The folk singer and poet, Jaromír Nohavica is one of the foremost celebrities (in the truest sense of the word) in the Czech Republic. He routinely sells out large concert halls and has sold hundreds of thousands of records. Now he has decided to reward his Czech fans by recording a concert album and making it available online for free. And the main method of download is BitTorrent (although direct downloads are also possible). That's a pretty groundbreaking thing to do.
Even more interesting is the content. The album consists of 22 preivously unreleased songs (each two recorded at a different concert) spanning the thirty-odd year long career of the singer-songwriter. While of benefit only to those with pretty advanced Czech. This album provides an interesting record of the recent 'post-communist' history. It speaks of hope and disillusionment in equal measure as it tells stories from the perspective of those who may have less interest in 'freedom' and 'banned' books than a cold beer at the end of the day. Some of the songs are just good fun (I heard at least three of them for the first time about 18 years ago on well-worn cassettes with live amateur recordings of concert performances). But most of them must have been written more recently and at least some are brand new. On occasion, Nohavica is given to maudlin cliches but when on form (which he mostly is here), he provides poetry of the highest grade (both with his storytelling, imagery and linguistic as well as musical versatility). Learners can find the full lyrics on http://www.nohavica.cz. The site also offers a few mediocre but passable English translations of some of Nohavica's songs.
