A Night At The Hip-Hopera

Not too long ago, some peoples called The Kleptones made a great album called A Night At The Hip-Hopera. It weaves music from Queen, other classic rock, pop, and hip-hop. The Queen stuff brings this really up and up feel to some harshly-laid down raps and some epic guitar riffs (see the full sample list) – truly a funny feeling is to be had from listening to these songs. And the tale of this album begins with an innovative new sound and ends with some “broken” copyright laws and less access to the album.

Back in September, Waxy.org mirrored the album and had a list of other mirrors. For some history, Waxy was also the first website to host the now contextualized Grey Album, which eventually led us to Grey Tuesday. Sadly, but predictably, as he did for the Grey Album, Andy Baio at Waxy received a cease and desist letter on Nov 17th from Disney who controls the Queen copyright. He’s been ordered to remove the direct download links on Waxy by November 23rd, which is tomorrow (these are just links– by the time the C+D came in, he wasn’t even mirroring).

The Kleptones say they don’t have the money to host their album due to bandwidth costs, but are very grateful to the people who are mirroring the album and acting as important political dissenters. With Waxy.org getting shut down on this, we need to make sure people can get the album through a chain of links and mirrors– it’s easy for us to keep this from getting censored. We are joining the mirrors while bandwidth allows (which might not be very long): Download Night at the Hip-Hopera. Better yet, try this Night at the Hip-Hopera blog torrent link and help us keep bandwidth down (did i just say ‘blog torrent’? stay tuned…). If we and other mirrors get a cease and desist, hopefully more sites will step up to host and we can link to the next site that has the mirror, and so on and so on. Waxy also has this list of active mirrors here, but it may soon need to be updated.

Disney’s c+d letter is another classic example of how an outdated copyright system and music industry uses censorship of creative works to keep control. Even free, non-commercial sample-based music is being shut down. Big thanks to Andy for being on top of this.

Can you and will you be the next mirror? Any site that has the album mirrored, please post a comment to this post about your whereabouts and help us make a chain of channels for A Night At The Hip-Hopera. And please check out the final, somber track, question.

Also, if you missed it, here is the crazy interesting video for the Grey Album: Grey Video (hosted by waxy, of course). And also definitely take a moment to check out our interview with DJ Z-Trip— get the real deal on these issues straight from the world’s leading mash-up DJ.