No Joy in Mudville, Part II
I received an e-mail today from a guy named Matt Tuozzo, a member of Team Techno who also released material back in the day on MP3.com under the artist name Cerebral. He contacted me regarding the whereabouts of Red Joy Reid.

You can read the whole story here. The short version, though, is this: We've been had. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled. There is no Joy Reid. She was merely a construct, a "pop icon for intellectuals" created out of thin air by a couple of guys who drank too many Yuenglings one night and fired up their photo-manipulation software.

That picture you see in the corner? It's a morph of Jodie Foster and Winona Ryder. Even the name is an anagram for "JODIE RYDER."

Wow. Quite a curveball, this.

As manipulated as I suddenly feel, though, I'm not sure I can be angry about it. I mean, this isn't the first time a guy created a female personna for himself and set to role playing. (Salon reported on a rather famous incident of role-playing a year ago.) Plus, it was probably sheer dumb luck -- an 8 on the river, you could say -- that propelled Joy Reid to 15 minutes of fame on MP3.com, rather than, say, Ninth Key, whose lead vocalist is flesh and blood and had a baby last year.

Matt makes an interesting point about the hoax, too: "From a social aspect, it confirmed my worst fears about humanity: that people are generally base, despicable creatures more guided by self-importance and carnalism than by egalitarianism, mutual appreciation or logic. Joy's music was my music -- sophomoric sketches of my music, in fact -- yet, Cerebral's far superior work never recieved a hundredth of the praise during those formative internet years, because he didn't have a cute smile and breasts."

All in all, this should probably rank up there as one of the best Internet hoaxes of all time. If there's ever a book about the glory days of MP3.com, there ought to be a chapter about Red Joy Reid. Hell, maybe I should write that chapter before anyone else gets their hands on it...