After some dispiriting music-related news it’s good to read something hopeful regarding the industry. By which I mean the future depiction of its recent demise. Producers of the HBOs “The Wire” have purchased the rights to Steve Knoppler’s "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age". The book describes everything from the technological transition of tape to CD to my time as a marketing intern at Interscope where the lead singer of Puddle of Mudd told me to shut the fuck up. Because he’s a man and a writer and as such thinks people care what he has to say, Knopper, a former columnist for Rolling Stone, has some ideas for the show and its musicians.

"Since the book came out I have heard from some musicians who have liked it and I would think, philosophically, hopefully many would want to be attached to a project like this,” he informs BBC 6 Music. He doesn’t name names, HBO has a history of shelving promising projects and David Simon isn’t involved so we’re skeptical of the likelihood of making this to air. What else? Playwright Victoria Stewart is writing the adaptation? Since I’m tired of turning one sentence of news into an entire post I’m going to tell you a cool story from the depths of Interscope Records in its heyday.

When recording 2001, Dr. Dre reached out to a variety of rappers to write his lyrics. That’s not new. Ice Cube wrote for him during N.W.A. days and Snoop Dogg wrote some of Dre’s most famous verses for The Chronic. But this time ‘round Dre tapped Jay and Jay-Z wrote the entirety of the hand-dip sunride classic “Still D.R.E.” You can hear it pretty easily and it’s amazing to think that tucked away in the Interscope vaults is a version of Jay-Z performing “Still D.R.E.” so he can relay the intended cadence and intonations to an awaiting Dr. Dre. But I’m here to tell you the two things that Dre changed from Jay-Zs original lyrics. In the original lyrics Jay-Z wrote “yeah, me and Snoop we talking again.” But Dre didn’t want it to seem as if they had ever stopped talking, so “talking again” became “dipping again.” The second revision was simply an update. Hov had written “Eminem, he’s double platinum, doing 50 a week,” but at the time of the recording Eminem had gone triple-platinum and the change was included. Whatever. I thought it was cool.