Like me, the formidable McNutt Against the Music is engrossed in the 50/Kanye face-off. His post yesterday touches on some of the same points as my scribble from yesterday morning, albeit in more lucid fashion.

He also dropped me an email:

"What I didn't talk about in my post is how I've actually found myself quite emotionally invested in this whole showdown, even though I'm fully aware that it's a cynical marketing scheme. Perhaps it's nostalgia on my part, a throwback to the days when people actually lined up to buy new albums and release-date enthusiasm wasn't crippled by album leaks. Or maybe its just that I consider Kanye West probably the most genuinely interesting pop star of our time, and as such a showdown with a hip-hop caricature like 50 Cent makes this a fight worth getting charged up about."

There are two good points here, but let's deal with just one today. First, amen. We all know that the Christmas morning feeling of getting your hands on a new album is gone and ain't coming back. But I miss it like heck. And after years of jumping on pre-release leaks as soon as they were downloadable, I've found myself hesitating to listen to them. It happened already this summer with the Spoon record; though I had downloaded it about two months before it was released, I surprised myself by not touching those MP3s, not actually playing the album until the day it came out, when I bought a copy at Criminal Records. And though I had the 50 and Kanye torrents that leaked last week, I didn't listen to either album until yesterday.

On my walk home from work last night, some time after eight p.m., I passed that same Queen Street HMV that was so desolate when I had stopped to buy Graduation that morning. Grudgingly, I found myself smiling; since I'd been there, just after ten a.m., a Universal Music street team had come around. Blocks worth of streetlamps and signposts around the store had been plastered with bright posters announcing the release of Graduation and Curtis. Inside, the floor wasn't packed, but there was a steady stream of customers, and they were mostly stopping at the shelves that held the Kanye and 50 discs on their way to the cash registers. I chatted briefly with one couple, who had picked up both discs to look at. They said they'd just come from watching that much-hyped joint appearance by the two on BET's 106 & Park. Each MC had performed two new songs, and while they hadn't battled—no surprise, with both having too much to lose—they had impressed, and these people had decided to come down to the music store and choose an album to buy.

Even if it was modest, even if it was a fraction of how it would have been had this all happened ten years ago, it still felt a little like Christmas last night. It was fun. It felt like an event. It felt like music kind of  mattered, as more than a ringtone or the vehicle for some schlocky televised karaoke contest, you know? And I read that sentence over, and I know it makes me sound like some ranting baby boomer, but I don't care. I miss the hell out of that feeling. And while I'm no major label apologist, I bet some of you miss that feeling, too.