourage inventors to share new ideas with the public without fear of loss of credit or loss of any competitive advantage gained by the invention. Thus, we can see that information monopoly laws were created out of a desire to encourage the share of information for the public good.

To that end, modern information monopoly laws fail horribly in an era where information can be inexpensively copied and where powerful industries have developed that usually force creators to sign over their information monopolies in exchange for distribution of their creations to the public. People like to share things that they enjoy or find beneficial with their friends and family. To promote such sharing is good and healthy. Instead, information monopoly laws make this act of sharing a crime and slander it with terms like piracy and theft. Rather than enforcing the natural idea that a person should receive a compensation commensurate with the labor that he puts forth, information monopoly laws suggest the bizarre idea that a creator should somehow be entitled to live off society like a parasite because they created something that many people enjoy or use. Even if this pernicious idea were sound, the creator rarely sees the profits from their creations in modern society because corporations generally make them sell the rights to most or all of the profits in exchange for mass distribution.

So how can we encourage people to share their creations without placing huge restrictions on freedom and promoting antisocial behavior?

For starters, we should observe that people have been creating and inventing things since the dawn of history, while information monopoly laws are a modern idea conceived and refined over the law few centuries. No matter whether we are examining the artist, the software developer, the scientist, or the inventor, most creators are truly driven to create by something deep within their own personality. Artists want to express themselves. Scientists want to know how things work. Programmers like to write code. They would do so even if society did not pay them for their works. In fact when it comes to art, many people would agree that intrinsic motivations such as the satisfaction derived from expression or the pride of accomplishment are far superior to extrinsic motivations like money in motivating truly great works of art. It is almost a truism that an artist driven by profit instead of the need to express makes poor art.

Given this natural tendency for creators to create and share their creativity with others, I submit that we have really proposed the wrong question. We really have no need to encourage creators to share their creations with society for the public good. They will tend to do so naturally. The real questions for us to ask are how to better facilitate their sharing things with others and how best to ensure that creators have time to create.

There are many intriguing suggestions and answers to these questions. But we will never consider the alternatives and experience the benefits of a new approach until people stop thinking inside the narrow confines defined by those who seek to control and exploit how we share information with one another.