The “Mother of the MP3” has penned a lengthy essay for NY Times‘ songwriting blog about her other hit wonder. Vega shares the inspiration for her a cappella tribute to Seinfeld’s future hangout and the unlikely DNA remix it spawned. A good read that touches on issues of remix culture and copyright.
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Major Tom’s Diner:
http://www.daveexmachina.com/wordpress/?p=970
“mother of the mp3″? did she help mccain invent the blackberry too?
She was talking about this a lot on an episode of Live @ Abbey Road too.
For a programmer, this sort of feels like the Al Gore / Internet or John McCain / Blackberry thing. It’s a neat bit of trivia but it seems like she actually thinks she had more to do with the development of the MP3 format than just being the creator of a popular song which was a good benchmark for testing.
Then this quote from the story:
“Whereas I tend to get frustrated and do things like bang on the hard drive with my fist, which is how I destroyed all the data on my last computer.
So why, given all that, am I called the ?Mother of the MP3??”
… groan. She seems like one of those people for whom being “not very technically savvy” is a big personality trait and she’s wearing it like one of those “I don’t even *own* a TV” people, yet she’s the Mother of MP3.
Come on,
COME ON! I totally disagree with you! The way I see it, Suzanne Vega is amazed and honoured that her song was used to test/improve the MP3 format. She did not coin that phrase of being the “mother of the MP3″ – someone else did! And we should be grateful to the uniqueness of Tom’s Diner for that. And she’s more technically savvy than you think!