Sellout Story (1997)

When the Conquistadors invaded the shores of what was to become Latin America in 1504, the Roman Catholic Church, which controlled the majority of Spanish society, came along for the ride. They brought with them the fanaticism and patriarchy of Old World Europe and they waged war against all the native civilizations that had walked the land previously like the Aztec and Maya. In their ignorance, the foreigners declared war upon the old religions and burned thousands of ancient temples and books of spiritual knowledge. They forced the people to bow down to a new God and instituted a new class structure and semi-feudal society revolving around skin color and property ownership that were still seeing the miserable after-effects of five hundered years later.
Incredibly, after what could only truly be called an attempt at brutal and bloody genocide, the descendants of the Maya still inhabit a good chunk of the area from the Yucatan Peninsula through almost all of what is today know as Guatemala and Belize. In the face of a rapidly homogenizing world run by transnational corporations who do the best they can to export the vapid culture of their strip mall homeland to the furthest reaches of the planet, the Maya still speak their own languages and continue to carry on the traditions and customs they've followed since way before the Spaniards arrived on their land. Although seemingly subjugated long ago, the Maya were smart enough to figure out ways to work within the system and give the appearance of total capitulation while holding on to pieces of their culture, adopting aspects of the new while holding on to what was important. If you visit their church's you'll see that they worship the white mans God. But everyone knows that their statues of Jesus have old Mayan idols hidden inside.

SELLING OUT

I stayed up late writing the other night and I was listening to the radio, flipping across the channels, checking out the local New Orleans and Baton Rouge stations. There was this one kind of catchy song I kept hearing, it was all over the dial, one of those songs you inadvertently start humming days after youve heard it and only then do you realize that its been stuck in the back of your head jingling around like an old TV ad for the past week. The voices sounded familiar and I could have sworn it was this really cool band I used to listen to a long time ago, but I couldnt imagine why the big commercial stations would be playing their song next to all the other fluffy pop dance hits Id been hearing in the background since the Summertime. I was scribbling away, not paying much attention, when the radio announcer came on and said something like: ...and that was the latest smash hit from the UK pop combo Chumbawamba! I dropped my pen.
Do you remember back around 1985 when all those icons of rock got together and had that huge concert called Live Aid to send money to the starving children of Ethiopia? It was a huge extravaganza with all the big names of the time like Michael Jackson, Cindy Lauper, Sting, Boy George, Phil Collins, and Bono coming out to support relief for the famine in Africa. It was the same era as We Are the World, do you remember that shit? Coked-out superstars holding hands in some music studio and singing about giving money to the poor? Its not just some figment of your twisted imagination, that really happened, we all watched it on TV.
Or at least I watched it. Back in the mid 80s, I was still in elementary school and mostly what we did after school where I was from was go home and sit in front of our TV sets and watch this new and exciting stuff they called MTV: three minute, fast-speed, cut-up rock advertisements blended together with watered down images of sex and violence for the Pepsi generation. Like most of the kids my age, Id just stopped watching Sesame Street a couple years back and this was basically the same thing -- the colorful puppets and bouncing alphabets replaced by super models and flashy guitars. I was your typical preteen of the time who sucked up all the garbage in front of me, from Def Leppard videos to Clearisil commercials. I ate up pop culture because it was what everyone else did and it was what I felt like connected me to the rest of the world.
I was one of those kids that didnt have hardly any friends when I was growing up because I couldnt run fast and all the boys in my school played softball. I was always the kid who got picked last when they were dividing up the teams, I hated sports and competition. I was the kid daydreaming in the back of the classroom. I remember getting beaten up and getting called stupid because I couldnt spell or hold my pen right. None of the cool kids ever wanted to talk to me cause I didnt have the right clothes. I was what they called a loser.
So when I was young Id retreat to the imaginary world of the TV. All my childhood imaginary playmates were always TV show stars: Gary Coleman from Different Strokes and Ricky Schroder from Silver Spoons, Mr. T from The A-Team. Id come home after school and start watching TV and not turn it off until I went to sleep, the glow from the screen keeping me company from the twelfth story of the apartment complex where we lived. It was the electronic babysitter for my parents who were always off working late, my faithful playmate and teacher.
My models for the relationships in my life came straight out of the relationships Id see on TV, all that stuff had a huge effect on me as a kid. I remember getting big crushes on movie actresses and being totally lonely and depressed when Id realize that I had no chance of ever knowing them in real life and they didnt really exist anyway. I remember feeling the emotions like the worst of heartbreaks Ive ever known since that time. Life was really confusing and TV culture had this way of tugging deep on all my insecurities and pre-adolescent needful emotions.
So like I was saying, I remember when that whole Live-Aid thing happened because I was super excited, all the big pop stars were going to be together in the same place at the same time and back then that meant more to me then anything that was happening around in my real life. Id been programmed for weeks with little clips in between videos to be ready to watch it on TV all day. I think when it actually happened it was kind of a let down, I dont really remember it, another big show washed over in my mind with a thousand others just like it.
By junior high school Id gone to a few rock concerts (Id win free tickets by calling up the local radio station until I was the lucky 95th caller and pledge my soul as a dedicated listener) and Id always end up feeling distanced from the performers, like they were some kind of super human beings and I was just one of a million souls watching something that Id had nothing to do with. It was this strange mix of contempt and admiration that would leave me feeling totally empty and sad. I looked up to the people on the stage but once again it was that feeling of them being so far away from my life that I wasnt even sure they really existed. Not too long after that whole time I started to become really disillusioned with the pop culture Id been fed all my life in this vague, hard to articulate, alienated kind of way.
Sometimes I feel like so many of my childhood memories have been glossed over with this thick layer of sitcoms and action show episodes, like so many of my memories arent even my own, theyre just some script that someone wrote in Hollywood somewhere. Sometimes I have trouble untangling in my mind what was real and what I just watched on TV, the apartment I grew up in from all those cardboard living room sets, the nightly news and the war movies. I wonder sometimes how many people out there have had the same experience. I wonder how many of us have the same implanted culture festering away in our brains somewhere, this bonding link with other people our age because we all grew up with the same dumb shit.
Anyway, at some point I exploded and a couple years later me and my friends were punks. And I had a lot of friends by the way, because there were a lot of us alienated, fucked up kids. There was this one neighborhood wed all hang out in and kids from all over the country would run away from home and come live in the abandoned buildings and hang out on the street. A lot of my friends had been through way worse shit then I could have ever even thought up in my middle-class liberal Manhattan dream world: their step-fathers had beaten or raped them, theyd been locked up and escaped from juvie or psych wards, they came from trailer parks and ghettos in middle America and their families were drug addicts and psycho military people. My dad had just died and my early teenage years were full of my own family trauma. Id never been able to relate to the kids in my school and for the first time in my life I finally felt like I was accepted somewhere. I related to the punks more than any people Id ever known. For the first time in my life I learned about what it was like to have a real community around who looked after each other.
So this is what happened: I stopped going to school and I started hanging out in this place called Tompkins Square Park. The scene on the streets back then was a real mix of kids coming from out of town who were out on their own surviving and kids like me who were still in high school and living at home but just had fucked up or complicated lives we needed to get away from. We were a pretty tight knit group, us punks, we created a family together and built community out of the scraps and fragments of all our life experiences as alienated teenagers, us against the world. I started to unlearn a lot of the TV programming Id been fed about social interaction and started to learn how to really relate to other people. Finally some of us misfits had found a tribe outside the mainstream. We had our own culture that strived to have nothing to do with the larger popular culture.
Music was a really big part of the scene we created. Wed put on our own shows and had our own spaces to play music. We had our own underground networks for distributing our demo tapes and little magazines with stories pouring out our souls to each other about our lives. There was a real emphasis in those days on self-sufficient culture. "Do It Yourself" was the rallying cry for so many of us fed up with the overprocessed blood-soaked consumer culture and the vapid corporate madness wed been raised with as children. Independent record labels popped up all over the place. Selling out the scene was a big part of the dialogue back in those days. I remember there was an album that came out called in Europe called Only Stupid Bastards Help EMI. Because all the major record labels were huge conglomerates affiliated with arms contractors, there was a real consciousness in keeping the music within the scene, not letting the profit slip away into someone elses pocket. Making any kind of money off your art was seen as selling out to us and at the time that had its really good sides.
Everything was really informal and down to earth. There were no managers or big labels at all. If there was a band from out of town that I liked, chances were that I could write them a letter and they would write me back inviting me to come sleep on their couch and give me a personal tour of their town. When I saw bands play at the squat shows and I danced in the pit with my friends, I felt like I was part of something really cool, something that Id helped to create that had nothing to do with mainstream society.

I think for a lot of us what eventually grew out of our alienation from society was a hyper-awareness of injustice in the world. Even if you were white the cops treated you just as bad as the black kids if you were on the street dirty and punk. Everything looked ugly at fifteen anyway: life was short and we were all gonna die young. It was the tail end of the Cold War and wed been raised with the threat of nuclear annihilation present in the backs of all our minds. We hated society and at the same time that we hated society, a lot of us felt a really strong affinity with animals that was stronger than our feelings for humans. It was a lot easier to feel emotions for imprisoned veal calves and cats with their heads cut open in vivisection laboratories than the people that were fighting wars against each other all over the planet. A lot of us didnt eat any animal products at all and if you dont know from personal experience, it can be pretty alienating to be a vegan in a meat culture -- everyones really threatened and thinks youre crazy. Try it for a little while and youll see what Im talking about. Go to a diner and try ordering some food with no milk or eggs or anything fried in animal fat.
Me and my friends would just get tighter and tighter as we slipped more and more outside the norms of society. We built our world underground and a lot of our codes of ethics were things that most people wouldnt even be able to begin to understand unless they hung out with us for a long time. Most of our fashion statements were really just for each other: the obscure band names on our tee-shirts or the cryptic symbols on our canvas patches wed used to hold our clothes together. But we had community: wed smash TV's and cook food in big groups, wed hang out on the streets and play music and drink a lot.

Eventually some of us became more overtly political. We hooked into older activist networks and started organizing in our schools and on the street. We got our inspiration from the old Yippies who would sit around smoking pot and telling stories about the good old days of guerrilla theater pranks and wed have meetings in an old pacifist resource center in the neighborhood that was full of anti-nuclear activists. There were lots of older housing activists and squatters floating around whod been the ones to originally open the abandoned buildings in the late 70s and theyd had years of experience fighting the city.
Back in the late 80s New York City was a trip and a half, let me tell you: for the first time since the 1930s there were homeless people everywhere, shanty towns in the middle of Manhattan island -- the after effects of a housing crisis and Reagan cutting all the mental hospital funding and social services back at the beginning of his reign in office. The Lower East Side, our beautiful neighborhood, was going through a huge and complicated economic battle between the forces of gentrification development and everyone else: everyone from the old Puerto Ricans and Ukrainians to the young artists and the anarchists were mixed up in it.
There were big riots in Tompkins Park over the tent city that had been constructed by a small army of homeless people and their supporters. I watched as friends of mine got beat bloody over nothing in the middle of police riots. I threw my first brick at a cop and set my first barricade on fire in the middle of the street. Id get arrested all the time in skirmishes with the police and my mom would freak out. So much of our politics were reactionary, just channeled adolescent anger fueling direct actions of our rage against society. Late night stencil bombing and window smashing, blowing up cars with M-80s, always focusing our anger against the police who were all seemingly these fat mustached buffoons who lived on Long Island and were like an occupying army in our neighborhood. But there truly was love and inspiration behind all that rage and anger. I remember it really well. A lot of us had this vision of a new society where everyone was free and equal and had autonomy from the outside government. Admittedly, as an young teenager in the middle of the city it was pretty hard to articulate sustainable models for alternative futures and practical ways to live cooperatively on large scales.
But more important than our far off visions for a new society, we really did have community that stretched across the world: scenes of punks all over the country with similar ideas and styles; comrades wed hear of in Europe who were battling Thachers reactionary government, the Poll Tax Riots, the thriving West German Autonomen scene with their romantic black blocks and whole occupied neighborhoods. We listened to old punk records that told us of our history, all shrouded in legends and mysteries, but so much more accessible and less alienating than whatever pop star crap that was playing on the radio that might as well have come from another planet.
Meanwhile, we had so much more fun than everyone else. We were the punks. We dyed our hair all different colors and wrote our opinions about the world on the backs of our jackets in spikes for everyone to see in crude slogans. We pulled off a subtle yet somehow very appealing mix of not giving a fuck but caring a whole lot at the same time. We didnt have to conform to the same gender rules that everyone else seemed forced into about dating and male/female division of sex roles. For teenagers, we were really super aware and conscious of sexism in our scene. For the first time in my life I started to meet really cool real girls who would school me in political theory and teach me how to make stencils; girls who didnt shave their legs and would throw bottles at cops when they were angry. Id found my crew.

There was this great album that a lot of us listened to back then called: Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records: Charity, Starvation, and Rock & Roll and it was by this really cool punk band from the UK called Chumbwamba. A bunch of us used to hang out at Michelle and Isa Moscowitzs house, (the infamous Brooklyn punk sisters), and dance around to it and cook big vegan feasts. It had come out right about the era of Live Aid and it was this incredible critique of the corporate rock structure and the hypocrisy of all the stars who profited off their image as caring about the poor. But it was so much more. It beautifully and simply articulated the destructive relationship between the rich nations and the developing world, the history of imperialism, the evils of apartheid, the corporate media, and the rich families who perpetuated it all. It was like a punk rock opera. From the first lines:
Im the boss of the company - and Ive got hunger working for me.
Listen, and youll begin to understand: I build my profits from stolen land.
Its the economics of supply and demand. And I make the demands around here.
to the last lines of the album:
And the cycle of hungry children will keep on going round...
Till we burn the multinationals to the ground.
I still get chills when I think about it. It wasnt like any other punk album that had ever come out: the distorted guitars, chaotic drum beats, and screaming vocals had been replaced by keyboards, drum machines, and melodic intelligible lyrics. But that didnt matter at all, this was obviously a very punk album. We all loved it, we all knew all the words. We used to joke that if we ever wanted the anarchists to infiltrate mainstream society wed just get them to start broadcasting Chumbawamba on the radio. Ha-ha.
Time flies. All of a sudden its eight years later. My friends that I used to hang out with on the street and in the political meetings are scattered all over the place. If you look at all of us now and check out our lives, were doing a really wide spectrum of things. Theres still a lot of us doing radical activism on one front or another: organizing protests and collectives, working with pirate radio and alternative media projects; traveling through the network of infoshops and radical houses around the country, cooking Food Not Bombs and bridging connections. You can find some of my friends off doing eco-activism in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, keeping the last of the old growth trees from getting clearcut. Some of my friends do jail support work in groups like Prisoners Literature Project that send books and letters to incarcerated inmates all over the country. Some of my friends are off in the jungle in Mexico working with the Zapatistas or doing solidarity work with 3rd world rebel movements back in our home towns. Some of my friends work in bicycle shops and teach kids how to build bikes or help organize Critical Mass rides that protest the car culture in large cities. Some of them work in food co-ops and have studied herbal medicine and natural healing to help provide alternatives to the medical industry drug culture. The ones that stayed squatting the tenement buildings on the Lower East Side by now are either master carpenters, total alcoholics, or some twisted combination of the two.
A lot of my friends are the most creative people anywhere and Im lucky to even know them. Off the top of my head I can think of dancers and jewelry makers and musicians and sculptors and painters and writers and freak nomad fire breathers who travel the country weaving their strange and inspiring tales. I bet if you ask any of us that are still around about those days back when we were growing up together on the Lower East Side we'll all talk about how influential and inspiring a time it was.
As for me, I ended up sticking around the anarchist scene more or less, nixed the punk thing with disgust a couple years ago when things got ugly, branched out, but Ive kept my roots and my friends and I still feel like I have a big community all over the place. I travel around the country and write stories about the people I meet and stuff that happens to me. Youre reading one right now by the way.

I showed up in New Orleans the other day and the old streets were alive with magic and promise. I'd been staying in a small town across Lake Pontchartrain with some friends for the past couple weeks and helping rennovate a house with their step-father. I had a crumpled up piece of paper with a contact address in my pocket for one of the local squats Id gotten from a kid Id met back in the Summertime whod drawn me a map of how to find his collective house when wed met hanging out on the same piece of land in Southern Oregon. I showed up at the house and it was a really nice squatted shotgun with pirated water and a wood stove, a sculpture of twisted copper coils hooked up to a bathtub in the backyard creating a makeshift hot water shower. There was a small tight-knit crew of folks living there who all shared a love for books and radical history and a hatred of authority. There was familiar art and maps and flyers for protests and shows all over the walls. I immediately felt at home.
The Crescent Wrench bookstore was a couple blocks away and I got the grand tour. The Emma Goldman books and Spectacular Times Situationist pamphlets, the Slingshots and Shadows and Blasts and Love & Rages, all the national rags. There were racks full of good zines, lonely kids pouring out their souls from all over the country captured in time on little folded pieces of paper. There was a whole library with everything from carpentry do-it-yourself books to cheesy sex guides to Howard Zinn history. Every night there was a different activity going on at the Crescent Wrench: from watching Noam Chomsky movies to book binding workshops to the night I walked in and there was a room full of people polka dancing. It was a cool little scene Id stumbled into, almost all people from other parts of the country whod come together to create an enclave of radical culture.
So anyway, that first day I was at the Crescent Wrench infoshop I was talking to the punk guy behind the counter, happy to be back around my own kind that I could commiserate with for a little while before I headed back to small town life across the water. I asked him: Hey, didja hear that old band Chumbawamba made it to the top of the charts? I keep hearing them on the radio. Isnt that crazy, who woulda ever thought, huh? He looked at me and I realized Id struck a chord. His face got all red and he managed to sputter out: Man, those fucking sellouts! Theyre such hypocrites! I cant believe theyre doing exactly what they preached against all those years ago! Fucking rock star bastards selling out our culture! I was walking by Tower Records and they had their album in the window! Can you believe that? They must be so rich by now. Fucking rich rock star sellout fucking bastards making money for EMI..
I laughed and told him I thought it was a little more complicated, but inside I could relate to his gripes. The truth is that I'm just as sick of watching the music and art I care about get coopted and bought out by big business. I freaked out when I turned the TV on one day to see that the Nike corporation had bought the rights to that old Gil-Scott Heron song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and was using it to sell their fucking sneakers. It was like Whitey using his own anti-manifesto with the meaning sucked out and spit back evil. It was some sick voodoo shit, insidious exploitation of black kids in the ghetto too young to remember the song had originally been a call to smash the consumer culture of the early 70's.
Even more, the whole "punk explosion" in the media a couple years ago was enough to make any self-respecting older punk kid slip into an identity crisis. It was like everything you thought had meant something had just had all the meaning drained out of it when those videos with the guys with mohawks started playing on MTV. It's undeniably strange when the stuff that you and your friends used to treasure like secrets is suddenly in the public domain. The music that got you through adolescence with its caustic critiques of pop culture is suddenly being sold as the same pop culture you were rebelling from in the first place. It's even stranger when you start seeing all these kids walking around who look just like you and your friends did and you want to be able to relate to them, but they're nothing like how you and your friends were. They're like the equivalent of hippies in the 80's: shallow retro fashion victims with so little political consciousness you could rub the contradictions in their face and they'd pay you to do it some more, cynical and hopeless. Back at the Crescent Wrench I found myself struck with how much I could relate to this guys angry ramblings.
Anyway, it was a couple days later, I was back at my friends place across the water, and I still couldn't get all this stuff off of my mind. By chance I'd been listening to the radio and I'd heard an announcment that if I was the 104 caller I'd win free tickets to see Chumbawamba live in concert. It was too surreal, too close to home. I suddenly felt betrayed. I kept getting visions of drunk frat boys singing along to poppy vapid feel good songs and record executives sitting in some office cashing in with big grins. The strange thing was that I was positive Chumbawamba knew exactly what they were doing. They were talking about it years ago, they were the ones who articulated it to me in the first place, shit. Something didn't seem right. This called for some drastic action.
So I went to go buy their CD at the mall, it was really the only thing I could do given the circumstances. I was standing on line at the Circuit City in the big Louisiana Shopping Center with my friend Kaia and it was the weekend right after Thanksgiving and everyone was busy rushing around doing their Christmas shopping. It was a total fucking nightmare. There was a wall with 40 television screens all playing the same droning images of war and sex: explosions and scantily clad bodies on beaches. There were all these kids standing transfixed before the flickering images and running around begging their parents to buy them the new super-hype video games and CD-Roms.
I was standing there on line with the glossy shrink wrapped CD in my sweaty hand and I was studying it for any kind of signifier that the contents were more radical than they appeared in their slick green and pink neon packaging. The only thing I could see that had any promise was a little note in the bottom right hand corner: www.chumba.com," an invitation to check out their web-page on the Internet.
Times have really been changing in the last couple years and it seems like now everyone and their mom has a website on the Internet. A bunch of my neo-luddite forest friends still think its a conspiracy to suck our brains out our skulls for the Man, but the more I learn about the potential communication capabilities of the Internet and the longer its around, the more open minded I become. Unlike television, which is just straight blasts of commercial garbage injected straight into our brains, the net is full of radical information thats really easy to access and sift through. Because its getting so much cheaper to use and because the medium is inherently interactive, Im totally convinced that its going to be a positive tool for large sections of the population. Not like there arent forty on-line reactionary business web pages for every one cool on-line lefty labor journal or radical bulletin board. There are. But the more people that get on there, the more the scales will tip. Ive recently been turned into somewhat of a computer geek, Im typing on one right now so maybe Im a little biased, maybe my brains already been sucked out. But anyway, keep reading and youll see what Im getting at.
We got back to the house and I walked straight over to the computer, turned on the modem, and logged on-line. I typed in the web page address and the screen flickered for a second and then came up full of text. I breathed a sigh of relief. Chumbawamba had links to all the cool radical websites around: Mumia-Abu Jamal, The Noam Chomsky Archive, The Liverpool Dockworkers, Anti-Facist Action, AK Press, Billboard Altering Sites, tons of stuff Id never even heard of. The 12 character address I found on the back of the CD and punched into a computer terminal gave me access to a wealth of information, all I had to do was click on what I wanted to know about and the screen would fill with text and photos. There was a section where there were ongoing debates about current political issues and diologues from people all over the world asking questions to the band. They had a list of big corporate shops that they recommended stealing their new album from. If you get caught, just tell the store detective that you have full support of the band. I was pretty happy. I dont care that EMI is a weapons contractor. If this was selling out then I think Im ready to sign up.
I dont think that me or most of my friends have a very easy time trying to imagine a large scale social revolution. Most of us are way too alienated from mainstream culture and even most other people to be able to begin thinking on such big levels. Most of us are covered in emotional scars and have retreated to our safe little enclaves in big cities or rural communities. A lot of our attempts at political organizing seem to end up only reaching each other because we only know how to talk to a certain kind of people.
Were still the same alienated kids who hate society and cant watch TV. Thats OK. But the truth is that there are too many battle fronts to be just hanging out with each other. I still want to see the people rise up and take the power out of the hands of the big corporations and start organizing their own collectives. I want to see a social revolution on a mass scale in my lifetime. Building a mass movement and educating large groups of people seems like really good places to start. But its easier said than done. I commend anyone thats trying.
So what Im trying to say is that if it means Chumbawamba starts selling what appear to be apolitical songs that become smash hits and millions of people listen to them and then maybe at some point have the chance of getting exposed to more radical stuff, I think thats wonderful. Im still the same alienated kid I was at 14 who scoffs at popular culture and has some separatist tendencies and still knee jerk recoils at the general amount of stupidity and sexism and racism and brainwashed TV Christian moralist bullshit most people have been inundated with. I always feel like my soul is dying when Im surrounded by corporate culture: office buildings, strip malls and tract suburbs. I always have to be able to retreat back to the familiar world of my friends who totally opt out of the system and live in the middle of the woods or scam their way through life in the cities living off the grid. Im totally inspired by the freedom of radical environments that can be created out of the clutches of the law.
. But the older I get the more I realize that the last thing I want to do is put myself in a bubble and surround myself with people who think just like me. Thats too easy. Im not going to scoff at all my friends who do it because I totally understand, but Im beginning to understand that if we really want to change the world and make things better for people other than our network of friends, it takes a way more challenging type of organizing , learning how to talk to people wed never figured wed find ourselves talking to, thinking about things on a large scale, on a mass scale.
I used to see the future in creating a new system and a threat by example from the ashes of the old. But the truth is that I dont see the old system going anywhere yet. I think at a certain point if we want to be effective on a mass scale we have to learn to negotiate a balance with the system. We have to learn to dance with our enemies because we know its for the best in the long run. We have to learn to be that statue of Jesus with the Mayan idols hidden inside. And be proud of it too. The truth is that I dont give a fuck anymore about an old code of the underground scene, Im way more interested in seeing change than I am upholding the unwritten laws. Im not going to be greedy and say my cultures getting robbed because my friends and I can always find more secret stuff to enjoy thats not for public consumption. If they figure out some way to make money off of it then well just think up something else thats new.
So in the end I think back to waiting in line at the Circuit City in the shopping center, surrounded by a whitewash of corporate culture. I think of all the kids growing up in this country who weren't lucky enough like me to be born in cultural centers like New York City and are stuck in the festering nightmare that are our country's ghettos and suburbs. I think of some of those kids going out and buying the new hit CD from Chumbawamba cause they heard the catchy song on the radio, making it past the surface layer and discovering a world they would have never had access to before. And I smile thinking about strange twists of fate and the unknown future in store for all of us.




"Revolution will be built on the spread of ideas and information, on reaching people, rather than on our habit of creating ghettoes within which to stagnate. It's no use standing outside shouting. We have to start kicking down the doors!" From sleevenotes to first Chumbawamba single, 1985