I interviewed punk legend and Dead Kennedys guitarist East Bay Ray for the August issue of Premier Guitar. For the most part, we talked about guitar playing, recording, and songwriting—as you’d expect. However, our conversation went off on a fascinating tangent when I asked Ray about his work as an artist advocate. The material wasn’t appropriate for Premier Guitar, so I am posting it here.
Two points to keep in mind when reading this interview:
- Obviously, the opinions expressed by Ray are his own and not necessarily the opinions of the Retro Chicken blog.
- I did not fact check the assertions Ray made about sources of funding, motivations, or quotes attributed to various corporations/institutions. Do your homework before accepting them as fact.
What projects are you working on now?
Right now I am mostly doing artist advocacy stuff. I am talking about how Google has turned artists into sharecroppers. Music is making money on the internet, movies are making money on the internet, books are making money on the internet, but that money is going to the middleman—the new bossman—which is Amazon, Google, Facebook. I live in the Bay Area—and there are 30-year-old billionaires here—and meanwhile independent artists can’t pay their rent.
And the billionaires are living on the backs of the independent artists?
Yeah. It’s a plantation system. Think about the 1890s, sharecropping got you cheap cotton, but it was based on exploitation.
The problem is they’ve also eliminated real journalism. Now what we have are opinion pieces and things paid for by corporations—like climate change and that stuff. I am real concerned about how we are going to have a democracy if people aren’t informed. Everybody has an opinion, but if the opinion is not based on facts and reality then it’s insanity. The University of California Berkeley Law School just put out, quote, “A study,” on the take-down notice system, which is where Google profits from. And guess who financed that study. Continue reading Canaries in the Coal Mine: Punk icon East Bay Ray talks about artists being exploited online and why that is just the tip of the iceberg