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Introduction by Susan Farrell of Art Crimes
Hiphop-Network.com can and should be a place of joyful connection, activism and change. If we help each other learn how to use the online world to nurture our community and promote our own businesses, it can be a tool for individual and collective revolution.

If we get stuck in our prejudices against technology, against earning money, sniping at the surface aspects of each other like gender and race, They win and We lose. The point is not to become consumers of the online candy, but for each of us to become a cultural architect of the net.

We must build the content we want online, or it won't exist. There is a wonderful vacuum right now where free music used to be, to take one example of a looming opportunity. Just look at the Grateful Dead's business plan. They gave music away by letting fans record and trade recordings, and it didn't hurt them a bit. They played to full houses the entire time and sold albums like crazy. Everybody knows their name. If you want customers in other countries, you can't rely on the established record/book/art distribution, you need to get or make a bigger, cheaper, more efficient network.

I salute Crayone for his efforts to build an infrastructure for community hiphop online. Years ago we met each other at a BBoy Summit where we were both trying to explain to anyone who would listen what the Internet is and why everyone in hiphop should care about it. Today we see the first and second generation of hiphop sites and the opportunity they bring for us to find each other and work together. Please join us, surpass our efforts, and make the Internet your own, because you can.

[Hack Your Own Career]
I'm expecting an outpouring of creativity such as the world has never seen before, right about the time the Internet gets fast enough that we don't have to wait for it anymore. Many writers will be in a position to run that show because they'll know all about the net. Already many of the biggest-money websites have writers for art directors and in lead-design positions.

[Rise Above It]
We need to somehow rise above where we came from and decide where we should go from here.

The punks and the metal heads and the hiphoppers need to declare an audio truce and realize that graffiti isn't about music. Everyone needs to set aside what they were taught about politics, religion, race, gender, and geography and realize that writers on the other side of the world are probably more like you than the people next door. Transcend the insignificant differences. Every cross-cultural handshake is a chance to move toward more peace in the world.

[Stop the Bitching]
Tolerance for the gangsta-rap image of women as stupid "whores" and "bitches" has got to end. It's not helping anybody, and it is undermining self-esteem where we need strength. What is it that makes sex good for men to do and bad for women to do? How can that possibly work? I thought that ignorant attitude went out with high-school in the 1950s. We need to find respect for each other so we can stand together, instead of dividing ourselves -- and undermining our potential power to change the world -- by perpetuating this view of women. It's dangerous and counterproductive. Women need to stop taking it and speak out.

[The Barrier to Entry]
It may be hard to see a transformation yet, because computers still seem expensive and cumbersome and we're so close to the beginning of the change, but public access to the Internet brought down some of the most stifling class barriers fast and hard. It is a revolution unfolding while we watch. Shaping that revolutionary network is job number one, because if we don't keep the network open and cheap for the free use of the people, it will become a powerful tool for oppressive government and corporate interests. The invention of the net is much like the invention of the printing press and the videocamera and is at least as important in political terms. The king is so frightened he wants total control over it. Otherwise we might all write whatever we want to. And then what would happen?

The net is pro-artist and pro-poet and pro-activist. Computers are like telephones or zines or paint or cameras: communication tools. What's important is what you have to say. On the Internet, no one knows what you are, or what you look like -- so it's the great leveler.

[Selling Out]
[Parts of this appeared previously on http://www.funkierthanthou.net ]
The Big Branding Machine is co-opting graffiti as fast as it can. The writers get the short end of the deal no matter what. They can sell their labor and skill (and if they are lucky, their imagination) to a buyer, which is generally known as "graphic art." Then this graphic art can be used to promote all kinds of things the writer doesn't necessarily endorse.

The writer gets to pay his/her rent, a laudable goal of any worker. Then the press complains, the other writers complain, and scholars scratch their heads and theorize about post-modernism and signifiers. By night, the writers scuffle with the corporations over the billboards -- for the eyes, the prize.

The choices are ugly. Work for a corporate oppressor all the time in a menial position or use one's creative talent to get commission work from the same. Working for social justice organizations, mom-and-pop businesses, the crafts, and farming are the other major choices that spring to mind. These also happen to be the things most likely to be crushed by the multinational megacorps.

Selling out to corporations, joining in the branding is tainting. It takes real work to make oneself de-stink from the consumption machine. Doing so should be a major goal of anybody who is on the bottom of the foodchain or who is spending to keep pace with the Joneses, and anybody who opposes exploitation of workers and rape of the planet. It's difficult to make a clean dollar in the US today, no matter what you do.

There might be something wrong indeed with giving the corporation a more powerful tool to seduce the sleeping.

Advertising is so ubiquitous that if we notice it at all, we try to re-ignore it. The difference between advertising and graffiti is that graffiti is harder to ignore, lacking a clear financial motive and having more style. What could be more visually annoying than public advertising nobody had to buy that can't be ignored or understood? What could be more socially confusing in a buy-low/sell-high world than someone advertising a non-product? Writers didn't pay for the space they take, and their most visible product is their talents; yet when they DO sell their product, it's hissing and dissing all around. Police show up and arrest them. People who like the product are suspect, surveilled, hassled, hospitalized. Writers are uneasy, worried that anyone's success is their own failure; wanting to redefine success instead; feeling dirty by association.

Money is not itself evil. That's a lullabye the rich use to sing the poor to sleep. (Although a lot of bad can be done by evil with big bucks, so it's easy to confuse first causes.) It rhymes with "change is impossible so why vote, why protest"? Visual artists seem to sing along more than regular folks. But very few musicians or MCs diss each other for selling a tape. Very few DJs diss each other for taking a door fee. Very few poets complain that someone else has a poetry book. What's the deal with visual arts? Why should painting or graphics or design be the talent nobody values enough to pay well for (but everybody wants) and the one thing you can get dissed hardest for selling (in the graffiti world, selling painted stuff is dissed harder than selling sex and drugs).

What's the way out? Should writers be careful who pays their rent? Should they be careful they are selling their labor only and not the product of their minds or a piece of their soul, a slice of their history? Can you be an advertiser by day and a subvertiser by night? Must everything revolve around the Big Brands? Graffiti existed before advertising. It does not exist simply in opposition, in mimicry, in synergy, or in any other relation to advertising except as a competitor, in fact a real contender, for visual attention. The danger is in the marriage of the two, which might breed a better ad, but maybe not a better writer or a better world.

I would argue that fine art is the product outlet of most interest. There the writer who has an artistic bent can get fame, get up, and have sketching parties to celebrate it. The artwork can be whatever the writer feels like expressing. It's wildness creates its interest and value. Selling the work gets the rent paid without needing to confront the specter of the child chained to the loom, the woman locked to the sewing machine. The successful writer-artist could potentially win the game by becoming what German writers call the "free artist." I think that's what I want to be when I grow up. I toast the artists who have gone before me and I encourage those who can to do.

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