Protect Your Fandom Oliver Camp
Introduction
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arly morning on the Saturday before shelter-inplace was announced, my mom and I arrived at a coffee shop to meet Mani Draper, a Bay Area hip-hop artist, music producer, clothing designer, and podcaster. The coffee shop’s speakers blasted reggae and its garage door was rolled up. We found Mani huddled in a corner talking with another local musician. We met and introduced ourselves and were ready to start the interview. However, since it was hard to focus with the commotion around us, we took the interview outside to a large, empty parking lot behind the shop. The parking lot was filled with colorful artwork from local artists. The sun was
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blocked by a cloudy grey sky and the forecast predicted rain any second. The city felt dead and there were just a few cars passing us each minute. The interview began with me asking this: When you sit down to face something new, how do you find it? Mani responded by saying: “I try to protect my fandom … and I think the best thing we can do as creatives is like protect being a fanatic, right?” (Draper) I nodded my head as if I knew what he was talking about and we continued the interview. It wasn’t until a bit later until I realized, being a fanatic is everything.
What is a true artist? Many people assume art is created from scratch, that real artists create art that has never been done before, that painters, composers and poets sit down at a blank canvas and out flows beautiful works of art, inspired wholy by their own individual skill and artistry. Real artists, however, preach otherwise. They know that no one creates art in isolation. We are all products of our current culture and generations of artists that came before us. That is why Austin Kleon, in his book Steal Like An Artist, advises creatives all over the world to “steal” from other artists. He believes that “the artist is a collector... collecting things that they really love” (Kleon 13). True artists surround themselves with things and ideas that fuel their imagination and resonate with them. Inspiration can come from books, films, paintings, dreams, music,
photography, people, nature, scents, feelings, light and shadows, day and night. They immerse themselves with things they love and then they find themselves creating stuff they love, after hours of practice. A hip-hop producer doesn’t wake up one day, without hearing a hip hop beat in his life, and start creating musical masterpieces. Kanye must have heard 100,000 beats before he could make music just as good as what he was listening to. He is famous for surrounding himself in design, fashion, music, architecture, and people that make him who he is today. How could one know what music is without ever hearing music in their life? How could one know to use paint to create art pieces? There is no way that Michelangelo could paint the Sistine Chapel without studying and obsessing over the great art that came before him.
Inspiration or Appropriation? What is “stealing,” anyway? U.S. Copyright law states that: if an artist creates an original work—writes a new textbook, draws a new drawing, creates a new hip hop song—then that thing belongs to them. The artist owns his or her art from the “moment of its creation” until the artist’s death (The heirs of the artist then own the work for additional 70 years beyond that) (Copyright Basics). Simply put, it would be stealing to copy and sell what someone else created, unless the creator gives permission. But what if an artist creates something that isn’t a copy, but is instead inspired by the work of another artist? For that to be okay, the work of the second artist “must display some originality of its own.” The work must not “be a rote, uncreative variation on the earlier, underlying work. The latter work must contain sufficient new expression, over and above that embodied in the earlier work” (Wikipedia).
And that is what good artists do. In his book, Kleon differentiates “good theft” from “bad theft.” Good theft honors prior work, while bad theft will degrade it, Kleon explains. Good thieves study old techniques and understand why certain techniques made prior art so compelling, while bad thieves won’t look for any deeper understanding. Good thieves steal from many artists, while bad thieves steal from just one. Good thieves give credit to artists who came before them, while bad thieves plagiarize and claim credit for themselves. Good thieves remix in new, unique ways; bad thieves rip things off and add nothing new. If you steal from one artist, or if you copy one work of art and try to pass it off as your own, you are breaking the law. But if you “steal” from many artists and create a new combination or expression, then you are creating real, original art.
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Two Good Thieves There are many bad theifs in the music industry who have built followings imitating their influences to sound just like them, but I guarantee you that the ones who are remembered are good thieves. Two good thieves I know personally are Mani Draper and Haile (Hi-le). Both come from the Bay Area but grew up with very different backgrounds. These artists are both very special in their own ways and are unique to themselves. Mani Draper started his life in the Oakland area, in Richmond, California and found a love for music at a young age. Growing up he had many childhood friends who he now considers his mentors, one of them being AK Frank. Mani describes AK Frank as someone who made music cool. He had awesome parents who let him build a studio at his house so he could invite the whole school over. They would all go down to his house for hours on end. AK Frank acted like a big brother to Mani, exposing him to mixing, producing, and making music–teaching him how to be a fan. Another person who taught Mani to be a fan was his god brother, who first introduced him to rap music. And that was when rap was in its golden age–when artists like Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, Ice-T, and N.W.A. were dominating the Billboard charts. At this time, Mani might have been too young to be listening to those lyrics, but his god brother got him hooked on old-school rap, and those sounds still influence his sound today. Mani left the Bay Area for college, but now he is back. He’s back because he realized that Oakland taught him to be a fan–and that Oakland is a great place to be a fan, even as an adult and a professional musician. The city is full of artists from all over the world. It’s a melting pot for artists from the west coast, mid-west, and east coast. It’s a great place for him to collaborate with the artists he admires, which pushes his music even further.
“Try all kinds of stuff and put it into one.”
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On the other hand, Haile grew up in Los Altos. He too developed an interest in music at a very young age. He started playing piano at the age 5. As a kid, he listened to all different types of music and developed his fandom early. Growing up, Michael Jackson was a huge influence. He says: “I had the Past, Present, and Future CD, so I would go to my basement and dance around to the discs” (Haile). Later, his older brother and cousin introduced him to Drake and Jay-Z. This is where he became a fan of hip-hop. Nowadays, Haile is inspired by his favorite artists: Travis Scott, The Weeknd, and Drake. But he also studies melodies and patterns from all types of music from classic rap to 70’s & 80’s pop classics, as well as current music from the UK and Sweden too. For a long time, Haile was a fan only. He just loved music. But then he started freestyling rap lyrics with his buddies. He didn’t take it seriously at first, until he found that his songs started getting better and better the more he wrote. So, after years of looking up to these artists, he started making his own music from local music producers and producers from YouTube.
“He reminds me that I can also pursue my dreams.” 5
True Artists Protect Fandom
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Both Mani Draper and Haile mention how being a fanatic impacts their music, but what does being a fanatic mean? The dictionary defines it as a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an extreme religious or political cause (Oxford). But in this case, being a fanatic is being a fan of something you like: someone who admires and supports a specific person, place, or thing. As creatives, being a fanatic is a crucial part in where we find inspiration. Mani mentioned that fandom “is just what informs our first step” (Draper) and that the “first stage as artists is imitation” (Draper). When you listen to music, your brain tells you whether you like or dislike the song, and in our nature, we want to create things that we like. This results in ideas similar to what we enjoy listening to. If I were a big hip-hop fan, I wouldn’t sit down at my computer and start making dancehall inspired beats without ever hearing dancehall before. Most likely, if you were a big hip-hop music fan, you’d create hip-hop music naturally. A lot of the time, Mani watches a movie or TV-show and gets super inspired and almost jealous. Many artists feel the same way. Sometimes I listen to my favorite music, and think to myself: I wish I made this song. But since outright copying would violate copyright laws, artists like Mani want to make music just as cool. Mani says that, “in a way it’s almost borderline jealousy, but it’s not jealousy because I really liked it” (Draper). In Mani’s case, jealousy motivates Mani to push himself to create songs that, while different from his favorite artist’s songs, are just as good. Watching the Grammys every year, I’m always impressed how the people sitting in the front row sing along with the artists performing on stage. The front row is reserved for the biggest stars in the music industry, but they know every word of each new song. Kleon mentions that arguably one of the biggest bands in the entire world, The Beatles, started as a cover band, making covers of their favorite artists until they became one of the greatest songwriting teams in history. They were fans of many different bands like Cliff Richard and The Shadows, The Marvelettes, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and The Crickets, The Everly Brothers, The Byrds, Ravi Shankar, and Goffin and King to name a few.
They were able to take “sophisticated arrangements and marry them to the rhythms and structure of early rock and roll” (Reader’s Digest). Ravi Shankar influenced them to use elements of his music and introduced them to the sitar which influenced “Within You,” “Without You,” and “Love You too”. Reader’s Digest states that “Paul McCartney publicly admitted that the ‘first forty songs we wrote were Buddy Holly influenced’” (Reader’s Digest). It’s crazy to think that The Beatles might not be as well known if they didn’t have so many influences. Jay-Z, arguably one of the most influential rappers of this generation, developed his love for music at an early age. In a Music Television article, Jay-Z describes his early music influences: “I grew up around music, listening to all types of people. I used to listen to old music like Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye and things like that. I’m into music that has soul in it, whether it be rap, R&B, pop music, whatever. As long as I can feel their soul through the wax, that’s what I really listen to” (Anderson). The music he listened to in his youth later became inspirations for songs on his album The Blueprint. Growing up in an R&B house and then being immersed in hip-hop from the streets, he found a perfect blend of the two. It made perfect sense.
There are many examples of “good theft,” but there are also many examples of artists using “bad theft”. For example, in “Inspiration Or Appropriation? Behind Music Copyright Lawsuits,” National Public Radio dove into the question of whether or not the band Led Zeppelin might have outright copied the songs of four other artists. The radio hosts explored the question of “where do you draw the line between inspiration and appropriation when it comes to musical compositions?”(NPR) What Led Zeppelin is accused of doing is the opposite of what Kleon recommends, and the opposite of what The Beatles did. The Beatles “stole” from many artists and made something new, while Led Zeppelin copied individual songs and ripped the artists off. As a last example, Bob Dylan, one of the most influential singer songwriters of the twentieth century, was both a good thief and a big fanatic. An article entitled “American Decades”, mentioned that Bob Dylan’s influences growing up were Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. All of these artists are so different from each other, so it’s not surprising that Bob Dylan’s discography is so original. Similar to The Beatles, he copied multiple artists and made something new.
Conclusion No matter if you are a painter, musician, photographer, writer, or dancer, all artists draw their inspiration from somewhere. We collect these influences like a scrapbook in our brain and it determines the music we create. Fill your brain with hip-hop music and pop music, you’ll find yourself making a new wave of music and be seen as original. There are really no boundaries, but the most important thing to maintain is your fandom, from the day that you start your journey to the day it ends. As Mani Draper says, “the best thing we can do as creatives is, like, protect being a fanatic”.
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Works Cited Anderson, Kyle. “A Young Jay-Z Describes His Early Influences.” MTV News, 24 Aug. 2009, www.mtv.com/news/1619380/a-young-jay-z-describes-his-early-influences/. “Bob Dylan.” American Decades, edited by Judith S. Baughman, et al., Gale, 1998. Gale In Context: High School, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1602000406/ SUIC?u=los42754&sid=SUIC&xid=64bea351. Accessed 29 Apr. 2020. The Campus Guide to Copyright Compliance. “COPYRIGHT BASICS: WHAT IS COPYRIGHT LAW?” The Campus Guide to Copyright Compliance, 2005, www. copyright.com/Services/copyrightoncampus/basics/law.html. “Derivative Work.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Feb. 2020, en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Derivative_work. Draper, Mani. 2020. “Inspiration Or Appropriation? Behind Music Copyright Lawsuits.” Weekend Edition Saturday, 5 Sept. 2015. Gale In Context: High School, https://link.gale.com/apps/ doc/A429371687/SUIC?u=los42754&sid=SUIC&xid=4a4c0f80. Accessed 29 Apr. 2020. Kleon, Austin. Steal like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative. Workman, 2012. Reader’s Digest. “Ten Artists and Bands That Inspired The Beatles.” Reader’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, 30 July 2019, www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/music/ten-artistsand-bands-that-inspired-the-beatles. Lamont, Kate. Cover Image. 2020. Tesfaye, Isaac. 2020.
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A Special thank you to Kate Lamont, Mani Draper, Isaac Tesfaye, Justin Camp, and Jennifer Camp for making this possible.
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Bio
OLIVER CAMP is currently a Junior at Freestyle Academy, taking design. His recently discovered passion is music. He listens to music all the time. He has been making beats for almost three years and hopes to continue after high school. He hopes his music can inspire and let him meet his favorite artists someday. He sets many goals for himself and has an awesome work ethic. He has a rebellious spirit and is always looking to try new things, especially when it comes to music. He is inspired by many people and pieces of work from Kanye West, Aries, Travis Scott, and The Weeknd, just to name a few. When he is not doing schoolwork or anything music related he enjoys playing sports, skateboarding, hanging out with friends, and taking naps.
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