Category Archives: politics

music, philosophy, politics

>Socialized death sentence

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You punch in at 8:30 every morning, except you punch in at 7:30 following a business holiday, unless it’s a Monday, then you punch in at 8 o’clock. Punch in late and they dock ya!
Incoming articles get a voucher, outgoing articles provide a voucher. Move any article without a voucher and they dock ya!
Letter size a green voucher, oversize a yellow voucher, parcel size a maroon voucher. Wrong color voucher and they dock ya!
6787049A/6. That is your employee number. It will not be repeated! Without your employee number you cannot get your paycheck.
Inter-office mail is code 37, intra-office mail 37-3, outside mail is 3-37. Code it wrong and they dock ya!
This has been your orientation. Is there anything you do not understand, is there anything you understand only partially? If you have not been fully oriented, you must file a complaint with personnel. File a faulty complaint and they dock ya!

Isn’t it strange? A job I loved a couple of months ago (November 2008) has turned into crap. This isn’t supposed to be a blog about my private life, but some things cannot go unnoticed. Work kills.
Dystopia, one of the best bands to ever grace this beautiful planet infested with rotten humans, puts it well in their super smash hit Socialized Death Sentence. Check out the earlier Dystopia post for even more joy. Happy time!


I am just a fucking slave
bust my ass for minimum wage
Before I’m paid the system comes and takes half away…
for bombs someday
My boss hates my fucking guts
I was never good enough
If I’m injured on the job
he’ll say ‘tough luck’
He’ll find someone else to fuck
My job… My life

Landlord’s pissed, rent is due
Haven’t worked in a few
If I don’t pay I get evicted
I’m fucking screwed
What am I supposed to do?
Each day… I die

Your… Your job sucks
The system fucks
A timeclock head
I’m dead
Employed… Mind void
Destroyed… Can’t avoid

I try… to survive
…losing…
Work, work
Socialized death sentence
System, system
Fucked all around
Work, work
like taking cyanide
System, system
Washing it down…
And I die again tomorrow…
When I wake up

This is Louis Harrell with his retirement award from J.P. Stevens Mill, his employer, shortly before his death 1978. Harrell died at age 62 of byssinosis, or “brown lung,” after years of inhaling dust generated in cotton manufacture. Brown lung – a term coined by Ralph Nader – occurs almost exclusively in cotton processing workers who handle raw cotton.
Byssinosis could have been recognized sooner. Health officials as far back as the 1930s were aware of the dangers of workers’ prolonged exposure to cotton dust. Because it was able to control the outflow of health data, the cotton industry stalled acknowledgment of the disease for 50 years. Finally in 1978 OSHA imposed a protective standard on textile factories. It estimated that 35,000 people had the disease and 100,000 more were at risk.
Today cotton production and byssinosis are largely ended in the US, but both are common in the third world.

philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Thirteen

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The 60’s were years of chaos. People began feeling a sense of disillusionment with the system. To Kaczynski this would become disastrous. As he continued to suffer through Murray’s experiments, he began to worry about society’s use of ”mind control”. He was convinced that academics – in particular scientists – were servants of the system, employed to develop techniques for behavioral control of populations. And Murray, who treated human beings as guinea pigs, and who was at the forefront in his field, widely accepted by everybody, wasn’t the only cause for Kaczynski’s conviction.

Alston Chase, in his book Harvard and the Unabomber, has a seemingly endless list of what caused the chaos and conviction:
Technological progress, the space race, the escalation of the Cold War, the sexual revolution, the birth of drug culture, television, the civil rights revolution, consumerism, the environmental awakening, The Cuban missile crisis, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, The Manchurian Candidate (a movie about brainwashing and mind control), the first Wal-Mart store, the birth-control pill, the women rights movement, Timothy Leary, the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., the ”Summer of Love”, anti-Vietnam war protests, riots in hundreds of cities and college campuses, the moon landings, Woodstock, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cambodia bombings…

In 1967 around 150,000 people marched against the Vietnam War in New York and San Francisco. Later that year, another 150,000 protestors marched against the Pentagon. The CIA launched ”Operation CHAOS”, a plan to spy on American citizens that would eventually collect the names of 300,000 people. In March 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initiated a Counter-intelligence program against what they called ”Black-Nationalist-Hate-Groups”. Two weeks later, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. triggered race riots in 125 cities, causing 46 deaths, 21,270 arrests, and involving 55,000 National Guard and federal troops. In November, students at San Francisco State College began a strike against the war that would last five months.
At Harvard, April 9, 1969, the home of Theodore Kaczynski, things would change too. Without warning, three hundred students charged the steps of the administration buildings and hung the red and black banner of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) from a window. Altogether, forty-one students were injured.
Chaos reigned and The Age of Reason had come to an end. The last nails in the coffin of the Western civilization was about to be driven down.

The influental French philosopher, historian and sociologist Michel Foucault had come to the conclusion that ”there was morality nowhere” (in the words of Norman Cantor). ”His culture is a culture of political despair. He sees only a struggle for power, a manipulation of ideas and ethical values by all groups of society through all moments of time, including the present.”
The shift of emphasis from the individual to the system reinforced feelings of helplessness. The system ruled and everyone was a victim. This was eventually distilled down into one thought: The system rested on power alone and therefore must be destroyed.

Theodore Kaczynski chose to retreat to the wilderness. He wanted to escape the clutches of civilization and then later plot its destruction.

philosophy, politics, religion

>Belief and Bloodshed: The Religion of Genocide

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First and last illustrations in this article are stolen from Babalon Graphics.
Go there for more relevant art.

My belief in humanity and God was shattered many years ago. The belief in humanity and God to do good, that is. But ignorance, injustice, hypocrisy and plain evil are always present, and thus form the basis of the ultimate truth of mankind.
There’s no doubt in my mind that humanity would be better off dead, and it seems to me quite strange how one could see it any other way. What signs are there that tell of a brighter future? Signs of dystopia are present wherever there are humans.
It should be obvious. The history of mankind is sealed with blood. Man was put on earth to fight, wage war and destroy. That’s what history tells us, and why would this ever change? Mankind is not good enough. Never will be. Our future breed is the last, to quote a brilliant Neurosis song (read the lyrics here), and rightfully so.

The shrouded reason, the bleeding answer
The human plague in womb
Bring clouds of war
Let us rest
Our future breed is the last

Violence and religion have been closely related since the dawn of civilization. While institutionalized religions have used violence against both their disciples and their real (or imagined) opponents, there is also this thing with religion as a provider of spiritual and material comfort to its victims of political/social violence. It works both ways; religious faith can both motivate aggression as well as constrain it. Religion helps to normalize genocide by providing myths of ultimate redemption, or by saying that it’s ok to annihilate your neighbour… In short, religion is used to legitimize and motivate mass murder.

Christian churches were clearly involved on many levels in preparing the theological, moral, political and mythical basis for genocide in this century. The Institute and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, established in 1939, greatly contributed to spread the idea of Aryan-Christianity by ”proving” that Jesus was racially an Aryan who fought to destroy the Jews. Such German Christians defined themselves both as a chosen people and as a victimized people, and they were socially and academically respected. Even though there were supporters as well as opposers to Nazism among the church leaders, what most of them had in common was the dislike of Jewish presence in Germany. Instead of discussing the moral of what was going on, they provided the perpetrators of the atrocities with religious comfort. They provided a cozy home where the killers could find peace and support, resulting in moral numbness.


We all know about the traditional Jewish concept of Jews as the Chosen People, the Jewish exclusivity and the Holocaust with a capital H. It’s pretty ironic then that the Nazis adopted this concept, them being the racial superiors, the Chosen Ones, and that the Jewish victims, and those who helped rescue them, went for the Christian concept of universalism: all people are equal – especially the weak (!).
Nowadays universalism is rarely to be seen as the racist Zionist movement continues its relentless massacre. The Zionist movement insists on the uniqueness of the Holocaust and is consequently refusing to consider any other case of mass murder as comparable. For example, Zionists do not look upon Armenians as fellow victims of genocide. For many Jews the Holocaust was directly related to Christian antisemitism. Armenians are Christians. Hence, no support from the Zionists. Also, the state of Israel needs to maintain good relations with Turkey, which has never even acknowledged the Armenian genocide, not even expressing regret for it. Politics and religion, not a very good mix.

Speaking of the Holocaust, Palestine radical author Hayim Israel Tsimrman puts the blame for the Holocaust on the younger generation of pious Jews in the 1930s who rejected tradition and betrayed their task of carrying Judaism forward. Their abandonment of religion along with their failure to return to the Land of Israel made it even worse. In his book Tamim Pa’alo, written shortly after the war, he argues that this is the answer to the question ”Why did God do this to this nation?”.
Radical, indeed.

The genocide in Rwanda can be traced back to the impact of the Catholic church on the population. The Belgian and French colonialism – for its own purposes – separated the inhabitants into the ethnic groups of Tutsi and Hutu. The church took part in this process and shifted its support from one group to another according to whoever was in power. This eventually led to the phenomenon of priests taking an active part in decieving the Tutsi population, calling them to seek shelter in the churches, which then became sites of mass murder. Here was the true face of the church, who claimed to bring Western civilization and Western morality to non-European and non-Christian peoples. The Vatican still denies any role in this genocide, and many of those clergy men who were involved are still active in Rwanda.


Back in the day of the mighty Inquisition, one was able to escape getting killed simply by converting to Christianity, thus losing one’s true identity, risking social exclusion and most importantly facing divine punishment. The horror!
Modern genocide tend to outrule this option, since religion tends to be related to race. The most extreme example might be how Serbian religious nationalists claim that Slavic Muslims suffer from a defective gene and therefore must be cleansed by murder or expulsion, since they cannot be transformed even by conversion.

Genocide – savagery, limitless brutality and cruelty.
Spirituality – love, compassion and humanness.
They walk together, hand in hand.

Article inspired by the book In God’s Name (2001).

politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Twelve

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”We were told that we were to engage in a debate about our personal philosophies, and then found that our adversary in the debate subjected us to various insults that, presumably, the psychologists helped him to concoct. It was a highly unpleasant experience.”
Ted Kaczynski to attorney Michael Mello, September 19, 1998

So what was this experiment, The Dyad as it was called?
Its intent was to catch the student by surprise, to decieve him, bring him to anger, ridicule his beliefs and verbally and psychologically brutalize him. One month before the actual experiment – the confrontation – took place, the students were interviewed in depth by Murray and his colleagues about their hopes and dreams of the future. They were asked to write extensive essays explaining their personal philosophies of life, as well as detailed autobiographies answering intimate questions on a range of subjects from thumb-sucking and toilet training to masturbation and erotic fantasies. They were subject to a lot of tests that included a Rorschach test, a time-metaphor test, the TAT, analyses of their literary tastes, an odor association test, a word association test, and twenty more at the very least. The results were then analysed by researchers, who developed a psychological portrait of each personality in every possible dimension.
Then it was time for the confrontation.

The students had been led to believe that they were to debate their life stories and moral with another graduate student like himself. However, when the subject arrived for the debate he was led into a very brightly lit room and seated in front of a one-way mirror. A camera recorded his every move through a hole in the wall. Electrodes that recorded his heart rate were attached to his body.
Instead of a casual student they were confronted with a talented lawyer who knew everything about them. The lawyer was carefully coached to launch an aggressive attack on his younger and totally unprepared victim as he was trying to explain and defend his philosophy of life – for the purpose of upsetting him as much as possible. Many participants of course found this treatment severely traumatic.
After these sessions they were called back for several ”recall” interviews, and sometimes they were asked to comment on the videos of themselves, were they were being reduced to anger, often totally lost, not being able to finish sentences because they were caught off guard and so on. In the last year of the experiment Murray made the students available to his personal graduate students, to serve as guinea pigs for their own research projects.
Alden E. Wessman, a former research associate of Murray’s who had been bothered by the ethical dimensions of this study said: ”Later, I thought: ‘We took and took and used them and what did we give them in return?’”

Kaczynski’s code name during the experiment was ”Lawful”.
The confrontation took place during the winter of 1960.

politics

>The Demonized Ahmadinejad

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>Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, as well as co-author of The New Color Line and The Tyranny of Good Intentions. I haven’t read any of his books, but his article Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran – Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections, published by Counterpunch, is worth considering.

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Full article here.

politics

>Ahmadinejad disclaimer

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>Earlier on, when I’ve written about Ahmadinejad, I’ve discussed his honest and straight-forward questions to George W. Bush (read his letter to the man here), his thoughts about the Holocaust and his relationship with the United States. I’ve never written about Ahmadinejad and his relationship to his people. It it obvious that he is an asshole opposed by many, and that the election was a fraud (or was it, really?). But he’s also worshipped by many.
However, when seeing what’s going on in Iran right now I hope that people will understand the need of civil rights and use their right to vote. I also hope that people will understand the importance of honest media.

Still, that doesn’t change my opinion about Ahmadinejad regarding what I’ve written earlier, because that’s a whole different ball game.

Click the images to enlarge
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi demonstrate in Tehran on Monday, June 15, 2009.

Supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wave Iranian and religious flags during a victory celebration in central Tehran June 14, 2009.

A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009.


The best way to get photos and updates seems to be Twitter:
#iranelection
#Tehran
etc…
Nima Dervish updates regularly in Swedish here.

interview, music, politics

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

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>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.

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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.