We often think of music piracy as a modern problem stemming from the advent of digital storage and dissemination technology, when in fact, it predates SoulSeek, Napster and Kazaa by a long shot. Barry Kernfeld's article in issue #22 of Stay Free! magazine, "Pop Song Piracy: Napster in the 1930s and the Story of Fake Books", recounts the history of bootlegged song sheets. The Tin Pan Alley era of American songwriting (in the early 20th century) was the heyday of sheet music publishing.
According to Kernfeld, bootlegged lyric sheets began to appear in 1929, when the dominance of the recording industry rendered obsolete the paradigm of having one person in the home who could play the piano read from 35¢ pieces of sheet music for the household's entertainment. Musical notation became effete because of the easy access to recorded music, and cheap, bootlegged sheets containing only the lyrics to popular songs grew more attractive to consumers. The recording industry reacted to "songlegging" exactly how it reacts to filesharing today: it panicked, and began a series of crackdowns and arrests that did nothing to stem the tide. Eventually, music publishers caved to the public desire rather than railing against it, and began to publish their own sanctioned song-lyric magazines, including the long running Song Hits and Hit Parader magazines.
The article makes the tacit point that music piracy is not just a problem of unregulated technology, but one that stems from the basic human desire (stoked by an unbridled advertising industry) to imbibe all the stimulus we think will make us complete while lacking the resources to do so-- that is, while the technology makes it easier, it isn't the technology's fault. On their new, supremely organic pop-hop opus Free Kamal, Radioinactive and Antimc seem to have a more sophisticated understanding of the intricate interface between technology and human desire than many artists who deal with the topic on either side of the facile "technology is awesome"/"technology sucks" axis. It approaches the problems of information saturation and a society increasingly dependent on its machines in a manner that seems less moralistic or paranoid than honest and realistic, and thus, it becomes like the real world, where oversimplifications break down-- a record of contradictions and paradoxes.
For instance, Free Kamal advises one to "befriend a tree, write poetry" and "cook from scratch" (i.e. to live simply and outside of the mechanisms of modern culture), yet is encoded onto mass-produced discs and sold over the Internet with an accompanying marketing push. Radioinactive's rapid, polysyllabic flow also inveighs against the viral nature of popular culture (on "Chop Chop": "Don't have a PC/ Or MTV/ Or an HIV/ Or an SUV/ Or an STD/ Or any CD by Master P/ No MasterCard/ No Platinum Plus/ No Palm Pilot/ Gameboy or Angel Dust") while being a perfect mirror to its constant, saturated and dazzling influx. This is not to criticize Radioinactive for hypocrisy; to the contrary, Free Kamal seems less a self-righteous critique of its culture than an expression of its conundrums, a living document of its era.
But it's not all technophobic screeds; the record is tempered with minutiae of the mundane and metaphysical musings on spirituality and ancient wisdom, further broadening its scope to evoke a totality of what it feels like to be alive today, caught up between so many opposing poles. Radioinactive's hypnotic, prolix rhyme style veers through pop singalongs and more traditional highbrow undie rap to weave a vocal tapestry of exceptionally high thread-count-- it's pop-hop in the vein of Why?'s recent work that never forgets that it is, at root, hip-hop. And while its themes are often serious, Free Kamal is giddy and upbeat, a bright ray of SoCal summer.
A talented multi-instrumentalist with an obvious technical understanding of jazz, rock and pop, Antimc festoons his drum patterns with live playing that scans across the continuum of modern music. From the disco-funk of "With Light Within" and "Movin' Truck", to the echoing dub of "First World Justice System", to the chanting drum circle of "The Weight of Secrets", to the flamenco-guitar inflections of "Stop Me Equals Death", Antimc fluidly unites style after style under his distinctive and unified aegis. Free Kamal won't make you cut up your ATM card, but it might make you feel better about not being able to reconcile your desire to do so with the infeasibility of actually doing it.
