Freelance Propaganda

EuroTrash girls, A grizzled author and moral compasses

Once upon a time a singer from a band called Cracker had a crazy time in pursuit of his, doubtlessly desirable, Euro Trash girl and wrote a song about it. It’s a country song and has some great lyrics.

So great in fact that some real Euro Trash girls covered the track. Those girls were on speed and into gritty electronica so naturally I like it much better than the, slightly droney, country version.

One evening, at a gig somewhere in France(?) the Chicks on Speed guest appeared and banged out a great version of their version of Cracker’s track, complete with crowd pleasing French and German lyrics.

That night someone taped the show—-one of those killer audience tapings where you feel right in the middle of the gig, and can even hear someone trying to pick someone else up in the middle of the track.

At some point that recording found its way to an MP3 and out onto the wilds of Gnutella.

While Bruce Sterling was tripping around Europe, in what Chris Nakashima-Brown, a reader of his blog described as:

The Grizzled verteran of the twentieth Century wanders the the near-future landscape he once imagined, battered laptop tapping the network through jury-rigged components of roadside detritus, anemic LCD glow the only illumination in the polluted rain under the shadows of the Bahnhof—the author a character in one of his own fictions made real.

So Bruce’s trip made him think of these lyrics and he posted them to his (killer) blog.

That’s where I come into the picture … I read the lyrics and wanted to hear the song. I fired up my music distribution system of choice, iTunes, and found the original Cracker track (as yet totally unaware of the drug-taking chicks). Sadly for some unknown reason you can only get that track as an album purchase. Failure for legal digital downloads.

I hit Gnutella and ten aborted downloads later I find the cracker track. Nice lyrics, nothing special. I left gnutella open in the background and was about to close it down when I found that it had discovered some other tracks with the Euro Trash girl. From drug addled shelas no less ;)

I downloaded the album version (?) and the live version and like them enough to shoot them over to Bruce, providing a link in case he hadn’t heard the live version.

Now Bruce being a music lover and wanting to share this great recording with the world, but also an artist paid for his production, was in a quandary and posted the link back to the track here on freelancepropaganda. But not as a live link and with these words:

Note lack of any live link, as I insist that you actually paste that into your own browser personally. As a patron of the arts, I rather frown on this Kazaa and darknet business. Musicians live hard and need money for drugs and sex. As a moral gesture, I will go farther yet. In fact, if one or any of the actual Chicks on Speed will send me email regarding this piece of music, I will PERSONALLY MAIL HER 20 EUROS, a real live bill of actual European currency, so that she can, you know, get her blood changed or something.

And that’s where we are today (Got to love Bruce’s style). Grab the track here.

Notice the existence of a live link.

Crazy kids in Europe begat Cracker begat Chicks on Speed begat Unknown club and band that invited them begat Unknown hero that taped them begat gnutellites that distributed them begat that link.

It’s a long road to creativity and a long road in bringing this to the audience. My moral compass is finely tuned to these things ever since the first days of Napster and the P2P explosion. Indeed I waxed lyrical about it at the first O’Reilly P2P conference and wrote a paper about how to get artists paid.

Sure it is a complex question but one principle remains crystal clear for me: if it is out of print and unavailable for a price then sharing and distribution is not just permissible but is the responsibility of people that care about art.

Now I suspect that track is not commercially available as it is an audience recording … but in the spirit of Bruce’s offer if anyone can show this to be available in another form I’ll whip the link down and send 5 Euro bucks to everyone of the creaters in the family tree above.