After eight records, three EPs, and 12 years of touring the globe non-stop, Erin McKeown is just getting warmed up. Over the last decade, Erin has spent an average of two hundred nights onstage each year. She has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Later with Jools Holland, NPR, BBC, and has had her music placed in numerous films, television shows, and commercials. In the last several years, McKeown has launched a successful side-career as a political activist, lobbying regularly on Capitol Hill in an effort to connect the worlds of policy, music, and technology. Her anti-SOPA video may be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da-XkA6746U
As a songwriter, I get asked all the time, “which comes first, the words or the music?” In twenty plus years of writing, I’ve never found a predictable pattern in my creativity. My friends who are also writers say the same. You never know, until you just know. You constantly labor, trying out many ideas, and then, there comes a moment when the ideas stick together and become inextricable. Something ignites, and a song comes into being. It is a singular thrill.
I think the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was a similar, singular moment when the many strands of Internet culture (the geeks, the critics, the creators, the users) all lifted their heads out of their respective sandboxes, became inextricable, and spoke with a unified voice: “NO.” I’ll go ahead and say it: the defeat of SOPA/ PIPA was a moment when the words and the music arrived at the same time, and you just knew. It was absolutely thrilling to be a part of.
Now, post-thrill and pre-next battle, I would like to make a case for digital activism by artists.
When I started my career in the late ’90s, I kept my political self separate from my musical self. I feared writing terrible, un-musical work that was bogged down with a message. I was trying to connect to the more established music industry, and I feared alienating anyone in my search for the widest possible audience.
However, as time went on and I became less and less concerned with participating in a music business that was rapidly crumbling anyway, I began to narrow that gap between my political self and my musical self. It was tiring to maintain, and I was burnt out on the ego-centric business of promoting myself constantly. There had to be a better reason to be a musician than just talking about yourself all the time.
I began by practicing the vocabulary of activism. Could I simply talk about what I believed? I remember being on Rachel Maddow’s radio show in the mid 2000s and trying to desperately to keep up with her as she articulated her views on issues and policies I cared about as well.
“I’ve got to get better at this,” I thought.
I looked to other artists whose political work I admired, and I learned by watching their skills. Slowly I gained confidence; I began to find my own voice; and I began to move toward actions.
For a long time, it’s been a cliché about artists that we don’t know what’s going on beyond whatever drug or show is right in front of us. Sometimes this cliché has had truth behind it. Sometimes artists have been willing participants in a tacit agreement to leave the art to the artist and the business to the business owners.
But sometimes artists have been unwilling participants in this agreement too, forced by all kinds of pressures to agree to contracts and situations that keep people with money and power rolling in their own, continued money and power. And there are a great many artists who take enormous pride in paying attention to what is happening around them and to them. Some of us refuse to shut up and sing. It is my experience that the more you engage with the world around you, the better your art is for it.
Here’s this word again: inextricable. As an artist, I find I am inextricable from the Internet. It is my instrument, my storefront, my megaphone, my audience, and my distributor. Thus I have found it is also the perfect arena for my activist self. It is a pipeline to get at the social justice work that matters most to me: access, participation, finding solutions to structural inequalities. As a visual / textual / auditory medium, it’s right in my wheelhouse as a creator. In my activism, I get to play with the Internet.
Artists are uniquely built for this sort of thing. This is what we do. The Internet is both our cause and the toolbox to fight for it.
So much gets said about how the Internet offers endless freedom for the artist. There is a mistaken belief that somehow, left to its own devices, the Internet levels the playing field between the haves and the have nots. Another myth: In the paradise of infinite storage, there is infinite attention to be paid even the smallest artist. Yet, it’s been my experience that the Internet is still subject to the same pressures as any other venue for expression. People with money and power will always want to keep their money and power.
However, for the artist the Internet does offer a pathway to change in that it is not done growing; it is not done evolving; and in its growth spurts, artists do have a unique opportunity to disrupt and push back at some of the usual suspects.
One of the main victories of the fight against SOPA/PIPA was the realization by many artists that they are also copyright holders, and that the Internet offers them an opportunity to exercise these rights however they choose. The work around SOPA/PIPA showed the world that copyright holders are not necessarily large media companies.
Instead, copyright holders are a diverse group that will not all make the same decisions on how to manage their rights.
Many artists understood, perhaps for the first time, that being a copyright holder doesn’t mean you want to or have to wall your art off and make people pay for entry. It simply means you are the one that gets to make the choice about what you want to do with your art. There is a vast world between “sue your pants off” and “everything is free.”
Lest we lapse into too much self-congratulation, there is much work to do. I have no doubt that the folks that brought forth SOPA/PIPA will try once again to restrict Internet freedom in order to maintain their own profit margins. As artists, we must speak to each other about this way of framing the rights of creators. It is a pathway to increased creativity, collaboration, and income. It is my personal mission to recruit more and more artists for this fight. And we will make you look and listen to our activism in ways that will be thoughtful, playful, artistic, and engaged. Words and music, inextricable.