Ok, so this came to my attention:
http://gremlin.net/main/2010/07/05/stealing/

Read it and come back. I’d strongly recommend hitting the original link too (http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com/weblog/2010/06/fighting_with_teenagers_a_copy.php) though reading all the subsequent banter is unnecessary.

Up to speed? Ok. Let’s rock.

So, as I mentioned the other day, I’m definitely a capitalist: Money is good. I’d rather not need it, but greenbacks are still superior to beads and shells and “free” just doesn’t work. Not in theory and not in practice.

And as a musician, I want to make money off the shit I make. This isn’t a charity: I’m more than happy to take any money that happens to be currently weighing down your wallet and/or conscience.

That being said, art is theft. The only difference between good art and bad art, is the artist’s personal ability to camouflage his sources. We rip off what we see and hear and remix it. Artists have been doing it since the earliest days of stick painting. And even the most morally superior person finds practical limits on compensating the sources, not to mention a couple of equally severe philosophic ones.

Let’s start with the practical.

First, you have chronological limits. Let me be clear here that “estates” are leeches. A group of people, under the guise of protecting some other person’s “artistic integrity” post-mortem are capitalizing off of a body of work in which they made no significant contribution. Elvis deserved to get paid for the music he made (assuming you like Elvis). His kids don’t. They can go out and get actual jobs. The fact that these groups are able to renew copyright at all is total shit. So, while I’m alive, you owe me money. Once I’m dead, fuck it. Same goes for you and every other person on this pathetic rock.

And I think even the life of the artist may be pushing it. If your sole claim to fame and fortune is a song you wrote 20 years ago and so you still have to milk it for every cent you can, that’s your problem. Get a job. Write another song. Something. Considering most people barely have the attention span to even sit through a song all the way, trying to collect decades after the fact is stupid.

Logic problem number 2, the question of origin: We rip off everything. But can we be held responsible for ripping off someone by proxy? If I play a guitar lick I stole from Zach Wylde who actually stole it from Muddy Waters, who do I pay? Why should Waters get to benefit from Wylde’s notoriety? Why should Wylde get paid for something he didn’t write?

Now the more philosophic problems:

Lets assume that in a moment of benighted ignorance, I believe that something I wrote (musically or otherwise) was entirely 100% unique, only to find that what I wrote was actually the hook for the Beatles’ “Day Tripper”? (Its a hypothetical. Just run with it). Is there any justification for me being charged for using someone else’s work if it happens by pure coincidence? Sure, one could argue that I might have to prove I had never heard “Day Tripper”, but then prove to me you’ve never thought about a bi-curious fuchsia rabbit. Unless I am able to account for every minute I have been alive (approximately 13,665,600 thus far) and what sounds were occurring at each moment, it can’t be done. Ever. Period. So I’m screwed. Fair, huh?

Philosophical issue 2: Unintended consequences.

Let’s say for argument’s sake, that we agree that every artist (or their estate) is entitled to compensation every time for the use of their material, even if it was purely by accident. So, who’s out collecting money at the party on behalf of Metallica when one kid decides to put on his copy of Ride the Lightning?

Fair use only covers duplication of material that one already owns, and only as back up to their current copy for private use. No letting friends look at/hear it, and no loaning it out, since these all qualify as public performance. No singing along and definitely no trying to pick out on the guitar at home, since these all constitute “unauthorized reproduction”.

You MIGHT be allowed to discuss its existence with people you know, but to be safe, “the first rule of Metallica is: You don’t talk about Metallica” (which, incidentally, I’m quite cool with). And this then extends to anything which has ever influenced a Metallica song in any way.

Seems a bit draconian, but the letter of the law is all that matters here and there are no exceptions (unless given previous written authorization from the creator, manufacturer, distributor, retailer, and any other party which can demonstrate sufficient interest in the transaction).

Now, lets deal with the specific issue presented here: a kid “trades” sheet music online, asking price $3.99, unable to find it in a medium accessible to her. While I’m disappointed by the lack of ingenuity, we’ll let that slide. Of that $3.99, let’s assume it really is a cold day in Hell and 100% of it finds its way into the author’s pocket (in reality, I’d be surprised if the author got 5%). If we’re only worried about the renumeration of the author, we can set up a Pay-Pal account and everyone can contribute to the “poor kids who can’t afford sheet music” fund and be done with it. Of course, then you have the unpaid for performance of the piece and the cycle continues…

But look at the big picture: this unpaid for copy of sheet music is serving double-duty as free advertising and creating new fans who are likely to go out and buy schwag. At the very least, if this girl is half the fan she claims to be, she’s probably in possession of ridiculously marked up paraphernalia and probably attended a show or two, which is where we artists really make most of our money anyway.

There’s a reason why bands and other artists give out shit at concerts. We can either pay thousands of dollars for a guy in a cheap suit to hock our wares, or we throw a kid a t-shirt and he proudly wears it, impressing his friends and luring more of you to spend your cash on our next self-absorbed endeavor.

So here’s the bottom line: if you like what we, or any other artist/musician/writer does, show support: Buy an album or a sticker or t-shirt or drawing or whatever. This is how we pay the bills and it encourages us to make more of the shit you like. But if the best you can do is help spread our work around, we’ll take that too.

Call it boredom, call it a lack of stimulation, call it an ever present need to express something, but (as you can tell) I’ve actually been writing quite a bit.

Of course I’m saving the best for the impending album but there’s still quite a lot to say that doesn’t lend itself to a lyrical format and it seems a shame to let all the unused bandwidth go to waste. At least I can act under the delusion of educating you.

So today I’m going to address a re-occurring accusation that we here at Deophagy HQ are “devil worshippers”. Let’s start with a brief examination of terms:

1) Devil- from the Greek, Diabolus, a Devil is a malevolent entity, used most typically in reference to the Judeo-Christian Satan, which in turn comes from the Hebrew, Shaitan, meaning Accuser or Adversary (though there is a school of thought that Shaitan may actually come from a term referring to excrement from where we get our English term “shit”). If one actually looks at the related biblical texts and keeps this definition (accuser, not shit) in mind, a very different picture of Satan emerges.

Sitting on the left hand of God, Satan is the prosecuting attorney/bouncer that prevents the unworthy from being admitted into the presence of God. He did it to Job and to Jesus. Only after Paul of Tarsus got his hands on the fetal Christianity in an act of pedophilic lust, did this character get warped into something unholy.

In fact, if one takes the Gnostics in to account, it was YHWH who was unholy, believing himself to be the ultimate God and this sick and twisted creation is the result of his flawed perception and that it was Satan who fought to liberate us by urging us to eat from the tree of knowledge.

At any rate, either Satan is an entity working towards our liberation or just another hired hand. The first may be noble, but its hardly enough to justify wasting any time on him since he seems as incompetent as YHWH himself, though at least persistent.

2) Worship- Giving praise or adoration through supplication and possibly tax-deductible contributions. Not our scene. We don’t worship anything. Period. We don’t care. We’re not even as bent as the LaVeyans running around worshipping ourselves.

Sure, between Belial and myself there is ego to spare, often requiring two, maybe even three tables at a restaurant to accommodate the hyper-inflated senses of self worth. But we still accept that we are, fundamentally, flawed and in the grand scheme of things, inconsequential. We just happen to be better than you.

So, no devils. No worship. Seems like the situation should be resolved there. But its not.

See, we’re sick puppies. Not content to worship some entity (fictional or otherwise), we see no problem in acting as said entity, becoming the faces of power, fear and complete ambivalence toward the human condition.

Where Belial tends to supplement his transformation by hacking off limbs and replacing organic bits with technomancy, I tend toward other more arcane methods. Neither of us takes the other particularly seriously, and only take ourselves seriously when there’s nothing better to do.

The only reason we do any of the things that we do is because we can. We’re here, stuck in your little sandbox and see no reason not to hack the living fuck out of this ultimately pointless reality.

Devil worshippers? No. Devils? Quite probably.

I love etymology.

Seriously.

I dig words, and language in general, but knowing where words came from and watch how they evolved into their present form is just fucking groovy.

The word that’s got me all hopped up at present is a little tiny word that gets thrown around carelessly and is desperately in need of rehabilitation. The word is “reason”. Or to be precise, I got worked up about the word “rational”, you know, possessing reason.

In a very long list of abused words in the English language, the ones I tend to enjoy the most are words about thought, about how we think, and the things we think about and in this case, ‘rational’ flew under the radar until literally twenty minutes ago, when by sheer coincidence I glanced down at something with ‘rational’ on it, but where all but the word’s root was covered.

Ratio.

Synapses fired off in a cascade of new ideas.

Ratio; Proportion; Phi; The Golden Mean; The Golden Spiral; Organic Curvature…

Around and around they went. And then it all clicked.

All of our so called “reasons” are nothing more than excuses. Reason is mathematically precise like the ratio between two numbers (barring the unfortunately termed ‘irrational numbers’). One must follow, logically, mathematically from cause and effect. Not use the cause to justify our reaction (fellow language lovers will forgive the improper usage of justify).

The end never “justifies” the means unless the end necessarily follows. Anyone who says otherwise is ret-conning history in an attempt to shirk responsibility when the shit inevitably hits the fan.

The reason must be the cause and it must be reacted to proportionately.

What this proportion is, unfortunately, can rarely be understood until after the fact, and even then can probably be debated until Hell opens its maw and finally devours everything. With so much of the human experience based so thoroughly in the subjective, trying to milk an unresponsive reality to provide an answer is difficult in the best of times.

But its something to think about.

As we in the US get ready to celebrate Independence Day, another commercial distortion of much older ideas, my mind finds itself wandering toward politics.

People have asked me a few times just where my allegiances lay in this arena, and they are generally shocked and appalled to learn that their preconceptions are generally wrong.

After all, I will gladly kick your ass, so I must be one of those psychotic pro-war Repugnantcans. Of course, on the other hand I’m about as untraditional as you can get without gill implantation surgery (soon… soon) so I must be one of those hippy, liberal Demoncrats.

But dig this:

I’m pro-guns AND pro-drugs (seems a handy population control mechanism in the making)

I’m pro-environment (generally liking air) AND anti-environmentalism (recycling is a scam).

I’m pro-life AND pro-death (seeing as how they’re inevitable anyway, what do I care if its in utero?)

Hell, I’m even pro-religion and pro-government, both generally being archaic, though frequently psychologically necessary and occasionally useful constructs for most people most of the time. And I have been known to run the gamut from tyrannical fascist to left-wing anarchist depending on how many idiots I’ve dealt with today.

The label-slappers out there generally sit back smugly with the word “Libertarian” (sometimes centrist) at the front of their purile little minds, but put simply, my beliefs won’t fit on a bumper sticker, let alone a single word.

In a perfect world, I suppose you could call me a laissez-faire-anarcho-capitalist-libertarian… but even that requires a good handful of qualifiers.

What I’m against is tyranny of thought, dogmatism, and hyper-emotionalism. I’m against manufactured conformity, political correctness and intellectual laziness.

I’m also against the idea that we’re all equal and yet, all unique. It has to be one or the other. I’m against the overwhelming sense of entitlement you monkeys exhibit and the idea that somehow your race, gender, or other involuntary trait renders you superior to anyone.

Elitism isn’t wrong in and of itself, but I’m better because I CHOOSE to be, not because of the random assembly of genetic information, divine providence or sheer fucking luck.

There is no conclusion. I am what I am and its likely to change… evolution is a wonderful thing. Get over it. Get past the labels, past the petty shit stirring and wake up. I may not agree with you, but it might at least give me reason to respect you.

Twice in two days. People might think I gave a damn.

It has come to our attention that there might be those of you stumbling upon the site for the first time (or perhaps returning after the drugs we gave you last time wore off) and wondering what the Holy Fuck was going on.

This is Deophagy.com. Even says so at the top of your screen. This is the hub around which all of our machinations spin. Whether it be the mail order zombie bride business or the random dispatches from one of my more paranoid personalities, you’ll find it here.

At least in theory.

In reality the site lurks in the darkest corners of the long-forgotten net, acquiring a lovely variety of psychotic delusions and nasty viruses (the kind that leak through the phone lines and make your girlfriend leave you for a Bavarian goat herder) and generally gathers dust.

It stirs periodically, we feed it, and it slithers back off to R’yleh or wherever it spends its time these days.

But what is Deophagy? We’re the latest trend, plague and baby sitter service, spreading our message of life, love and pointless destruction. Part band, part social experiment and part delusion of grandure, Deophagy is the cure for the common cult.

Etymologically speaking, we are the consumers of Gods. The Christians, long having forgotten that their messiah told them to “take, eat”, we have decided to take him and the rest of his ilk up on the offer. Transubstantiation and weak symbolism is no longer sufficient. Rather, we gorge ourselves on the Gods themselves.

And don’t think we’re stopping at the Christcicle.

It has been roughly 2 years since anything has been touched on the site.

Amazing how time flies…

Deophagy is not (wish as you might to the contrary) dead, though parts definitely developed a lovely green color, atrophy most definitely set in, and many have been standing at the ready with shovels.

This exile was partially self-imposed: the fetus has been gestating and is finally starting to kick, which seems as good a time as any to start preparing you all for the impending apocalypse.

On the other hand, we have most definitely been struggling to find the tools and musicians to really bring this monstrosity to life. Everyone wants to be a rock god, an icon, and an artist. But so very few are willing to bleed for their art. In fact, they start looking quite pale when I bring out the knives.

Oh well.

In the meantime I have been watching you all with half-hearted interest. Watching you cattle not only build the abatoir but happily, even impatiently, waiting for someone to throw the switch to set the conveyor belt in motion.

My lovelies, I am more than happy to comply.

As we lurch ever closer to D-Day, I will be making my presence known so stay tuned.

You had your chance.