They Call Me Mr. Glass...

by funtax

I want to be Sam Jackson's character from "Unbreakable." I really do. Villains have so much more class and personality than heroes (except for Batman, but I don't have the discipline to do the kind of sit-ups that it would take to be Batman). Unfortunately, aside from frequent and reckless breaking of Maryland's oppressive motor-vehicle laws, I don't do much by way of criminal behavior. Sure, there's the meth lab and the whale smuggling, but who doesn't break those laws now and then? I really lack the ability to do anything extraordinarily evil, so, alas, supervillainy has thus far eluded me.

In fact, the closest I come to actual, on-purpose law breaking is something some friends and I do every now and then to volley a little chaos at the Music Industry. In a world where the RIAA sues people's pants off on a regular basis and CDs with one or two good tracks on them cost as much as twenty bucks, a little rebellion can be healthy. Additionally, there's been a serious upswing of completely vacuous, crap music flooding popular culture as of late, making it exceedingly hard for the average consumer to find music that isn't being hawked by Carson Daily on TRL that week. So we came up with a modified version of a scheme we'd seen elsewhere. It's called droplifting and it's pretty much the opposite of shoplifting.

Basically, instead of stealing albums from a music store, we sneak albums into the store and hide them in the bins. The copies we place in the stores are usually full versions of popular albums, made from mp3s that are converted into cda tracks and then burned onto blank disks. Since the average pop album is only about 40 minutes in length, that usually leaves a good 15-20 minutes of space on the album that we then fill with other, better (in our opinion) tracks. For example, there was a run of Limp Bizkit albums earlier this year that had Public Enemy tracks tacked onto the end and a set of Kid Rock albums with a couple of Mike Ness songs added on. We include a cover that explains what the disk is -- that it's free, that it's a full copy, that it can be taken without fear of the store's security system having a conniption and that there are bonus tracks at the end that they may enjoy.

The original droplifting project was somewhat different. Instead of trying to make a dent in the cultural armour of American musical consumerism, the original project was designed to be a guerilla method of disseminating unsigned artists' work via traditionally uncooperative commercial channels. It remains an excellent way for unsigned artists get their work out to the public. You just burn off a run of your albums, head over to the local music store and drop them into various bins. Obviously, your best bet is to target an audience that has a taste for your style of music, so avoid dumping your trance album in the Country and Western bins (but who's to say that a Hank Williams fan might not get turned on by hearing your stuff, so the choice is ultimately up to the artist).

But what happens if you get caught? Technically, I know of no legal precedent that would establish the practice of leaving something in a store illegal, aside from littering laws, which would be a serious stretch. Making copies of copyrighted material is, of course, more of a legal sticky wicket. But since we aren't mass-producing/distributing the disks or selling them, it seems possible that this sort of thing could fall under "fair use" and thus be legally permissible. Personally, I prefer to think that it's illegal. It's not as much fun if we're allowed to do it.

I was, in fact, caught once. It was shortly after this past Thanksgiving and we were all amped up on "Buy-Nothing Day" propaganda and gingerbread (okay, it was bathtub gin, not cookies, but we were amped nonetheless). So a bunch of us decided to do a somewhat synchronized drop in the various areas we were in for the holiday. I was back home, visiting family, so I had the distinct pleasure of droplifting to the IROC-Z crowd I'd grown up with. It's very pro-Metallica sort of area, so making the choice of artist was pretty easy. I went out the weekend after Thanksgiving with a set of Metallica's 'Black Album' that had a Negativland song a friend had sent me and two Misfits tracks Metallica covers frequently added to the end (in retrospect, I should've chosen a shorter album, since that one clocks in at around 63 minutes, leaving a scant 11 minutes for additional tracks).

I dropped two copies in three different stores in the local mall and then headed to Best Buy. I walked past the guard in the front, perused mice for a moment and then headed over to the music section when the area looked clear. I meandered a bit, waiting for stragglers to leave the aisle and then dropped the remaining four copies I had into the bin. Then I turned around and saw a lanky fellow in a Best Buy shirt heading my way. He walked up to me, reached into the bin and removed my disks. He looked at them, handed them back to me and asked me to leave. I was hoping someone larger would come over and drag me out, but that was not to be. I left, unescorted and with little by way of righteous indignation and rebellious circumstance.

Another friend reported a more successful attempt where he and an accomplice were being watched by a clerk who walked over when they were done, inspected the bin, looked at their additions and laughed. Then he put the albums back. So in either event, experience suggests very little significant trouble will come of such activities. That being said, everyone with bandwidth and a CD burner should try it. It's more fun than running red lights and it's cheaper than the upkeep on a meth lab.

In the meantime, I'll be busy constructing my underground lair. If anyone has any sentient apes or giant androids that they're willing to let go for a reasonable price, let me know. This supervillain stuff ain't cheap.

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