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In This Issue

• Fat Virgin Screws Microsoft
• Fed Talks with Corporate Stooge
• Letters to the Feditor!
• Dirty Terrorists Go Too Far: Now It's Personal
• LilAmber.com: Legal Child Porn for the Masses
• Fed Fun Guide: How Not To Make A Bomb
• Shivering Shit Machines Progeny of Actress Ricci
• The SHIT
• Bollinger: Mixing Business with Leather
• Lashed & Leashed at CV
• 14 Year Olds Do It Best!
• Remember Sept 27th
• Girl of Petite Race Likes Small Place
• The Staff of 19.1

The Fed is very proud to present the following exclusive interview with a Nameless Faceless Shameless Corporate Stooge from deep within the Recording Industry Association of America’s secret underground lair. In the interest of readability, and for your amusement, we hereafter refer to our interviewee simply as "Stooge."

FED: Let’s talk about file sharing. College students who can’t afford CDs anyway download Led Zeppelin songs that you’ve already made a gazillion dollars off of. Everyone knows the real market for music lies in selling box sets of previously unreleased recordings of Keith Richards vomiting from heroin deprivation to overpaid, nostalgic Baby Boomers. Why the big fuss over a bunch of kids?

STOOGE: First of all, I’d like to equate file sharing to needle sharing. No one can prove that file sharing doesn’t spread AIDS and Hepatitis C. More importantly, it causes unwanted pregnancy. It goes like this: boy downloads new John Mayer album, girl hears it and infers that he must be sensitive and open to emotional commitment, girl has dirty unprotected sex with boy repeatedly. Now if this guy doesn’t even have $18.99 to buy the John Mayer album, what kind of a financial future can he offer their baby?

FED: Tell us more about your new slogan, "When You Share Music, You Share Music with Bin Laden."

STOOGE: It is a proven fact that music shared on services like Kazaa frequently travels beyond the 48 contiguous United States. In other words, it falls into the hands of terrorists. This should come as little surprise since the name "Kazaa" is difficult to pronounce and includes many of the same vowels as the name "Osama." The trouble is that people just aren’t aware of the harm that their file sharing is doing to our nation’s security. If Al Qaeda is able to obtain even a single weapons-grade John Mellencamp album, they will be able to mount an attack that, down the dark decades of our torment, will make the moment the Twin Towers fell seem like a fleeting glimpse into paradise.

FED: You stole that line from Pinhead.

STOOGE: It wasn’t stealing; that’s not a word I like to take lightly. I went to see Hellraiser in the theater twice ($14), bought the videocassette ($18), the laser disk ($22), the limited edition DVD ($29) and the soundtrack album on 8-track, vinyl, cassette, CD, and HDCD ($65). Now I own it and it’s mine, all mine, all mine! (Haughty, over-acquisitive, hyper-capitalistic sneer: Priceless).

FED: Tell us about some of the other industry-wide initiatives that you are spearheading.

STOOGE: Right now is a time of great change for all the member companies of the RIAA. We are carefully purging our organizations of individuals who no longer fit into our business scheme: mostly musicians, producers, songwriters, and the like. Our new team is made up of lawyers who found themselves out of work when the courts started to crack down on frivolous and wasteful lawsuits. Luckily, as international mega-conglomerates, the rules don’t apply to us. We’re very pleased with our new employees. I mean, the lawyers put just as much cocaine on their expense accounts as the musicians did, but they trash fewer hotel rooms and don’t have nearly as many unwanted pregnancies. These savings will more than pay for our new stationary when we officially change our name to the Suing Broke College Kids for a Trillion Dollars Industry Association of America.

FED: Some commentators have speculated that the biggest problem facing your industry is actually an inability to develop new talent that appeals to young people. What do you make of that?

STOOGE: You should blame the Democrats. If the industry had our way, we would have begun drilling for new performers in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge immediately after Hendrix died, and by now we would have weaned ourselves from our musical dependence on terrorist-supporting nations. Take Celine Dion: we’re as angry as you are that she’s both French and Canadian, but what other choice did we have?

FED: Do you still see a future in the manufacture and sale of CDs?

STOOGE: Any real music lover knows that nothing can ever really compare to owning a CD. Except maybe owning a record. Or having a pet rock. But an mp3? No. Let’s face it, fans don’t buy CDs for the music. They want cheesy photos of the band trying to look tough, they want to skim the Thank Yous in case their name pops up, and they want the thrill of buying something expensive that they can’t be sure ahead of time whether they’ll actually like. It’s the most legal form of gambling available to our youth. Finally, and most of all, music fans crave a hard, flat, colorful surface to roll a fatty on. An mp3 just can’t do that.