an evening with chuck d
Originally written 04.28.2002.
iain and i headed off to george square theatre and were luckily able to still score tickets to see chuck d (although they had been marked up to #12 instead of the presale price of #8). we took our seats, and by the time the show started, the university hall was packed to capacity. i really like events at univeristy venues because when they’re smaller, they tend to have a certain intimacy and informality that is lost at commercial venues. so there were no openers. it was chuck d and all chuck d for almost 3 hours, but like the last spoken word event that i went to, jello biafra, one hardly noticed the length of the lecture.
chuck spoke, as he said, about “rap, race, and technology”, an akward medly from the sound of it, but he managed to pull it off for the most part. much like biafra, chuck d tends to be outspoken and has a tendency towards rhetoric. he might not have his politics continually consistent, but at least he admits that he “doesn’t know shit”. chuck d is best when he talks about what he knows firsthand – growing up and being smitten by music and music technology and learning the ropes of the record industry and eventually beating them at their own game. he might have gotten mixed up about the reading festival being in scotland, and he might have mistaken the strokes for being a london band, but when it came to the record industry, he educated me on a number of points about which i was previously ignorant. for instance, he pointed out that digital music, and the sharing of digital music was just the end product of a process that was started by the record companies to exploit consumers. when cds were introduced, they were considerably cheaper for the record companies to produce than lps, but they were sold to consumers at nearly twice the price. similarly, “analog contracts” for artists required that 15 percent of the artist’s cut go to the record companies to cover the 15 percent of the vinyl that was damaged in the manufacturing process. when the analog switched to digital, with only one percent of product damaged, the artists were still held under “analog contracts”.
when chuck d got going, he was incredibly engaging, and often i found myself laughing hysterically. one of the high points was chuck’s impression of dr. dre deciding that he didn’t like mp3s. the point chuck was trying to make was that dr. dre could care less about mp3s and was basically just buying the story of his record industry handlers, but the whole play-acting scene was executed with such comedic genius that the point was almost lost. i can’t recreate the scene in all it’s glory, but it went something like this. (note: in the following dialogue, d plays both parts, walking back and forth across the stage to assume the roles of the characters)
lawyer: yo dre, people are stealing yo’ money.
dre: [takes a big toke of an imaginary joint] fuck ‘dem.
dre: [taking another toke] how are de’ stealin’ my money?
lawyer: they’re downloading mp3s.
dre: [takes yet another toke] fuck mp3s.
d’s comedic ability and his awareness of politics came through again when he play-acted a similar scenario to describe american foreign policy. he equated american foreign policy with shaquile oneil coming to your house, eating your food, stealing your car, and having his way with your women while you’re powerless to do anything about it. awesome.
at the end of the lecture, he answered some questions, and although he rarely addressed the question directly, his thoughts were still really interesting. it’s easy to be critical of people when they fuck up a response, but i’m not sure i’d do any better. i have a tendency to idolize artists who address politics in their work and people tend to like to point out their shortcomings and inconsistencies to me. watching chuck d, i realized that what i like the most about political artists is the fact that they represent the average guy waking up and deciding to care about the world around them. the important thing isn’t that they get everything 100% right, or think everything through all the way, but that they’ve at least taken the step to start examining the state of their government and their culture. i can handle people who disagree with someone’s politics, but nothing bothers me more than the people who are apolitical and distance themselves from having any oppinion on anything. if artists like chuck d can make one person in the audience think about their own lives in a manner that they hadn’t before, then that’s a great thing. it’s just really refereshing to be in a room with people who are excited about another person who is really excited about something.