On Piracy: Steal This Film II

Before I have to get in another bar conversation that follows the lines of "you wouldn't go into a 7-Eleven and steal a candy bar would you?" I wish we could all at least get on the same page:



If it floats your boat, you can donate to the project at their website.

Kilgore Smudge Lives... in Casper Wyoming

Back in the day before MP3s and CD burners, coming across new good music was a hard thing to accomplish. Radio spoiled early our ability to mindlessly enjoy depthless pop music, and then we grew up to spend countless summers watching the same numbing rotation of mass-produced musi-tainment on MTV. We watched as the independent rock stations in our city got swallowed by Clear Channel hell bent on making all music mediocre and safe for the masses. We just begged for something listenable to make its way to the airwaves, which it never did, so instead we spent our time in the wrong parts of town at the best CD stores rifling through the collections in search of buried treasure. Sometimes we might have heard snippets of an album, or seen a stellar performance on second stage somewhere, and we'd search the racks hoping we might find the CD of that band that nobody's ever heard of. But even if we fount it, making that purchase was always a gamble. We risked forking over our last 15 bucks for a CD that might be half rotten.

Those were the days when kids still ripped tapes for one another to pass along music that hadn't made the mainstream. Here was music on the cutting edge: dynamic, creative, interpretive, raw, and without the glitz image, just a sound. Music that took the last 30 years of innovation as its roots and transformed their sounds into true examples of musical evolution. Not flat, postmodern disruptions of old paradigms, but instead articulate responses to the past presented in new, edgier formats. "Undiscovered" bands really lived the music because the money hadn't had a chance to corrupt their aesthetic standards yet. The underground, liminal areas are always the staging points of innovation, but a place where the profit motive of the culture industries have not yet penetrated, so good music without a mass distribution deal spread by second and third generation tapes.

My high school buddy lived in Florida and came across a tape of band called Kilgore Smudge and passed it along to me. I listened to that tape until it broke. I searched high and low for the CD version but even the stores that catered to more independent tastes didn't have it and couldn't manage to special order it. It wasn't until years later when the band got picked up by Warner Brothers and released a second album under the name Kilgore that I finally found a used copy of their first CD. Their second album, naturally to an old fan, didn't have the same feel that I heard off of that second-generation tape; maybe it was a combination of the hiss and odd pitch warbling from the tape medium mixed with the sounds of a smaller productions budget that made the first release seem authentically untouched by mass culture. Still, their second album was leagues ahead of what got airplay at the time, but as most bands capable of becoming legends do, they faded into obscurity for reasons of their own.

Flash forward to today-- in a bout of nostalgia I went out on the internet looking for Kilgore's second album, because after loaning my original CD to several friends it finally disappeared before I had a chance to rip it to MP3. I'm not feeling very warm to paying $15 bucks for a used CD, because I don't even own a conventional CD player any more. Furthermore, I already went through two hard copies of the CD and I'm not buying the third on principle, especially because the original members of the band will never see any of that cash. In any case, I feel like I already own stock in this band I never even got a chance to see live, just because I tried to keep their music going by passing it on to others who had never had the luck to hear them. Hell, I would pay for some DRM-free MP3s, but after a quick search on the net, I find not a lot, and even the *cough* less legal avenues turn up nothing. R.I.P. ONIK: I would have liked to known ya, but I was just a kid...

Although I didn't find the album I was looking for I did find a lovely time capsule of obscure band trivia (thanks to our cultural pillars of information, Myspace and YouTube). Heres an eye-rolling, forehead slapping example of the worst reporting that the mainstream media has to offer. Straight from the unforgiving desert, Wyoming's very own sorry excuse for a news channel K2 interviews Kilgore and tries to paint them as the shocking, bad influences they never were:



And since I can't currently find their album, here's a live song off of their first album, with a grit and intensity I haven't seen for a while. How I'd love to get my hands on a couple of bootlegs, but the internet isn't quite yet the library I'd like it to be...

When Pigs Fly... A Brief History of Record Industry Suicide and Other POVs

For those who haven't seen it, this article is probably the most astute rendering of why the music business of late is completely fucked. It's time for an overhaul in the way we produce and distribute art, music and culture from the ground up.

FTA:

At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please. Since the labels are owned by giant corporations with a great deal of money, power, and political influence, the RIAA is able to lobby politicians and government agencies to manipulate copyright laws for their benefit. The result is absurdly disproportionate fines, and laws that in some cases make file sharing a heftier charge than armed robbery. This is yet another case of private, corporate interests using political influence to turn laws in the opposite direction of the changing values of the people.

This is set to be the biggest issue facing the new millennium, an epic struggle of freedom and human culture versus the interests of capitalism. Unfortunately, those who stand to lose the most have the least ability to shape the public discourse surrounding the real issues at stake: power, control, and access to culture outside of a capitalistic economy.

For those green artists new to the beast of the culture industries, I always direct them to the sobering article written by legendary producer Steve Albini, The Problem With Music. This should be Rock n' Roll/Music Business 101 introductory text. Enough with the dreams of fame and stardom; the road to success is about as dirty as it gets. Albini's not exaggerating the least bit when he says that "Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit."

And if Albini's insights aren't enough to convince the budding rock star that there's a filthy future in the biz, the biggest losers being the artists themselves, Courtney Love weighs in on the subject with similar conclusions. To her, the real criminals are not the pirates, but instead the greedy record companies who fuck the artists and have the gall to turn around and call music lovers "thieves."

So kudos to bands like Radiohead, Trent Reznor and Saul Williams for having the courage to try something that flies in the face of the biz's conventional wisdom. They are the true entrepreneurs. With a little bit of innovation and creativity, we all might just be able to come up with new ways of promoting the arts without screwing the artists, all while bringing the palaces of elite media corporations crashing to the ground.