Art Versus Brand | Stealing for Inspiration

Last week, my partner’s sister and brother-in-law drove down from their home in Steinbeck Country, Salinas, for the wild industry freakshow in Orange County that is the yearly global music products convention known as NAMM. Two years ago I got to walk the innards of the Anaheim Convention Center and lasciviously linger over the Rickenbacker and Paul Reed Smith guitars, the same brands used by my personal rock gods, Paul Weller and Carlos Santana. Few things question my atheism and music and the ocean are two things that reinforce any inkling of spirituality that lies dormant inside my shell. So in these rare moments I must seize the emotional connection I have to large bodies of water and to the guitar-bass-drum trifecta. I used to check out Ozomatli, Invisbl Skratch Picklz and Mix Master Mike so I go straight into auto-pilot mode and bob my head in response to the knob-noodling and crab-gripping (you know, like the kind that put DJ Shadow on the map) on the mixer by the toughest selectors sampling all the newest DJ gear. In grad school they tell you to never ever say this in relation to the burden of your identity, but in this situation, it felt natural. This was just a privileged peek inside the musically banal, the pragmatics of music making, the minutiae of roadie logistics, things like guitar pedals (no Big Muff to Tuff), drum equipment, airport suitcases for guitar amps, digital versus analog, Luddites versus mouse-clickers.

If you have never been a part of music making or spending social time with friends in absolute silence except for the sound of Miles Davis’ fusion period cranked to 11 or even playing Dark Side of the Moon to a Wizard of Oz on mute then you might not find the aforementioned understandable but worthy of your derisive attention. There is a lot of crunchy curly hair, bellydancers, groupies-in-training, emulators and fanboys so engrossed in meeting everyone from Sheila E (which Zoe and Efrain did! LUCKY!) to Dave Mustaine that you forget that sometimes passions are messy and hard to look at with a serious face. I had no idea if we would run into any famous folk ourselves but I made to sure to dress the part of musical aficionado. On me though that look translates as Samantha Ronson in a funhouse mirror with my old-school fedora, white-shirt, hoodie vest and leather cuff even though I’m aiming for Damone in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sabrina, my partner, totally agrees to be my Lindsey Lohan. The people of NAMM look the way they do with no hint of irony and have no hopes or desire to ever appear on the webpages of hipster photography or mean-spirited sight-charting blogs. They just look like they work at a music shop in Downey.

The male-female ratio at NAMM is off by 1000% so all this male attention inundates my partner and her sister, as if they’re the Kelly LeBrock character from that movie, Weird Science, going down the escalator in the mall scene. I even see musicians I thought were dead but are actually alive like Bootsy Collins. I thought that dude was totally dead. I was wrong.

This year, I didn’t have a pass to official NAMM but managed to go and check out Armando Peraza and Giovanni Hidalgo to bring gender balance to the sausage party in one of the big Hilton ballrooms. Both men performed with other beloved studio musicians that, like Pereza and Hidalgo, contributed to popular understanding of Latin music classic recordings. But there’s a distinction to the musical appreciation and I just want to make that clear. Peraza and Hidalgo both appeared on recording by guys like Hector Lavoe, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, Santana and Charlie Parker. The lazy listener might have different occasions for which to hear recordings by these artists, nary one to actually approach any record to look at and study the credits and possible liner notes. They understood and obtained their appreciation of the musicians onstage through their personal attachments to the records these guys appeared on and there are many. Just call this a clichéd observation of fandom and commitment to craft but I just want to give it up to those that take the time between breakfast, lunch and dinner, punching in and punching out, happy hour and hangover to do their homework.

This episode dares me to think that Peraza and Hidalgo might be the last of the artists in a world where each day it’s not so much the concept, the virtuousity, the spirit anymore but the brand that gains circulation and popularity. I’m not suggesting artistic extinction it’s something else. Every year I’m finding myself admiring the hobby artist—those that do their craft out of love and not careerist necessity—and the multiple ways in which they admire other artists. Peraza and Hidalgo are by no means living in obscurity but maybe it’s because there will always be hobby artists that appreciate and understand the artistic labor of hired hands, musical braceros if you will but with better pay and different relation to posterity. I just think maybe someone like Santana is understood popularly more as a brand, you know like you hear Black Magic Woman at your Chicano nationalist uncle’s wedding party or the aisles of a Pep Boys and it feels like Coca-Cola for your ears, especially more so now when he adds vanilla and lime and diet to his repertoire by adding goofy pop singers crooning mindlessly on his later work. Maybe Santana is an artist in a world where the masses are unaware about how much they lose when they give their souls, credit card numbers and social security codes over to the corporate structure in the name of immediacy and convenience. It is the loss of patience, passion, and attention spans—the holy trinity in critical consumption—but the truth might be that some people would rather just download it and go, not pore over the grooves playing name-that-guitar-pedal.



And then before I fall into this tragic abyss fueled by self-righteous diatribes about the scarcity of artistic integrity and consumer-producer interface I look at this Jim Jarmusch quote that’s been circulating mightily up and down the blogosphere this last week about stealing with gusto in the pursuit of personal authenticity. Fortunately the quote operates like an inhaler calming my most reactionary impulses to rail against the artist becoming commodity. It pacifies my inner Jack Black-in-High Fidelity beast against getting mad for not just selling out but for stealing voraciously to sell out, getting mad because they don’t work the mind and soul-suck of the 9 to 5 while we slave after dinner to get that line break down or that chorus-verse-chorus into shape.

Does that mean that inspiration is always thievery? I guess it’s time to think about critical thievery and if it is going start playing a role in my own art-making practices (and maybe your own) and speculate if these practices coincide more with dominant mainstream artistic industry standards or intervene and disidentify against such standards. I guess because DIY-styles proliferate differently now because of the Internets it’s almost become really easy to become a brand. I mean part of me can’t hate on Shepard Fairey because the fool did follow and wheatpasted the trail blazed by Robbie Conal, even if it was with some stylized rendering of this totally geeky esoteric part of my WWF-watching past. Fairey does what has and will continue to make the masses clamor for more—makes the dorky cool. Transforming geeky knowledge, however trivial it is, into something visually stunning will always put money in your wallet. And for some, possibly the majority considering how hard it is to sway them, politics is really dorky, definitely uninteresting to look at because there’s not enough good art with the resources to be advertised as brands. I don’t want to spend time on qualifying dorky or turning it into some kind of keyword or whatever so let’s just keep going with it for now. Politics is dorky, political graphics is for a politicized niche of people that like to collect that kind of cultural document. I brought back a bunch of gorgeous OSPAAL posters from my first and only trip to Cuba ten years ago because I like to have cool graphics that match the interior of my political leanings. But if you look at those pictures of me from that trip then you will see that I indeed presented visually as a dork.

This is difficult damned-if-you-do terrain to hover over because I know there are two camps of artists out there—those that believe in citationality, that is, getting permission—and those that don’t. There is the “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal” bunch that feel emboldened to project those whims and calculations publicly. I guess Mark Vallen’s critique of the Obey man himself has me all in a tizzy, especially as I anticipate Favianna Rodriguez’ continued criticism of artist stealing from political visual archives to push their own careers further (like into the Smithsonian) and being self-aware about it while doing it. But then I think about hip-hop’s origins in the borrowing and stealing arena and its ability to take the old and repackage it into something truly transformative. Yet, I understand the murky ethics of it all because a lot of samples were never originally cleared in the beginning and there are clear legal issues at play. Then I’m feeling cagey about the Danny Hoch Taking Over show happening right now at the Kirk Douglas theater in Culver City. I wonder if he’s become a brand and if his is the brand about being the white guy that lives hip-hop as creed that tells mostly liberal white people that don’t listen to hip-hop that go to his shows why they suck for doing all this bad stuff to the black and brown folks whose teats, incidentally, he is allowed to suckle and who in return nod their heads in approval. Is that what we like because that is what we expect? And is that what we expect because we’re up on some shit about identity, politics and desire but don’t really question the rubric American Theater falls under and the political implications endemic to the industry (i.e.-filling theater seats with white butts).

But that industry is just one of many microcosms of our capitalist society and so we must ask ourselves how can we go beyond critiquing individual artists and address the real/right issue. Can’t we speak candidly about being ethical in our engagements and entanglements with authenticity? Are those unethical artistic practices by-products of fame? I am suggesting this mostly to counter the feelings of powerlessness and asshole-ness that arise when critiquing unethical artistic practices. Stealing still happens and as long as people are hungry it is going to keep happen. You still see the man claim a position that teeters between bashful and boastful about stealing people’s work and getting away with it in a recent Boing Boing video encounter between Fairey and famed street culture photographer, Glen E. Friedman. It’s all good bro’, you stole my shit and I busted you but we both ended up getting paid so it’s all good bro’. If you read the comments you’ll see something I wrote under my nom de guerre, Raquefella, to which someone promptly shoots back the Jean-Luc Godard line that Jarmusch pillows his own quote under which just tickles me.

Capitalism keeps us disconnected from art and the means of production. So instead of getting caught up trying to fight the behemoth of the brand name I have to return to the only form of consumption I know. I’m going to read the liner notes and spend time with a work of art and see if we connect. I’m going to meditate for a moment with the likes of the new Antony & The Johnsons CD or the latest book on street artist from NYC, James De La Vega and get a feeling going on some level. When I don’t have time then it’s off to the Starbucks to see what music they can spoonfeed to me because that brand is trying to corner a market on it. Too easy? Well, isn’t that what brands do?