Category Archives: politics

interview, music, politics

>Public Enemy’s Chuck D on how copyright law changed rap music

Leave a comment

>Public Enemy were one of the very first – if not the first – groups to release an album on the internet (There’s a Poison Goin’ On was released on May 18 1999, the cd was released on July 20).
Ten years ago!
Since then, band leader Chuck D has been the most vocal supporter of file sharing in the music industry. He even testified before Congress in support of P2P and has been quoted saying “rap is devolving so much into a commercial enterprise, that the relationship between the rapper and the record label is that of slave to a master”.
Speaking of anti-materialism, anti-sexism and politically and socially conscious rap: “A lot of cats are out there doing it, on the web and all over. They’re just not placing their career in the hands of some major corporation.”
Chuck D is also involved in the cd set Let Freedom Sing: The Music of the Civil Rights and the follow-up movie Let Freedom Sing: How Music Inspired the Civil Rights Movement.

Here’s an old interview from the Stay Free Magazine with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee about how copyright law changed rap music and destroyed its creativity, and pretty much turned rap into crap overnight.
Interview by Kembrew McLeod. Original article found here. Swedish translation here.

———-

When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and–in the case of “Caught, Can I Get a Witness?”– digital sampling: “CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ‘ CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT / THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE THE BEATS THAT I RAIL … I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID ZERO.”

In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of oppor-tunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot.

Stay Free! talked to the two major architects of P.E.’s sound, Chuck D and Hank Shocklee, about hip-hop, sampling, and how copyright law altered the way P.E. and other hip-hop artists made their music.

* * *

Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?

Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It’s rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop in the 0s to the early ’80s. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.

Stay Free!: Those synthesizers and samplers were expensive back then, especially in 1984. How did hip-hop artists get them if they didn’t have a lot of money?

Chuck D: Not only were they expensive, but they were limited in what they could do–they could only sample two seconds at a time. But people were able to get a hold of equipment by renting time out in studios.

Stay Free!: How did the Bomb Squad [Public Enemy’s production team, led by Shocklee] use samplers and other recording technologies to put together the tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions.

Hank Shocklee: The first thing we would do is the beat, the skeleton of the track. The beat would actually have bits and pieces of samples already in it, but it would only be rhythm sections. Chuck would start writing and trying different ideas to see what worked. Once he got an idea, we would look at it and see where the track was going. Then we would just start adding on whatever it needed, depending on the lyrics. I kind of architected the whole idea. The sound has a look to me, and Public Enemy was all about having a sound that had its own distinct vision. We didn’t want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff–bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature.

Stay Free!: How did you use samplers as instruments?

Chuck D: We thought sampling was just another way of arranging sounds. Just like a musician would take the sounds off of an instrument and arrange them their own particular way. So we thought we was quite crafty with it.

Shocklee: “Don’t Believe the Hype,” for example–that was basically played with the turntable and transformed and then sampled. Some of the manipulation we was doing was more on the turntable, live end of it.

Stay Free!: When you were sampling from many different sources during the making of It Takes a Nation, were you at all worried about copyright clearance?

Shocklee: No. Nobody did. At the time, it wasn’t even an issue. The only time copyright was an issue was if you actually took the entire rhythm of a song, as in looping, which a lot of people are doing today. You’re going to take a track, loop the entire thing, and then that becomes the basic track for the song. They just paperclip a backbeat to it. But we were taking a horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces.

Stay Free!: Did you have to license the samples in It Takes a Nation of Millions before it was released?

Shocklee: No, it was cleared afterwards. A lot of stuff was cleared afterwards. Back in the day, things was different. The copyright laws didn’t really extend into sampling until the hip-hop artists started getting sued. As a matter of fact, copyright didn’t start catching up with us until Fear of a Black Planet. That’s when the copyrights and everything started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and people were taking whole songs. It got so widespread that the record companies started policing the releases before they got out.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn’t be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout–meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound–for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you’re looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.

Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, “Your artist is doing this,” so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.

Shocklee: By 1990, all the publishers and their lawyers started making moves. One big one was Bridgeport, the publishing house that owns all the George Clinton stuff. Once all the little guys started realizing you can get paid from rappers if they use your sample, it prompted the record companies to start investigating because now the people that they publish are getting paid.

Stay Free!: There’s a noticeable difference in Public Enemy’s sound between 1988 and 1991. Did this have to do with the lawsuits and enforcement of copyright laws at the turn of the decade?

Chuck D: Public Enemy’s music was affected more than anybody’s because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn’t have been anything–they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can’t really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that’s sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It’s going to hit the tape harder. It’s going to slap at you. Something that’s organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.

Chuck D: Copyright laws pretty much led people like Dr. Dre to replay the sounds that were on records, then sample musicians imitating those records. That way you could get by the master clearance, but you still had to pay a publishing note.

Shocklee: See, there’s two different copyrights: publishing and master recording. The publishing copyright is of the written music, the song structure. And the master recording is the song as it is played on a particular recording. Sampling violates both of these copyrights. Whereas if I record my own version of someone else’s song, I only have to pay the publishing copyright. When you violate the master recording, the money just goes to the record company.

Chuck D: Putting a hundred small fragments into a song meant that you had a hundred different people to answer to. Whereas someone like EPMD might have taken an entire loop and stuck with it, which meant that they only had to pay one artist.

Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different sounds?

Chuck D: Exactly. There’s only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood’s “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You” and revamped it in his own way but basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It’s easier to sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire collage element is out the window.

Shocklee: We’re not really privy to all the laws and everything that the record company creates within the company. From our standpoint, it was looking like the record company was spying on us, so to speak.

Chuck D: The lawyers didn’t seem to differentiate between the craftiness of it and what was blatantly taken.

Stay Free!: Switching from the past to the present, on the new Public Enemy album, Revolverlution, you had fans remix a few old Public Enemy tracks. How did you get this idea?

Chuck D: We have a powerful online community through Rapstation.com, PublicEnemy.com, Slamjams.com, and Bringthenoise.com. My thing was just looking at the community and being able to say, “Can we actually make them involved in the creative process?” Why not see if we can connect all these bedroom and basement studios, and the ocean of producers, and expand the Bomb Squad to a worldwide concept?

Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There’s one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert instrumental as the backing track for your “By the Time I Get to Arizona.” It sounds like you’re rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without permission?

Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it’s great.

music, politics

>Supporting the scene

4 Comments

>
Advance Patrol is yet another band who has decided to release its new album El Futuro via The Pirate Bay – for free, fully legal. Click here to download.
Also visit their web where you can listen before download and if you like it, give these guys a few dollars at their paypal adress. I haven’t even heard the album yet, but I still contribute with 100 SEK to support their cause. This way the money ends up where they belong – with the artists!

Cool thing is that Advance Patrol, who was unknowingly being used against The Pirate Bay in the trial, this time own the music themselves, meaning they can do whatever they want with it.

The hiphop group known as Advance Patrol will release its new album on The Pirate Bay today. They will do so to spread their music to as many as possible, and at the same time discredit the prosecution against The Pirate Bay, a prosecution where Advanced Patrol has been used as a scapegoat in the circus around the court proceedings.
– We never asked to be plaintiffs in this case, Gonza from Advance Patrol explains, they used us as scapegoats in a fight in which we don’t wish to participate. We refuse to be used in a war against our fans.
– You cannot legislate away file sharing, Gonza says. Those who fileshares our music are also those who appreciate it the most. They are my friends, and friendship is something to be valued highly. That’s why we’re giving away El Futuro to the internet, to our friends.
Press release

politics

>Why vote for piracy?

18 Comments

>

Why vote for piracy?
Well, the thing is: It’s not a vote for piracy.
(For pretty much the same opinion in Swedish,
read this great editorial written by Eva Franchell, Aftonbladet.)

I promised myself not to vote anymore, but promises are made to be broken, so… Here’s why I vote for The Pirate Party in the European Parliament elections 2009.

I think a statement need to be made. Things need to change, because this doesn’t have to be a game for the elite anylonger.

So, piracy then… No, it’s not about being able to snatch whatever you want off the internet.
It’s about the society we’re facing, not even in a distant future, but now, right now, where corrupt judges who know virtually nothing about the internet violate civil rights, where FRA rule, where IPRED is a fact, where ordinary companies have become extraordinary cops, where freedom is at stake – pretty much because the people in power don’t understand what’s going on. These people are more interested in profit than human rights.

You think this ”freedom” talk is exaggerated? Look at France and their recently adopted HADOPI law.
You think The Pirate Bay trial was legit? Then let’s make all post offices responsible for providing the infrastructure for illegal sharing of drugs, weapons et cetera, and sue the shit out of them.

Yes, The Pirate Party is a silly name. And they look silly as well, and their logo is childish. But why care about looks? Most people don’t even know what The Pirate Party is all about.
Just to pick an example: I bet 90% of the Swedish population thinks that The Pirate Party wants to abolish copyright law. Not true.

Usually I’d be a Green Party/Left Party kinda guy, even though I detest party politics, as well as the obsolete left/right scale (check the results of my political tests here). But regarding these specific issues, The Green Party and The Left Party are not as well equipped as The Pirate Party, even though they – on the surface – have pretty much the same opinions regarding these issues.
The problem is that The Green/Left Party have about a billion other issues to deal with, hence they won’t have a billionth of the time (that The Pirate Party has) to deal with what I believe to be the most important question of today – civil rights. The more issues you have to deal with, the less energy is put into each and everyone of them. That’s why The Pirate Party ought to be so much stronger than The Green Party and The Left Party altogether – regarding these specific issues.

Because The Pirate Party is pretty much only interested in integrity and civil/human rights. That’s their strenght. They’re acting childish and stupid when it comes to other issues, but here they rule.
”If you don’t believe that civil rights is the most important political issue right now, then don’t vote for us.” That’s a direct quote from the leader of the pack, Rick Falkvinge.

I’m not sure how much power they will have if they get elected, but my vote is cast with hope so that these issues are constantly being dealt with by people who know what they’re talking about.

And if you still think it’s all about downloading files off the internet… Nigga, please!

That being said, I just downloaded some files off the internet…
Try it, you’ll like it!
http://soundsofzilence.com/
politics

>Abu Ghraib – The photos Obama is trying to block

Leave a comment

>

You’ve all been reading about President Obama trying to block previously unpublished photos from Abu Ghraib (Why? Because the pictures would “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan). Well, Obomba, this is the age of the Internet where you cannot silence the opposition anylonger.
Here are some of the 60 unpublished photos of US troops abusing prisoners in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. There are loads more photos, still unpublished, and there are thousands of documents regarding torture yet to be released. We haven’t seen the worst yet.

Thumbnails here. (Warning!)



philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Eleven

6 Comments

>

Harvard University canteen

The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of Nazi concentration camp doctors following World War II were like a joke. Because of that, after the trial, the judges, concerned that there had been no clear guidelines available to them on which to base their condemnation of these defendants, made up rules of their own to be used in future similar trials. These rules were to be hailed pretty much globally as the golden rules regarding experimentation on human subjects, and this set of ethic principles were collectively named The Nuremberg Code.
”The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential, and the person involved should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any elements of force, fraud, deceit, duress…”
This says pretty much why The Nuremberg Trial was a joke.
However, the Code was ignored by many. One of those who violated the Code was Henry Murray.


”Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?”.
This was the invitation to a group of Harvard students who had enrolled in a popular psychology course in the fall of 1959. Around seventy students volunteered and twenty-two were picked by the researchers. What the invitation failed to say was that the experiments would last not one, but three academic years. It did not reveal that the students would be decieved. Nor did it provide information about the purpose or possible effects.

At the time when Kaczynski decided to participate in the experiments, Murray was a giant figure in the world of psychology. His Explorations in Personality (1938) is considered a classic by many, and the Thematic Apperception Test, TAT, developed by Murray and colleague Christiana Morgan, became widely used by psychologists all over the world. Also, during World War II, while working for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA), Murray helped develop a system for testing the capacity of recruits for clandestine warfare, which is widely used by government and business today. He was of course a great influence on his students.
However, he was very intolerant to criticism. Many claim that’s why he feared to publish his work. He took everything personally, and couldn’t keep his feelings and science apart. This was the essence of these experiments: Murray’s research lacked the objective controls that the scientific method demanded.

Also, Murray was a complex character. For instance, he led a double life, which might shed some light on his experiments that I’ll discuss further on. He constantly masked a life bordering on the bizarre, probably as a result of his childhood (classic stuff: he felt rejected by his hypercritical mother and tormented by his dominant older sister) and was angry, narcissistic, sexually ambivalent, repressed… Ina May Greer, Murray’s longtime assistant said he was full of “anger, frustration, aggression, hostility, need to punish, need to explode, need to let go of all the controls of society and live out whatever mood was there, whatever instinct or impulse was there… This was stronger in him than in most people.”

In the summer he spent six weeks with Josephine Rantoul, his wife, and then six weeks with Christiana Morgan, his colleague and mistress. When together, the lovers explored the limits of their sexuality. They gave themselves pet names, where he was ”Mansol” and she was ”Wona”. Morgan wrote in her diary that ”our life was in the whip – the black whip that hurt”. In other words, they submitted themselves to extreme sadomasochism and role play which they called ”Walpurgis evenings” (Chase discusses this in more detail in his book, check here for the use of Walpurgis Night in popular culture).
According to Ina, Murray was a man who needed to be in total control, but also to be capable of exploding – and he exploded in violence when making love to Christiana. Their affair lasted over forty years.


Long addicted to amphetamines, Murray was introduced to LSD in 1959 by Timothy Leary, then a young professor in his department, who would soon become infamous as the advocate of psychedelic drug research (”Turn on, tune in, drop out” was his most famous catch phrase). One former colleague said that Murray ”took amphetamines and got himself whipped up to the point where he could work, and then he worked feverishly for as long as he could at a stretch and knocked himself out, and then he had to take sedatives to sleep”. Both Murray and Morgan were on a weird combination of sedative and pepper-up pills.
For more on LSD in (extremely vague) connection to the Unabomber, check out the (not so good) movie The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet.


And Murray was the guy that Kaczinsky was up against.
Kaczynski, a man with clearly defined goals and focus, somewhat of a genius, who was worried about the future of civilization, who had absolute faith in reason and who had great intellectual interests, where to meet Henry Murray, one of the world’s most prominent psychologists, whose science was an extension of his private turbulent life.
Darkness descends.

philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Ten

Leave a comment

>

Why are the most advanced civilizations also the most barbaric? It seems like the more human beings advance, the greater their crimes. In my mind, clearly inspired by Oswald Spengler as I am, the level of advancement in civilizations today is of no good. We have reached the peak and the further we advance, the more we destroy. This is definitely the age of decline, and technology is what increases our capacity for mayhem. In the 20th century we were even forced to invent new words to be able to deal with the madness: ”concentration camps”, ”genocide”, ”gulag”, ”ethnic cleansing”, ”collateral damage”, ”carpet bombing”… In the modern age progress equals destruction.
Spengler wrote: ”This machine-technics will end with the Faustian civilization and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten – our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon”.

Social philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford writes in The Conduct of Life (1951) that ”we have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where the feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end”.
Theodore Kaczynski, who arrived at Harvard in September 1958 (at the age of 16), read this, and a whole lot of other books that were part of the courses he took in expository writing, German literature, deductive and inductive logic, Western literature and philosophy, and the history of science. Harvard’s social environment at the time was clearly dominated by the ideas of the relativity of morals and the irrationality of religion. Here, at Harvard, is where the Unabomber got most of his ideas from.

When reading about the Unabomber at Harvard everybody seems to focus on his outsider attitude, that he kept to himself and never spoke to people he met in the hallway. What people seem to forget is that this is pretty normal behaviour, especially at Harvard at the time, where being labelled a ”loner” was like having a badge of honor. Dealing with highly complex mathematics there was little time for socializing. Kaczynski did not stand out.
Everybody who’s been studying at a university (or just left the house, for that matter) knows you don’t just stop for a chat when meeting people. You do that with people you know, otherwise you just keep walking. The same thing goes for the ideas of the Unabomber. Any sane person would think like him, only any sane person wouldn’t execute those ideas to that extent, in such a brutal way. And again, Ted did not stand out. Alston Chase writes in his book Harvard and the Unabomber:
”Another one of my classmates was expelled for dropping a bomb off the Anderson Bridge into the Charles River, setting off an explosion that shook windows throughout Cambridge. After leaving college, he was recruited by the CIA, which employed his incendiary talents during the succesful, agency-sponsored 1954 putsch in Guatemala…”.

So, again we come to the conclusion that Theodore Kaczynski was pretty much like everybody else. What made him snap, then? As Alston Chase writes, and what seems highly probable: it was The Experiment that took Ted over the edge.
More about that in Part Eleven.

politics

>False media – we don’t need it, do we? (Part 2)

Leave a comment

>
Mass media – the drug of the nation.
Alongside the politicians, this is where we find the world’s greatest hypocrites. For 2 742 days mass media in Sweden was completely silent regarding the Dawit Isaak case. Now, all of a sudden, the four largest daily newspapers got together in a bombastic Free Dawit campaign, and I can’t help but shake my head in dismay. Why now? Why just the daily papers? And where’s their commitment the other days of the year? Shame on you, filthy swine.
Dawit Isaak has been the case in alternative press and blogs since day one.

And talking about swine: What about mass media and the swine flu? And the corporations feeding off our fear and the mad money they make?
How many people have died so far? Compare that to the number of people living in each country. And then check back on Africa: How many children die there everyday due to starvation? Some kind of answer: Think of it as 12 jumbo jets full of children that crash each day. And yet there’s only a massive wall of silence regarding these people.
Misanthropy accelerates… for each grave.

But then again, maybe this guy is the reason we don’t care. ;)