Did It Leak?'s Alan Carton, 23

In a music culture ever so increasingly reliant on and fixated by digital downloads, torrents, rips, file sharing, and the like, getting a jump and a head’s up on the latest online leaks of upcoming releases is essential for high-cultured music aficionados and ardent music journalists and critics alike. For about the past two years, everyone’s “it” source appeared to be the online blog Did it Leak? (http://diditleak.co.uk/), and later its Twitter counterpart, @diditleak, which ultimately claimed an impressive amount of over 12,000 followers.

The website and its corresponding Twitter account had quickly established a growing reputation for being a reliable source of album leak notifications—and it was always the first to know about every leak. The reputation, in turn, was able to increase the accuracy and consistency of Did it Leak?, as well as make it even more up-to-the-minute, as there were more passionate fans and followers, which meant more potential sources of leak notifications for the blog’s creator/administrator.

But who was this administrator, this enemy of the Recording Industry Association of America, this person so vehemently despised by any and probably every corporate big-shot music executive, this beloved character of music fans and critics around the world? Well, his name was Alan Carton, and he died a little over three weeks ago. He was 23.

For years Carton kept his anonymity for several reasons, namely to protect himself from any legal trouble and to keep the integrity and efficiency of his project intact. But few people knew this Edmonton native and Vancouver film student had been diagnosed with cancer at the age of 18, and throughout all of the turmoil, all of the pain and suffering, and all of the exhausting hospital visits, he continued to release leak notifications, even from his hospital bed as his cancerous lungs filled with fluids.

After high school, Carton developed a lump on his leg and originally dismissed it as a cyst. When it was revealed to be cancer, he was at first apathetic about the potential dangerous consequences, confident that if Terry Fox had the determination to beat a similar cancer, why couldn’t he? But then a full MRI proved to be tragic, as the cancer had spread to his lungs. Doctors had to remove 45% of the muscle in his leg, which left Carton dependent on crutches and soon confined him to a wheelchair, but it did little to improve his bleak odds of survival.

So at such an unfortunate and terrible young age, Alan Carton began to live out his bucket list. He travelled around the world with friends and family, taught himself the guitar and keyboard and wrote music, and fulfilled his dream by attending the internationally renowned Vancouver Film School, where he would go to class during the week, and fly home to Edmonton periodically on certain weekends for his chemotherapy, back in time for class on Monday morning in Vancouver.

But his biggest accomplishment began in the fall of 2007: Did it Leak? The popularity of the site grew so fast, it was not long before interview requests were pouring in from newspapers from around the globe. Even the Chicago Sun-Times tried to contact him for leak-hunting advice. But Carton turned them all down for the sake of his anonymity.

By the spring of 2008, the tumour was pushing against Carton’s lungs, and he was down to 90 pounds. The hospital visits began to increase in both frequency and length. He could have had the tumour surgically removed, but that meant the removal of his lungs, which also would have logically entailed being strapped to an oxygen tank for the rest of his life. In any event, it was not long before the cancer continued to spread, as a tumour in his brain was soon found.

But Carton was not without a phone for receiving leak tips and a laptop for reporting them by his hospital bedside. Little did the world know that the first person to publicly announce the leaks of the latest Ringo Starr, Usher, Lil Wayne, and Mary J. Blige albums was just a kid confined to his deathbed, bored and with nothing else to do.

His last post was on his blog on Jan. 4 and on his Twitter account by the next day for the new Vampire Weekend album Contra, which went on to peak at the top spot on five different Billboard charts, including the Billboard 200. On Jan. 16, doctors filled him with morphine and drained his lungs, and he died later that day.

Meanwhile, @diditleak remains stuck on Jan. 5, forever to read “Vampire Weekend – Contra leaked, due out January 12th.” Alan Carton was a trailblazer in music journalism, and he was only 23 years old. RIP.

Hawksley Working Man

Is it any surprise that the virginity of 2010 is still in its infancy and we already have a Hawksley Workman release? Not really. Here comes Meat to deflower the year, especially with its visually avant-garde album cover: a silhouette of a somewhat distorted, naked woman’s torso, plump breasts in the top-left corner ready for breast feeding, as the head of singer/songwriter Workman (real name Ryan Corrigan) consum(mat)es her womb.

Meat is Workman’s eleventh full-length album since 1999—not to mention its counterpart Milk, which is soon to be released digitally, and countless EPs. This small-town Ontario cabaret glam rocker doesn’t live music; he breeds (through) it.

Anti-urban themes have always underlied Hawksley’s music, but with Meat he takes it one step further; the album art is merely suggestive of what to expect: songs about constructivism, solidity, determination, wholeness. If his previous albums were a defence for and a celebration of natural man and an attack on urban man, then Meat is a repositioning, almost as if Hawksley has experienced defeat and he has to (re)create himself.

Sonically, Meat is Hawksley’s most nuanced work yet. The album is heavier than the mellower Treeful of Starling and Between the Beautifuls, and while it incorporates some of the rock elements of Los Manlicious and his earlier albums, “Song for Sarah Jane” for instance—the album’s best—is John Lennon with a piano gone gritty, while “French Girl in LA” and “(The Happiest Day I Know is a) Tokyo Bicycle” employ poppier elements, such as a catchy woodwind melody in the former.

Some of the more experimental rock moments are, however, annoying, including the unnecessarily long outro in “You Don’t Just Want to Break Me (You Want to Tear Me Apart)” and the very odd screams in “(We Ain’t No) Vampire Bats.” The end result is that Meat has scant traces of bone.