5. Rewrite Your Rules
Or How to Bend, Break and Ultimately Rewrite the Rules
Mutiny and the bounty
The pirates of the Golden Age changed the game, rewrote the rules and altered the course of history. Unlike so much of the innovation at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, where earnest men with large furrowed brows sweated diligently over steam engines, pirates didn’t change the world by purposeful invention, they did it through wilful obstruction that challenged all the rules of the time. And in setting out to break something, they ended up making something. They didn’t just want to tear down the old order; they wanted to create something better, for themselves.
This is what distinguishes them from other forms of rebels, punks and rogues, and makes them more akin to unconscious artists, architects and creators than chaos merchants. And it is their gift to you: being more pirate permits you to find creativity through destruction. In this chapter we’ll move beyond their fearlessness in questioning bad rules that weren’t working to look at how their actions led to the creation of new rules. We’ll see that there’s power in stepping outside anachronistic structures and challenging broken systems that benefit only the few with new ideas that can benefit and inspire the many.
A utopian vision of the future wasn’t the pirates’ top priority. They were focused on the more classic pirate pastimes of rum, treasure and not getting hanged, but by rejecting the status quo they ignited a spark and showed an alternative that caused like minds to gather and form around new ideas that filled the smoking hole they’d left in the wake of their rebellion. That’s what this chapter is about: the formation of new ideas that capture others’ imagination; the early creation of better rules that people choose to gather around and represent the beginning of a new belonging, and a challenge to the idea that accepting what we’ve got is good enough.
The pirates weren’t the first people to raze things to the ground to allow glorious new creations to flourish. Throughout history, the most radically successful ideas derived at least some of their appeal from a rejection of the old ways. As Picasso famously said, ‘Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.’
The point is (and, to be frank, this applies whether you’re an artist, a poet, a pirate, a pawn, a pauper or a king), sometimes confronting, questioning, obstructing, destroying, smashing, bending and breaking even just one thing is a legitimate and useful way of creating change. The greatest change-makers know this, but they also know that you can’t get stuff done on a big scale by breaking rules alone. You have to provide an alternative. You have to change the game and rewrite the rules.
The pirates had a term for this. Obviously it’s not as beautifully expressed as Picasso’s words, but it will help us be clear in our intent, and it’s the term we’re going to use, because it’s the act you’re going to take … the word is ‘mutiny’.
Mutiny is how pirates took rebellion and turned it into a new set of rules that others could follow. On Wikipedia, mutiny is described as ‘a conspiracy among a group of people to openly oppose, change, or overthrow an authority to which they are subject’,1 which is exactly what we’re looking for, but is also not as scary or likely to get you arrested as it sounds.
Mutiny is the route to writing new rules, the bridge between the act of destruction and the act of creation, and the gravitational force that will help pull other pirates to your cause.
Once we’ve looked at how pirates, past and present, have rewritten the rulebook in a way that gathered ‘the brethren’, you’ll be one step closer to designing your own mutiny and growing your own crew.
And remember, when we talk about mutiny we’re not talking about sailing 10,000 miles, braving sea monsters and storms to risk hanging for stealing Spanish gold. We’re just talking about standing up for what you believe in, whether that’s doing something different at work, making a shift in a serious relationship, being the agent for change in your local community or even actually doing something about that idea you’ve been thinking about but are not acting upon. They are all mutinies worth starting, and starting now. A mutiny of trying something out, making something happen, doing something different or beginning something.
There was a time (and I know, because I was there) before the side hustle, when doing your own thing and starting something new meant building the ‘business plan’ for it, convincing a bank manager to support it, getting incorporated and other long-winded hurdles to clear. But luckily for you, those days are long gone. Now, in the pretotyping age, all it takes is self-belief and an internet connection to spark a movement, begin a project, make a difference or even start a company.
Pretotyping? Yup, it’s the stage before prototyping, and it’s a great way of saying ‘making it up’ with a sort of professional ring to it. Alberto Savoia, the man who came up with Google’s Law of Failure, designed the Pretotyping Manifesto (look it up) as a guide for embracing the tools around us to invent the stuff of the future without needing to invest much money or time.2 Whether you’re in an organization trying to introduce new products or attitudes to old mindsets, or flying solo trying to create a new service or goods, there has never been so much opportunity afforded you to try stuff out in real life; it’s never been easier to start a project or test a product idea, whether it’s a podcast or a pop-up, a performance or a political act; if you really wanted to, you could call a mutiny on the rules of today and have new rules underway by this time tomorrow.
The Golden-Age pirates seized the unique opportunities on offer to them and instigated mutinies to pave the way for new rules that would improve their life. Modern pirates do the same, replacing old rules with new rules, and bad ideas with good ones. In the same way the last chapter made rebellion digestible if taken with a hearty meal, this chapter will illustrate how to rewrite rules by looking to both eighteenth-and twenty-first-century pirates for inspiration.
Break the biggest rule you know: the remarkable tale of Anne Bonny and Mary Read
It was never going to be hard to find examples of rule-breaking or rule-remaking pirates, but take your marks and get set for the story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, pirate pioneers and proto-feminists whose game-changing influence is more profound than you can possibly imagine. These two women broke one of the most universal and stringently enforced rules of their society – the one that said women were not fully autonomous human beings with rights, responsibilities and abilities equal to men. By setting off to sea they contributed to one of the most far-reaching (if slow-moving and unfinished) revolutions our world has ever seen: the battle for equal rights. Bonny and Read’s story proves just what can be achieved when you ask why not, take risks, find allies in your cause and demonstrate to others that everything they assumed was wrong. Their rule-shattering and paradigm-shifting life stories would make for an excellent movie.
Bonny was born Anne McCormac in 1702, a by-product of her father’s affair with the family maid. Disgraced, Dad, maid and baby Anne moved from Ireland to London and then on to Carolina, where Anne grew up angry but, by all accounts, beautiful. As a teenager she married small-time pirate James Bonny in secret, thinking it better to seek forgiveness rather than permission. Her plan backfired and her father kicked her and her new husband out onto the streets. When James realized that, without her father’s financial patronage, Anne was worth ‘not a groat’ and, worse still, was now his expense, he was ready to hit the road.3
Jack, the dashing pirate captain ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham, who’d been swashbuckling up and down the eastern seaboard with a larger-than-life pirate swagger, chose this moment to arrive on the scene. Jack charmed the bloomers off Bonny, and offered her the opportunity to deliver the ultimate ‘middle finger’ to polite society by running away with him, a handsome ‘enemy of humanity’ and one of the foremost Golden-Age pirates.
First, Bonny attempted to exploit a legal loophole to free her from her former vows so that she could marry Rackham and make a mockery of marriage laws that viewed her as her absent husband’s property. She threatened violence on the non-compliant official who rejected her attempts and then blew a hole the size of a pirate ship in accepted female conventions and ran away to sea with her lover to live as a pirate. As Johnson put it in his A General History of Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, she and Calico Jack ‘finding they could not by fair means enjoy each other’s company with Freedom, resolved to run away together and enjoy it inspite [sic] of all the world’.4
Back in England, Mary Read’s not dissimilar story began to gather pace. Mary had also been born an illegitimate child, but before she was even born her father had abandoned her mother and their newborn son, Mark, who died shortly afterwards. To complicate matters, Mary’s mother discovered she was pregnant with Mary shortly after her husband had disappeared … In need of a way to disguise her condition from the world and from her mother-in-law, who was obliged to support her financially, Mary pretended her baby daughter was a boy and passed her off as her dead brother.
An early life of pretending to be a man became a habit, and the teenage Mary joined the army, which women were, of course, forbidden to do. As Mark, she became a fierce fighter and a distinguished soldier, and fell deeply in love with one of her comrades in arms. What eighteenth-century awkwardness ensued no one will ever know, but somehow, some night, in some European conflict, in some army tent somewhere, Mary must have revealed she was indeed a lady because we know that love flourished between the soldiers. Due to their hard-fought reputation for good service and their renowned bravery – and, of course, the dazzlingly good story it made to tell the folks back home – the couple were celebrated and Mary was spared the punishment she technically deserved for deceiving the army command.
As it happened, the army command abso-bloody-lutely loved it. Their superior officers didn’t just approve their request to be married, they paid for the party and invited themselves along. Following which, Mary and her man were discharged with full honours and given help to buy a local pub that became a firm favourite with the soldiers stationed nearby.
But the eighteenth century was harsh as hell, and Mary’s husband promptly died of a hideous, eighteenth-century blood-curdling disease. The pub trade took a downturn and then – sad, mad, penniless and alone – Mary went back to wearing men’s clothes and once again illegally signed on. This time round, however, Mary joined the Royal Navy and before long was captured at sea by pirates. Reluctantly, or so the story goes, Mary gave in to the pirate life and was unsurprisingly rather good at it. As she moved up the ranks, and from ship to ship, Mary aka Mark one day found she’d joined the crew of a certain Anne Bonny and Jack Rackham. (See what I meant when I said it would make a good movie.)
Soon enough, another member of the crew caught Mary’s eye and she once again had to reveal herself to her new fancy to win his affections, and once again fell deeply in love. Time passed and her new man got himself into a spot of bother gambling. As per the Pirate Code of that particular crew, he had to settle the dispute in a duel on the beach. Mary, an accomplished swordswoman, judged her sweetheart the likely loser of the ensuing contest, and so stepped in. Before the beefing buccaneers could cut loose with their cutlasses, Mary gave it a De Niro dose of ‘You looking at me?’ and skewered her lover’s rival with her sword, then dumped his corpse overboard.
So far so very badass, but Anne and Mary aren’t finished. Now a formidable duo, with the backing of Captain Jack, they sailed the seas side by side as Pirate Queens and became legends in their own lifetime.
Turning pirate was an active choice for Bonny and Read, a far more appealing alternative to the powerless and financially vulnerable position they would have been in had they stayed put on land and played by the book. They, like so many other pirates, preferred to make their own way in the world, following their own rules in how they contributed to the collective interest of their crew. The remarkable thing is that the pirate ship allowed them the freedom to do exactly that. At a time when women were held to be inferior to men in every way, intellectually, morally and spiritually, Bonny and Read participated on the same level as their male counterparts in pirate life. Thomas Dillon, the master of a merchant vessel captured by the crew, observed that they ‘were both very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do anything on board’.5
Both women blasted every conventional argument about women’s qualities and capabilities out of the water, simply by being there and being themselves. Esteemed historian Marcus Rediker states that
although [Bonny and Read were] not formally elected by their fellow pirates to posts of command, they nonetheless led by example – in fighting duels, in keeping the deck in time of engagement and in being part of the group designated to board prizes, a right always reserved for the most daring and respected members of the crew. [They] proved a woman could find liberty beneath the Jolly Roger.6
In other words, they rebelled and they rewrote the rules of what women could and couldn’t do.
Bonny and Read’s time together was short, and in less than a year Rackham’s entire crew was targeted and taken down by the Royal Navy, which had an official warrant for the capture and execution of ‘Notorious Pirates’ including Bonny and Read, the first and only female pirates named on any warrant during the Golden-Age. When the navy caught up with Rackham’s crew it arrived in such a considerable force that the men of the pirate crew took cover below whilst Bonny and Read remained on deck, hurling abuse and shooting their pistols at both the advancing navy, and their cowardly comrades.
When the day was done, the navy defeated the Pirate Queens and the entire crew was taken to execution dock. After the trials Jack was due to be hanged first, before which he was granted one last audience with his lover whereupon Anne delivered to him the immortal line, ‘Sure, I’m sorry to see you here, but if you had fought like a man you need not have hanged like a dog.’Ouch.
At this point the lives of Mary Read and Anne Bonny diverged. They both escaped the hangman’s noose on the grounds that they were pregnant, but Mary died not long after in prison, possibly from complications in childbirth, and Anne and her child disappeared off the face of the earth, either ransomed by her father or perhaps sprung from prison by former pirate colleagues.
Though it would be overstepping the mark to claim that these remarkable, rebellious rule-breaking women were consciously striking a blow for any proto-women’s movement, their story became part of a new conversation around women’s capabilities and entitlements that was emerging at the time in both high and low culture. Their legend made its way into shanties and ballads, giving millions of mostly illiterate working-class women an intoxicating example of poor and marginalized women just like them who had lived life on their own terms. The story was jumped on by the emerging media who hailed the pair as ‘warrior women’7 on the front pages of the ‘penny dreadfuls’, the gossip magazines of the day. Mind you, though this coverage was sometimes admiring, it also came with a hefty dose of condemnation, as you would expect from figures who challenged some of society’s most fundamental rules. Bonny and Read were heroines to some but were also vilified as shameless traitors to their sex.
As Rediker suggests, the famous pair found freedom under the Jolly Roger. He argues convincingly that none other than Anne Bonny is the inspiration for one of the most famous paintings of all time, ‘Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple’, known in English as ‘Liberty Leading the People’, by Eugène Delacroix, painted in 1830.
One of the most influential pieces of art in the world, it hangs in the Louvre in Paris, as it always has, but chances are you’ve seen a poster version of it, as the promoters of the West End/Broadway show Les Misérables have adapted it for their own revolutionary purposes.
Rediker compares the defining portrait of Bonny that appeared in Captain Johnson’s General History of Pyrates with the enduring image of Lady Liberty; ‘a central female figure, armed, bare-breasted and dressed in a Roman tunic, looks back as she propels herself forward – upward, over, and above a mass of dead bodies’.8 They are a mirror image of each other, except where Bonny holds her sword above her head, Lady Liberty raises up a flag. Bonny is joined by a young man, Lady Liberty is accompanied by a boy. Rediker provides an arsenal of evidence to prove this is no coincidence, first that Delacroix was known to be fascinated by pirates and ‘endlessly inspired’ by Lord Byron’s famous poem ‘The Corsair’, which he studied as he painted ‘La Liberté’. Rediker also points out that by this point, the General History of Pyrates that had the portrait of Bonny on the cover was an international bestseller on its twentieth edition with at least six editions printed in French. As Rediker puts it, ‘it would be a fitting tribute to Bonny and Mary Read if the example of these two women who seized liberty beneath the Jolly Roger in turn helped to inspire one of the most famous depictions of liberty the modern world has ever known’.9
Even if you weren’t familiar with Delacroix’s painting, the strong woman in robes looking out, striding forward, one arm raised, a symbol of hope and liberty sounds familiar? That’s because it’s the same composition as the Statue of Liberty in New York. Sure, the Statue of Liberty looks a bit more respectable and less revolutionary, with a few more clothes and a torch rather than a sword, but she was partly inspired by Delacroix’s lady nonetheless. So it seems the Statue of Liberty is a distant relation of Anne Bonny the Pirate Queen …
If you can’t quite picture the Delacroix painting, or you think I’m making all of this up, I’ve lined up the respective images for you; just go to www.bemorepirate.com/liberty and see for yourself.
In terms of rewriting the rulebook, Bonny sets the bar pretty high. She influenced cultural depictions of freedom and reimagined the way women could and should act by refusing to accept the rules as they were. Bonny and Read’s greatest power was in being themselves and leading by example, rejecting the prejudiced protocols of the day and charting their own course instead, a fundamental principle of a Be More Pirate mindset.
The tall tales of Captain Elon Musk
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.
Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla,
SolarCity and possible supervillain
Elon Musk is a thoroughly modern pirate of seemingly limitless ambition. The man has something to prove. When it comes to rewriting rules, Musk is THE man to look to. Not content with first rewriting the rules of how we handle money with PayPal, how we perceive and use energy with Tesla and SolarCity, how we travel long distance with Hyperloop, he’s now set on rewriting the rules of life as we know it via SpaceX and his mission to colonize Mars.
Just as we spoke about Malala in the previous chapter about rebellion, I want to remind you that it’s important not to get daunted or distracted by Musk’s massive scale of achievement. What’s useful is to look at how Musk did what he did and plunder his methods that will serve us mere mortals. But let’s start by assessing what’s happened so far. Musk started his first software enterprise with his brother on a few thousands dollars, and sold it for several million a few years later. He quickly bought into a business that owned a small and neglected idea called PayPal. It didn’t stay small and neglected for long. Musk took PayPal to the ubiquitous global brand and utility it is today, completely rewriting the rules of the global finance sector in the process. Then he walked away with $180,000,000. As he famously says, ‘My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in SolarCity. I had to borrow money for rent.’
With Tesla, Musk aims to popularize electric, environmentally friendly cars that can out-perform a combustion-engined car on every level possible. With SolarCity he’s set out to demonstrate we can power our lives without relying on fossil fuels, by fitting desirable solar panels on our homes that look the same as roof tiles. And with SpaceX he’s proving a private company can advance quicker in space exploration than NASA, not to mention the small matter of trying to give humanity a chance of life on Mars. With Hyperloop, he released a fifty-seven-page ‘open source’ document detailing his plans for a transport system that would carry travellers from San Francisco to LA in a matter of minutes. Despite all the well-founded criticism that came his way, his ambitious plans have won support around the world with investors like Richard Branson helping to take the idea further. Musk proves how open-sourcing your ideas starts to create followers for your new rules.
Like his pirate predecessors, Captain Musk is clearly up for adventure and deeply engaged with exploration. But for me, the root of Musk’s pirate-like persona stems from his ambition to cause good trouble, to question first principles and rewrite the outcomes as a consequence. Musk finds solutions to big problems because he adopts the mental model of first principles in which you leave analogy-based argument behind and challenge all assumptions made. Musk calls it his ‘Scientific Method’. For example, when Musk and his team were working out how much the first SpaceX rocket would cost them, instead of looking at comparable products and setting a benchmark accordingly, they figured out what the necessary parts of a rocket were and then found out how much the raw materials cost. They found that they could make a rocket at 2 per cent of the normal cost. And all this because he questioned and challenged assumptions. Musk’s success is wrapped up in how he’s taken these findings and written new rules around them and published them as goals, or, if you like, Pirate Codes to live and work by.
In 2006 Musk published the Master Plan for Tesla. This was quite unlike any conventional business plan. In the modern-day equivalent of a Golden-Age pirate nailing articles to the ship’s mast, he posted it online. It’s pretty simple, but it encapsulates a way of doing business that builds in good trouble as a design principle and screams pirate in its delight in mischief-making. It reads:
- Build sports car.
- Use that money to build an affordable car.
- Use that money to build an even more affordable car.
- Whilst doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options.
- Don’t tell anyone.
When you know what you’re rebelling against, and you’ve got your idea and others who want to follow, if you want your new rules to stick, let others own them as theirs. Give them away freely for others to adopt, adapt and believe in as if they were their own. By doing this you make them complicit in your thinking as it becomes their thinking. Rather than forcing his rules on others, Musk inspires people with his openness and as a consequence his ideas permeate the mainstream faster.
Like Captain Benjamin Hornigold in the early 1700s, who had the vision for the Republic of Pirates as a new way of life, Musk is planning nothing less than a human colony on Mars. Hornigold put out the call amongst the pirate brethren and shared his vision with the next generation of pirate leaders. And they came. Musk essentially does the same, laying down new rules for a new vision of the future:
Fuck Earth! Who cares about Earth?
There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go [to Mars], and the set of people who can afford to go … and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilization. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go.
But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies … even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars.
If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonize the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel.10
Three hundred years after old Ben Hornigold said, ‘Fuck Society, let’s take these great democratic principles we’ve made, reject this broken system and start a new way of life,’ and Musk is flying the same flag. He’s laying down new rules for anyone to follow if they choose, and can afford half a million dollars!
The fine art of the remix
If Musk has rewritten the rules of the energy industry by inventing a better battery, then hip hop has rewritten the rules of the music industry by inventing a better beat. Hip hop is and always has been about the remix, its own term for mutiny. Back in the early 1970s when DJ Kool Herc pulled off a previously unimaginable act, playing two copies of the same record simultaneously, looping and extending the drum section of the tune, the breakbeat was reinvented. With a longer backbeat from Herc, it was down to Afrika Bambaataa to add the lyrics. With these two pirates at the helm, hip hop became the new voice of rebellion, bum rushing the political jazz poetry that inspired it out of the way and bringing to life rap instead. When rap and breakbeat were joined by breakdance and graffiti, the so-called Four Elements of hip hop were established and a new culture was born.
Hip hop was a new rebel flag presenting a new way of operating that attracted others to join its movement. Hip hop’s success has been in part due to its dedication to reinvention; it somehow manages to convey the promise of transformation and reincarnation whilst also being unashamedly mainstream. Groups like Niggas With Attitude, or NWA, went double platinum because of their global sales to middle-class young white boys desperate to drink in the rebel sounds of their wicked beats. Hard-hitting lyrics, laced with profanity and misogyny depicting the dark reality for young black men in America, were learned verbatim by English schoolboys as Compton became the new soundtrack to small towns from Key West to Croydon, and every other small town seeking a glimpse of the new rules of rebellion.
But the interesting point for us to take away is not so much the fact that hip hop as a music form moved from the margins of popularity to occupy the centre and developed into a billion-dollar industry, but that its principles influenced a whole generation of artists to do things differently, and do it themselves.
When RZA formed the Wu-Tang Clan he had to pay for their studio time with spare change in dollars and cents. Even though they could barely afford to make their first record, ‘Protect Ya Neck’, when the record labels started to smell success the Wu-Tang Clan refused to abide by the usual industry rules. As the single blew up, label after label approached the crew but RZA held out as he had one killer condition that no label had seen before and none would agree to. RZA wanted to sign a deal for the Wu-Tang Clan that would allow each member of the crew to also sign as individual artists to any label they liked. RZA was smart enough to know that one label could never back the whole clan as a crew, and support them as individual artists (there were nine of them!), and, wanting to make Wu-Tang the biggest-selling hip-hop brand group of all time, he recognized the key to their success would be in insisting their eventual label agree to a clause that, once their debut album was released, each crew member could sign up a separate deal with a separate record label. Loud Records shared in RZA’s vision to make the Wu-Tang Clan the most successful hip-hop group the world had ever seen and signed them up on RZA’s condition.
RZA forced the music industry to rewrite their rules. Once their debut album had gone platinum, he helped each and every one of the rest of the crew to secure a major deal across separate labels, meaning that nine of the world’s biggest record companies were all individually investing their resources in pushing the Wu-Tang Clan brand. RZA broke the rules so well, he now had the entire ‘navy’ following his new rules, whilst his predictions came true and the Wu became the biggest hip-hop artists of all time.
In keeping with his pirate predecessors, RZA laid the foundations of a shared ownership model. Each individual artist’s album was always made in partnership with the group, and every release paid into a collective pot, allowing them to start a range of additional enterprises including the multimillion-dollar-earning Wu Wear fashion range. RZA’s new rules paid off in millions of dollars for him and the rest of the crew, but they also became the new rules of hip hop and the dominant idea of artists as enterprises became the norm, or, as Jay Z put it as he followed suit, ‘I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.’
Hip hop and its core principles of rebellion and renewal influenced other genres of music, particularly rap. When Chance the Rapper sought advice from his mentor, Childish Gambino, about breaking into the music industry, he decided not to sign a record deal and instead give his mixtape away for free. No threats, no fights, no fuss. Chance flipped conventions and started a mutiny that shook the very heart of the modern music industry. A big statement but a small act that would make him stand out.
Chance became the first musician to win a Grammy without ever having signed a record deal, for Coloring Book, his mixtape that was available free to stream on the internet. He knew that he was taking a risk, but, like a pirate, was discovering new ways to find reward. As Chance explained in an interview with Fader magazine, he reflected on his pioneering and pirate-like role when he described how the industry looked at him as a pioneer: ‘They’re almost like, “Keep going. You’re in uncharted territory, and you’re helping to shed light on what [the future of the business] will look like and we’re all curious.” ’11 And in the mind of Chance the Pirate, the risk wasn’t so great; from his position at the edges, looking out to the future, the old system obviously held little promise to him, as he told Rolling Stone magazine when quizzed on whether he’d ever sign a record deal: ‘There’s no reason to. It’s a dead industry.’12
In his reinvention of the traditional music artist business model Chance relies on performances, merchandise and other income streams, meaning his musical choices are his own. The same then becomes true of his political voice. Chance leveraged his fame and reputation unrestrained by the rules of a traditional industry relationship to become an outspoken voice on social issues, and in particular a critic of social justice, welfare and education.
Chance raised and donated over $1 million to the public-school system in Chicago where he also spontaneously bought an entire neighbourhood tickets to the cinema. His achievements prove that rewriting the rules works. He caused good trouble and became a hero and role model to millions in the process. His rebellious actions illustrated to a whole generation that they could do it alone, sending shivers up the timbers of much of the music industry, who rely on convincing future talent they’re better off signing contracts and handing over control.
With control on his side, it does look like Chance has done one major deal, in that his next mixtape was available exclusively via Apple Music. It’s not a record deal per se, and arguably Apple need Chance more than he needs them in the staying cool stakes, but when you’re telling Apple what to do, you know your rebel play has gained you real power. Chance has written new rules that prove you can fight for fairness, find your fortune and have your own say.
From Herc to RZA to Chance, and hundreds of other hip hop pirates across fifty years of hip hop, no matter how big it gets, rewriting the rules is as much a part of hip hop’s DNA as the remix is part of the music.
A very modern mutiny
From Musk to the Wu-Tang Clan to Chance the Rapper, so far we’ve seen some pretty impressive and dauntingly successful modern pirates. You might be thinking that, whilst these pioneers’ achievements are inspiring, they are a little unrelatable, because, let’s face it, not all of us know how to build a rocket or spit sixteen bars. But if you look closely, you’ll see there are rule breakers and rule remakers operating everywhere, fixing, changing and bettering the problems they see on a daily basis. Like Teresa Shook, Sophie Collard, Ben Jones and Jon and Tracy Morter. They had exactly the same tools at their disposal as you do right now and they decided to rewrite the rules of the day.
For Sophie and Ben, that day was one summer’s night in 2011, when London exploded into riots so unexpected that the police force were stunned and weren’t able to do much beyond some damage limitation. For a wild night, angry, frustrated and dispossessed people ran the streets, smashing shop windows, looting, starting fires and generally causing a royal ruckus.
We’re not here for the rioters’ story. Whilst their explosion of rage was rebellious, it was neither in the cause of good trouble nor about rewriting any rules and offering a better alternative. Sadly for the troubled young people who got caught up in it, it just got them into worse trouble.
The mutiny I want us to learn from that night was, rather, a call for community, not an attack on it. As night fell, many London streets were under the control of large crowds and few police seemed to be on hand to help. Even the most sympathetic observers retreated to the sanctuary of their homes. Rolling news showed fire after fire on high street after high street, in the closest thing to anarchy many people had seen in their lifetime.
Amidst the head scratching, confusion and questioning, Sophie Collard, aka @sophontrack, started a mutiny against powerlessness when she sent a tweet creating the now legendary tag #riotcleanup. Ben Jones, or @BenDylan, joined the constructive conspiracy when he picked it up and retweeted it so that it was seen by @danthompson, who already ran a social initiative and knew how to turn this small group of rebels into a movement for which he was eventually rewarded by the prime minister. Within hours, thousands of scared, uncertain and shocked civilians were convening online and agreeing to meet in the still-smoking streets for an enormous clean-up at dawn. And so, whilst many shop fronts still smouldered, members of the community descended on the streets holding brooms and brushes aloft and set to work, setting a new precedent. Their initiative helped the retailers and small businesses whose livelihoods were dependent on the high streets getting back on their feet again and the alternative and positive headline was a hugely welcomed relief for the media and the rest of Britain. The clean-up brigade offered alternative help that would usually have been left for the police to deal with and restored the country’s confidence in a community.
Sometimes a good idea shared is on the streets by the following dawn. Rewrite rules out in the open for others to find and follow.
Teresa Shook is another mutineer who, in the spirit of good trouble, rewrote the rules with no more in her toolbox than you have now, if you have a social media account, and a grievance to rebel against (of which you should have a whole list by now).
On the night of the US elections November 2016 Teresa wanted to rebel against the incoming president, Donald Trump, and in particular the revelations that had emerged through the election campaign about his attitudes to women. Teresa, a retired lawyer and grandmother, was so incensed about the misogynistic message she felt Trump was peddling that she used her social media account to suggest a demonstration in Washington on inauguration day – a women’s march. As with the #riotcleanup mutiny, Teresa awoke the next day to find over 10,000 people had agreed with her. Several other women who’d made similar calls for a modern mutiny had similar responses, with thousands of women contacting them as well. A conspiracy was formed, and a crew of women gathered and made their individual mutinies into a collective reality. They represented various agendas, networks and eventually countries, and they overcame all their individual perspectives and time zones to make their mutiny a mass movement.
The Women’s March 2017 remains the largest single-day protest the US has ever seen, and became a global day of protest and advocacy of women’s rights around the world as almost every other country followed suit.
Whilst those are two major modern mutinies, Jon and Tracy Morter’s less political, less consequential but no less impressive mutiny might be the most mischievous. In December 2009, Jon and Tracy decided to take on Simon Cowell, the brains behind everything from America’s (and everywhere else’s) Got Talent, the architect of One Direction, the evil genius behind The X Factor and more crimes against music than we’ve time to list here.
Fed up with another year of manufactured plasto-pop from the Syco stable dominating the Christmas charts, the music-loving and mutinous couple launched a social-media campaign to challenge the X Factor winner for the much-coveted Christmas No. 1 position in the UK record charts, which had been held by Cowell’s creations for years.
In a moment of genius, Jon and Tracy chose one of their favourite all-time rebel anthems by Rage Against the Machine, ‘Killing in the Name’, specifically for its chorus line: ‘Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me’.
At first it looked like an inconceivable task to get enough people to buy a seventeen-year-old song from a non-mainstream rap metal band for it to reach No. 1 at Christmas, but a few weeks later and that year’s X Factor winner and manufactured cheese manifestation, Joe McElderry, was beaten to the top spot as ‘Killing in the Name’ became the first download-only Christmas chart topper. Tracy said: ‘It was one of those little silly ideas that make you laugh in your own house. We really love music and remember when we were young and the charts were really exciting. We just thought, wouldn’t it be funny if that song got to number one?’ Rage guitarist Tom Morello said it had ‘tapped into the silent majority of the people who are tired of being spoon-fed one schmaltzy ballad after another’. In a show of good grace and to join a long history of Establishment figures recruiting pirate tactics once they’ve proven their new rules, Simon Cowell said, ‘I am genuinely impressed by the campaign they have run … I offered them jobs at my record company. It could be in marketing or perhaps even running the company. I wanted them to come and work for us. I was deadly serious but they haven’t taken me up on the offer.’
The consistent power of pirates is in the threat of their rebellion, but the potential of pirates is unlocked when their rule breaking turns into rule making.
Free from the limitations and institutions that say there is only one way, and it’s our way, pirates have nothing to lose, and therefore everything to gain, from being courageous, creative, adventurous and imaginative, which in turn creates more compelling ideas for others to take inspiration from.
Pirates revel in escaping the suffocation of old rules to try their own stuff out. If you can recognize the old way has run its course, or the rules you’re following have passed their sell-by date, then, rather than blindly continue to follow someone else’s tired ideas, you become free to pursue a rare opportunity to explore your own theories and invite others to test them out.
And, don’t worry, rule rewriting can sound like heavy lifting, but you don’t have to be the grand architect of an entire new system. Every instance we’ve looked at shows the essence of the Be More Pirate approach to writing new rules. The greatest change comes when there is a tight focus on new, experimental and ambitious rules, formulated by an individual or small group, that become so powerful they are adapted by or inspire the mainstream. Start small, dream big and get going – that’s how pirates bend, break and remake the rules.