Ooooh.. I may have pissed off Patti Smith

Ah, ongoing saga of Pop Montreal 2007. Whew, wearing red today for Burma and running between events and running on the steam of much too much free booze and head spinning between the joy here and the anguish there. Yesterday was fueled by the sweet cocktail hour after Patti Smith’s keynote, at which I had the dubious distinction of pissing off Patti Smith, and also Sandy Pearlman a little bit I think, by trying to find out if it was true that she didn’t want people have free access to her music. This was something I’d heard people saying. I was pretty sure it wasn’t true. I should probably have used the opportunity to ask something wicked smart instead but alas, the free booze from the NU Films party the day before was still moving my veins and yeah. Apparently, untrue. Very untrue. She gives away as much of her music and rights as she legally can on her website, having signed record deals. She loves that 200 000 people have listened to her songs for free on her Myspace, and she loves listening to the music made by her “friends” there. The only thing she is very much against is being sampled. She resisted record companies wanting to chop and modify her work in the 70’s and is not more comfortable with it now. Remix culture doesn’t appeal to her, make your own music please, and I don’t know where you got that information. Ahh. Sorry.

I can understand how established artists feel this way about sampling, and still feel love for the open access and community potential of the internet. Honestly. I know I’m all for most things disruptive and open source, but I can sympathize, especially when you have that many people looking at you and judging (it’s easy for us plebes to be fine with remixing, it’s likely no one will notice). It’s too bad in a sense, because I think she might love the hiphop politics of sampling if she got into it and if someone like Scratch Bastid and Buck 65 remixed People Have The Power it would probably be a global anthem. But it’s fine- it’s like Salman Rushdie believing in the crucial chaos and disruption of democratic conversation and freedom of expression but not wanting people to publish excerpts from his work without his permission. At first glance this seems contradictory and people accused him of double standards and of being money grubbing. But look more closely and you discover that when people print excerpt’s of Rushdie, he gets blamed for the riots and for the fact that people die. I don’t know what the answer to this is.

My sense is that in the large scheme of things it might be better if information in whatever form could circulate more freely, regardless of fears and mistakes made, but what do I know.

She was brilliant and told great passionate stories about how she creates music. More on this soon. Review of her surprise show earlier this week with A Silver Mount Zion here.