didn’t your parents teach you to share?
hey ya’ll
so i just got back from the "first annual bay area anarchist music festival," which rocked. =) the music was (thankfully) punk-free with an eclectic mix of hip hop, DnB, dub, mashups, and other really loud rythmic stuff that I’m not sure how to categorize. there was one folk band too (the appropriately named "Folk This!") and they kicked ass as well. I’m sitting here at my keyboar just unwinding a bit before bed, thinking about stuff and am not sure entirely where my thoughts are heading, but if ya’ll wanna come along with me I appriciate the company. =)
one of the coolest things about tonight was getting up there and having kids in the audience who had downloaded my music (or maybe even bought cd’s) and knew the words rapping along with me. As someone who started out in hip hop memorizing other people’s flows that I heard on the radio or at school, it’s fuckin incredible to feel like I’m starting to come full circle. not that I have any kind of illusion that I’m going to blow up any time soon or anything, but it’s nice to know that my music is reaching people. I don’t expect to go platinum any time soon (and probably not ever), but that’s just fine with me, my goal has always been to use my music as a way to communicate. tonghts show - and this whole weekend - have really helped me remember why i started doing this shit in the first place and where I’m at now as a musician and a performer. I had kids from santa cruz, modesto, and phoenix arizona all come up to me as i was sitting at the bookfaire yesterday and at the show tonight and say that they’d downloaded my music and burned copies for their friends, and a lot of those kids were the ones in the front row tonight rapping along with me. On the one hand, I didn’t make a penny off of any of them because I set it up so they could download for free and i didn’t get paid for the show since it was a benefit - which is of course why the music industry is so terrified of file sharing - but on the other hand, I’m not in this to make money, I’m in this to communicate and spread ideas.
And that, my friends, is the beautiful part. People who are making music because they love making music and because they want to share something with people have absolutely nothing to fear from file sharing, since it’s one of the very best mediums for helping underground and independant musicians get their work out. The corporate muzak behomouths, on the other hand, are still fighting desperately to shut down the networks. They killed napster and they’re suing kazaa users, but that hasn’t stopped people from joining any of the dozens of other file sharing networks, and in fact all the publicity has helped grow the networks. And even outside of file sharing, kids are burning cd’s for each other. I went to visit my folks last week and my little brother has a giant cd binder with over 500 albums in it - and every single one of those cd’s is a burned copy he got from a friend. the riaa has absolutely no chance of stopping that shit.
The plain fact is that music is NOT a commodity, it’s a living organic part of every human culture, and the record indistries attempts to steal it, shrink wrap it, and sell it back to us are finally being met with organized, coherent, grassroots resistance. There’s no vangaurd, no leaders, just a lot of folks who love music and think that sharing it is the most natural thing in the world. And they’re right, it is.
When I put out my first album back in 2001, the recording industry was just getting started in their war against file sharing and I made a conscious decision to offer all my music for free online and encourage people to share it, and that’s a decision i have never regretted. The recording industry does not and has never given a fuck about the artists, despite their rhetoric. As far as they’re concerned music is a commodity to package and sell and the artists are just like workers in any other industry - human resources to mine, exploit, and then dispose of when they are no longer profitable, and in return they offer an illusion of glamor and wealth, along with the promise of a few minutes in the spotlight. Since up until now they have controlled the means of communication and distribution, they have been able to maintain a very tightly controlled oligarchal chokehold on the music that most of the industrialized world listens too. File sharing, cd burning and swapping, and the growing number of independant artists who give away music for free are all elements of the resistance to this industry, and I hope ya’ll will forgive my optimism, but from where I’m sitting I don’t see any way we can lose. They can sue the whole damn planet if they want, the fact is that people now have the tools they need to share music, and there is nothing more natural, more human, then sharing music with your friends.
to put it in perspective, its not a revolution, it’s not even that serious a dent in the capitalist system, but it makes me smile anyway.
so to all the folks who’ve downloaded my music in the last three years, I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it, and to everyone who bought cd’s from me this weekend, thank you, now go burn copies for your friends. =)
peace -
emcee lynx
monday march 28, 2005 - 2:45 am
