So Ian Gershengorn, a RIAA-connected lawyer, has been tapped to join the Justice Department by President Barack Obama. This marks the fifth lawyer with RIAA ties appointed by the President, and Gershengorn was a member of the law firm Jenner & Block, a law firm that recently told a Judge that Obama supported upholding high monetary damages in cases related to peer-to-peer file sharing.

Gershengorn isn’t the only one of the block of lawyers tapped to support similar decisions in various cases that have been going on these days.

Read more after the jump.

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I can recall eleven years ago when a small, small blurb showed up in Alternative Press about Jets to Brazil. Just mentioning that the band was made up of members of Jawbreaker, Handsome, Lifetime, and Texas is the Reason made my head spin. I didn’t know that Blake Schwarzenbach, Jeremy Chatelain, Peter Martin, and Chris Daly were in the band since the blurb didn’t mention who was in the band. But just the mere idea that a band featuring members from some of the greatest post-hardcore bands of the 1990s was enough for me.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone thinking about the kind of sound Jets to Brazil would have. Expectations were high, and when Orange Rhyming Dictionary dropped, I doubt it really was what anybody expected.

I loved Jets to Brazil’s three proper albums (and still do), but I’ll never forget a sense of deflation from the packed crowd surrounding me when I saw Jets to Brazil play on their first tour. The show I saw was at Fitzgerald’s in Houston, while the band was on tour with the Promise Ring. The record had yet to reach stores and this was years before the idea of an album leaking on the Internet was possible.

I don’t think anyone (other than the ones who got a copy before its proper release date thanks to a nice Jade Tree pre-order offer) in the room expected what they heard that night. Blake singing even more than he did on Jawbreaker’s final record? Keyboards? Midtempo songs? I got the sense that people wanted Jawbreaker Part II with some dropped-D thrown in for good measure. Since I had heard the record before I saw them (and really liked the record right off the bat), I had a good time. But I got the sense that some people started re-thinking their fandom of Blake Schwarzenbach. What followed was a critical negative light filled with nitpicky scrutiny, seemingly continuing the negative flak that Jawbreaker got when they signed with a major label. Many harsh reviews of Jets to Brazil’s three albums backed this idea up.

So ten years later, Blake appears again, but this time, in another trio with a sound closer to Jawbreaker than Jets to Brazil. People go nuts (including me), but as we wait for the first album from the Thorns of Life, I wonder if people would have preferred the Thorns of Life more in 1999 rather than 2009. I’m pretty sure they would have been derided for being a Jawbreaker retread, and whatever they released would be endlessly compared to Jawbreaker’s essential work.

What I ask now is, where’s the fairness in letting someone move on? Why can’t Blake just do what he want to do and not seem to have a trail of haters surrounding him? Maybe because I was too young to understand Jawbreaker when they were together to “get” everything and not hate Jets or Thorns, but I just find the slagging of Blake’s work after Jawbreaker rather off the mark. Am I alone here?

Sarah Clemence recently wrote an interesting article for Condé Nast about what is probably the true status of the mainstream music industry. In it, she makes the case that in fact the music industry is not doing that bad, because while individual consumers aren’t buying CDs in droves, there is still revenue to be made from alternative outlets, like music publishing and rights for putting it in movies and on TV and in cell phone ring tones. All of this along with the now-growing legitimate online music business, slowly but surely overtaking the free underground market that Napster and Pirate Bay inspired. Whether you want to believe it or not, iTunes makes money. Wal-Mart’s online music store makes money, and with the growth of DRM-less music for sale online, it’s fast-growing market.

For years, we’ve been hearing about the “death” of the music industry. “Oh, online music sales will kill the independent record store. The cost of making CD’s is keeping small indie labels from competing. People downloading music these days, often illegally, is stealing from artists who work hard for their art. It’ll never be the same again!”

No, it won’t, to be honest.

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