The music biz ain’t dead. It doesn’t even smell funny. Not even jazz. Sure, labels are tanking, magazines are closing, and–like Gillian Welch sang in one of the most effectively heartbreaking laments about modern culture–everything is free. But music itself is perhaps more present at every level of society than any other time in human history. It is more disposable, too, achieving a level of ephemera not known since before recorded sound.

For musicians, it brings new creative challenges, to create something that requires an experience greater than itself, more three-dimensional than a simple recording can allow. For listeners, especially voracious ones, it brings new moral bounds. But, mostly, delicious, awesome gluttony.

It is, of course, a cosmic dick move to never pay for one’s tunes. On the other hand, it’s a total rube job to always fork over cash. (Parking lot hippies slinging grilled cheese and nitrous call square people “custys.” No one likes a custy.) But where is the line? What is the line? The problem is no longer whether or not it is permissible to download music–of course it is–but who to steal from. Or, more practically speaking, who to pay.

If one’s goal (as it should be) is a sustainable musical ecosystem, the answer is–as with food–to go local. Given music’s now usual expression as bits, usually housed on some distant server, the definition of “local” is entirely up in the air, gone to the ether.

It could be you are a resident (in Bill Wasik’s terminology) of the hipster archipelago. Maybe global psychedelic weirdoes like the recently reunited Os Mutantes seem like kindred spirits, or maybe cough syrup-chugging Houston hip-hoppers. Perhaps your Facebook network describes the arc of your locality. Perhaps your apartment building, your block, your college friends. Maybe you belong (in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrasing) to a karass, its fellow members unknown to you until spontaneous discovery. What’s your scene, man?

No matter where you are (or they are), it is more fun and satisfying to buy your friends’ albums than to spend money on (say) the new Wilco record or a Rolling Stone subscription. Unless you happen to be friends with Wilco, of course, or strongly identify with their mission. (One of the reasons I was happy to pay $10 for Radiohead’s In Rainbows is because their pay-what-you-will gesture seemed a clear indication that we were of the same locality.) Local could be local, spending money on music that is only available in your immediate vicinity — like buying a neighbor’s home-pressed CD-R, or going to one of his gigs, checking out the other acts he’s playing with.

It is not that one’s immediate vicinity is better than anywhere else (which would be nationalist) or that he should exploit the music of musicians in far away countries (which would be imperialist). Simply, it is never bad to think about one’s consumption. In the case of music–as opposed to say, wondering how the proverbial sausage gets made–thinking local can only make the experience richer.

Very often, especially now that one doesn’t have to enter the commerce-based community of a record store to acquire it, music can feel beamed in, created someplace far away, by other people. The internet is more than the celestial jukebox, it is the celestial big box store, sucking everybody into the vast Everywhere. The disappearance of regionalism in American culture is as old as the interstates, but it is a mistake to think of that transformation as anywhere near complete, that life is effectively the same all over the place. Of course it’s not. But only you know where you’re at.

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He did, however, point me towards a Woody Guthrie songbook which Guthrie published with the inscription, “this song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” He told me about a pamphlet he once published called “Mimeograph Power, encouraging people all over to mimeograph things.”

He asked me to send a copy of the article. Which I did, along with (as requested) a mailing address for Gilberto Gil, the one time Brazilian political dissident, then serving as his country’s Minister of Culture. (Seeger had lit up when the conversation somehow turned to Brazil and how a city there had built a system of radial bus routes. Internet, no. Brazilian city planning, check.) He responded with a postcard (on the front: a 40-item list: How To Build Global Community), saying he’d copied the piece and passed it along to a friend at Folkways. He signed it with a banjo.

It is hackneyed to call somebody “a human Internet,” but Seeger almost unquestionably is. Over the course of his seven decade career, he has spread thousands of songs and connected hundreds of causes. And, while he was once a polarizing figure, blacklisted through much of the ’60s, he is perhaps the only man to have transformed both music and politics and transcended both while doing so.

In “The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger,” a fantastic New Yorker-profile-turned-short-bio published by Knopf on the occasion of Seeger’s 90th birthday this May, Alec Wilkinson quotes Seeger on his 1949 separation from the Communist Party. “I thought it was pointless,” Seeger says. “I realized I could sing the same songs I sang whether I belonged to the Communist Party or not, and I never liked the idea anyway of belonging to a secret organization.” That wasn’t quite enough for Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, who called Seeger before them in 1955. Seeger refused to testify, but refused to take the Fifth Amendment either.

Since then, as Joseph McCarthy’s trials have taken their right place in history as something far worse than the vague American communism they were hunting, the impressiveness of Seeger’s nearly Biblical stand has only grown.

“Before the HUAC engagement, people sometimes regarded Seeger’s optimism as childish,” Wilkinson writes, “and unrealistic, as a habit of mind inconsistent with the moral rigor of a serious person. Afterward, he became a figure of undeniable stature. He had stared down jailtime. He had stood amid peril for his beliefs. He had typified the principles of all the brave people he sang about.”

Unless one grew up singing along with Pete Seeger’s music, it might be hard to hear it as anything but purely cornball, despite its obvious sincerity. This is by its very design, of course, evidenced by the fact that perhaps millions of people did grow up singing along to it. For whatever other ideologies he championed, Seeger has always been a populist, and this populism both fueled the nascent folk scene and, in some twisted way, via Bob Dylan, transmutated into the “sincerity” gene that has plagued, served, and saved rock and roll ever since.

If “The Protest Singer” whitewashes Seeger in any way, it is utterly appropriate of its subject. It is not that Pete Seeger needs a mythology — he has possessed that since 1955 — but that the myth needs a proper form for transmission. “The Protest Singer’ reads emotionally like any number of Great Hero biographies one might have accidentally ingested as a grade school student. Its dust jacket even suggests that it is such: an even balance of red, white, and blue on the spine and cover proper. And its colors don’t run. They sing. It should be read by every American child.

“This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender,” Seeger famously wrote on his banjo (depicted on “The Protest Singer”‘s back cover), paraphrasing Guthrie’s blunter, “This machine kills fascists.” It makes one wonder, amid a tangle of USB cables and iPhones and the corporate-folk culture of YouTube, just what his own machines are capable of doing.

Photo by Bobster855