Attention
shoppers! As you peruse the aisle of your random CD rack you may stumble upon a
jewel case with an eye-catching image and a generous helping of tracks from a
variety of artists, most or all of which you’ve never heard of. If you’re in a
store with alarmed packaging around the CDs, you’ll notice that the one in your
hand is as unencumbered as an angry feminist at a bra burning. Interesting. Go
see what the clerk has to say about it, ugh…. The kid doesn’t know anything and
can’t find any info on the store computer. Not only that but the bar-code
doesn’t seem to work either. Maybe you want it anyway and they pull a price out
of the air and on you go. Perhaps the track by Evolution Control Committee
caught your expert, indie eye and you took the gamble, or perhaps you never gave
it another
thought.
Whether you like it or not you’ve become a participant in the phenomenon know as
“droplifting’. A word coined by Richard Holland (aka Turntable Trainwreck) which
is meant to describe the opposite of shoplifting, bringing in the goods and
leaving them for no sane reason, except to perpetuate a kind of dadaist
publicity stunt. Holland, not being picked up by a label or predicting not to be
picked up, would discreetly drop his discs in stores, you know…. don’t quit yer
day job. Around the continent shifty characters are lurking around (usually)
major department stores and CD racks droplifting the two thousand existing Free
Speech for Sale compilations under the appropriate file or even right there in
the top-seller display rack.
A loosely knit collective known as Snuggles (Negativland fans will recognize the
reference from the “U2” single) – “New Media Collective” are behind the
compilation of re-contextualised advertisements, cut-up, processed, remixed and
generally fucked with. The Snuggles list is at least 9 years old and originally
began as a Negativland discussion list. List members have taken the DIY ethic on
in a funny yet combative or cynical strategy;
”The album's
source material is copy written from several advertisers and producers who would
charge us way too much money to legally clear the samples, if they are even
willing to negotiate at all. The content of this album would likely offend them
to the point where they wouldn't want it to exist, as it criticizes their very
industry using the same clever tricks they use to sell their products. Frankly,
we don't feel any of them deserve to get paid a second time for the recordings
they've already been overpaid to produce. More importantly, I feel what we're
doing is making new art out of their old art, and furthermore, we should be
allowed to be financially compensated ourselves for making such art! This is
also one of the subtle ironies of this project.” – freespeechforsale.com
But hey, now
that you know the secret, don’t be a patsy, all the tracks and more are
available at the freespeechforsale.com site! . In fact Free Speech for Sale is
the third in a series of compilations from the Snuggles group, the first two
being named “The Droplift Project” and “Dictionaraoke” , not to mention various
other side-projects and online give-aways from many of the artists. The Press
kit explains it like this: "With this recent compilation, we want to show the
public the harmlessness of appropriating samples from commercials: harmless
because the samples will not advertise anything...though they may say something
altogether different, it just won't be the message the advertiser intended us to
hear." explains Every Man. "William S. Burroughs did it with real text in the
'Naked Lunch', Andy Warhol did this with his 'Brillo Box' sculpture and his '100
Soup Cans' painting, and we're doing the same thing in Free Speech For Sale with
audio." The web-page designed to closely resemble the “As Seen On TV” site was
built by Snuggles member Pimpdaddysupreme, who also works with audio-art troupe
Workshoppe Radio Phonik, both of which appear on the FSFS CD.
The CD’s
curator is a multi-talented computer systems administrator who goes by the alias
Everyman. With other members of the list in various fits of flight and fancy,
Everyman stepped up to the task of bringing Free Speech for sale into fruition.
According to Everyman the project began being kicked around as early as 2,000
right after the Dictionaraoke compilation. You’ll find Everyman’s contribution
to the CD under yet another alias, the Button, which is derived from his
late-night, 3 hour experimental radio show Press the Button on WRUW in
Cleveland.
After mailing hundreds of CDs around to interested droplifters, Everyman
realized he hadn’t even started his role in the CD giveaway but remedied that on
a road trip from Ohio to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. “… I droplifted
some of these in the Flying J store by Interstate 80, and I’ve been doing this
at every single Flying J stop. I drop 5 to 10 of these in the CD section which
is right in front of the check-out counter and they’d never notice. I did this
day after day after day while driving out (there), and at one point when I was
standing in line I heard a trucker behind me picking it up and looking at it and
he said the name of it, you know, he said (adding a southern drawl) ‘Free speech
for sale? This must be somethin’ new because I’ve seen this at every goddamn
truck-stop for the past 2 days!’ I was trying hard to stifle my laughter”.
Stopping at the same locations on the way back from Burning Man, Everyman found
that half of the Discs had been picked up. Either bought or stolen, and that’s
the nature of the game, really.
The website offers a place for droplifters to write stories of their exploits;
where they’ve set the discs (ideally in a “hot new” items display somewhere),
and hopefully soon, a victim… I mean lucky individual will post something about
buying the disc. The stories may include something like this example from
Snuggles’ member The Former Yugoslavia; “The other night the copy of FSFS that I
dropped off at Target (Asheville) was still on the same end-cap more than a week
later, only it had been moved in front of the new Lionel Richie CD. So I tried
to buy it. Surprisingly, there wasn't much of a struggle - I got sent over to
the customer service desk, they checked their database and couldn't find any
matching products, so they sent me on my way with it... only to have me turn
around, come back in the store and "redroplift" it (this time on a "popular
music" end-cap in front of one of the registers). Fun fun fun...”
Of course nobody really sees dime one from this experiment in nonsensical
marketing, so why do it, and why take appropriated material and rework it to be
something funnier, ironic and consequently more entertaining? “Steve Hise
discussed this a little bit,” Everyman ventures to explain, paraphrasing audio
artist and Detritus.net owner Hise “where there’s different levels of
plundering, there’s the subversive level, like why would an artist plunder,
would it be for subversion or would it be because its so neat because it’s so
new, its against the law? You know, I’m doing this because it’s wrong, just like
some people smoke pot because it’s technically illegal and they argue that if it
got legal it’d probably cut the amount of pot smokers in this country in half. A
lot of people would try it just because it’s legal but then it would just fade
away.” This, he says, likely makes up about 75% of the Snuggles collective.
“…Then there’s the level of plundering that’s like ‘I want to do this because I
want to make a statement and I use recycling as a tool for my art and not
necessarily because I only rely on recycling as an art form.’”
Steve Hise (a contributor to Free Speech for Sale, etc.)
told me about his involvement in the Snuggles group, which he said was fairly
minimal at this point because of his own focus on the art of appropriation in
audio and visual. His website Detritus.net hosts a number of on-the-go projects,
news and issues around creating through plunder, or like the website says;
“Detritus is a gallery, a village, a library, a studio, a news service. Detritus
is keeping watch on relevant events and developments, and always adding more
content to its pages.” Among the fine artists Steev calls friend, and may do the
occasional collaboration with, are People Like Us, The Tape Beatles, The
Evolution Control Committee and Wobbly just to name a few.
I asked Steev Hise about a recent speech he gave at the
Electrofringe festival and got more about the question of why; “Electrofringe
is a yearly electronic art festival in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. I
was invited and attended in 2001. (see electrofringe.org for more details ) My
talk there was basically about using cultural recycling as a form of cultural
activism. I also discussed the history and purpose of Detritus.net, and the 3
"stages" of cultural recycling, in my view. What I mean by stages are sort of
modes of operation or rationale in artists that engage in cultural recycling.
In other words,
why do people do it? The stages are:
1. The Pleasure
of the Intertext
2. The Glamour
of Theft
3. Cultural
Activism.”
He continues;
“These stages are not necessarily in that order for everyone, and often someone
will drift back and forth between them or they co-exist in 2 or 3 stages at
once. The first is about simply enjoying the act of cutting and mixing
pre-existing cultural artifacts. It's fun. The second is about exulting in the
sort of outlaw chic of knowing you are "stealing" intellectual property. The
third is using cultural recycling as a tool to convey meaning and hopefully make
positive change in culture and society.”
Everyman admits that, to the Snuggles group, making a track compelling without
the humour and irony can be difficult but valuable; “…
Andrew
Steven’s Cyberphobe
(‘The Year of my Nervous Breakdown’) CD where he included 9-11 samples, “…me and
David Dixon of Stark Effect were discussing that very concept saying that the
one thing that the Snuggles artists use a lot is irony. It makes it cute, it
makes it funny and does make it have a greater impact, but the one real hard
thing to do is sometimes make a track without the usage of irony. It’s like the
real artistic challenge. I felt that Cyberphobe did just that. It’s really cool,
it’s not funny but it’s still entrancing to listen to.” “Negativland has some
tracks like that. My favorite on is off the album Free, which is called ‘The Gun
and the Bible’. It’s chilling, I mean the Bible, this loving, peaceful thing in
the name of God and religion, which stands for the ten commandments, ‘Thou shalt
not kill’ but there’s so many people killed with a gun in the name of religion.”
Whether the tracks on Free Speech for Sale are ironic, silly, surreal, stupid or
all of the above, they are unarguably compelling. Certain tracks and strategic
edits are hard to shake from your mind sometimes, i.e. Tim Maloney’s “Shatner”
with William Shatner informing you how to choose a career in “TV VCR repair or
TV VCR repair or get a degree in TV VCR repair”, Stop Children’s “Medicine Head
24 Hour” in which “…one daily dose provides 24 hours of headache, diarrhea and
abdominal pain.” Evolution Control Committee mixes pineapples with Dippidy
doodoo. Social Security’s touching “Hi, Bye” with the advice “For free help call
home.” Toward the end of the disc some of the artists bring FSFS to an almost
creepy end with darker audio-art collages. It’s truly a novel compilation with
ingredients for the experimentally minded and thinking industrial fan.
If that weren’t enough, the website includes several bonus tracks from these
artists and other potential Snugglers. “I don’t think the number has stopped
because people keep making them” Everyman says, “I guess it’s not clearly
defined but we’re always accepting bonus tracks. If you some idea of making a
song out of a commercial then by all means, you know, that’s what the bonus site
is for.”
To get involved in droplifting, while the discs last, or to find out more about
the Snuggles collective, go to the
website at
