Did Copyright Kill YouTube?

I can’t find shit on YouTube. Not an ounce of good performances. I mean really. I’m looking for Van Morrison singing anything from Astral Weeks in 1968, then I’m looking for Van Morrison singing anything before 1980, and finally I’m just looking for Van Morrison. I’m thinking, for chrissakes, 40 years must constitute public domain! But all I get on YouTube is third-rate covers performed in linoleum tiled kitchens with refrigerators and futons as backdrops.

Copyright lawyers have killed the magic of YouTube. But in this case, thank god copyright law saved me from myself. I found almost no videos of Van, and ultimately, that’s probably a good thing.

The mystique of Van, that carnal sexiness in every Astral Weeks track, is lost when I finally find him, pole-straight and snapping — almost, it seems, out of rhythm. He looks so fundamentally uncomfortable in front of the microphone, and stares a bit to the side, intent on getting the words out right. Where is the passion and the lovelorn longing that seethes within these songs? Where is the humid sweat, orange mint tea, marijuana, tears? Back in some other place, back where we transcended, perhaps. But certainly not here.

In video, all I get is old, plasticized Van performing the entirety of the only album I’ve ever called my favorite; or, I get young, ramrod Morrison doing Brown-Eyed Girl, which I was over by the time I was seventeen. I can’t help but watch my love diminish amongst the traces of a sad, heavy drinker who wears permanent sunglasses, either to shade the bloodshot, or to hide the work he’s had done around his eyes. It’s dramatic to say, but have my illusions been shattered? Clearly, our experience with the singer’s music is more than the experience of the singer himself.

Read something good here.