Copy & Taste
Sometimes I wonder about people who make music and their grip on reality: maybe they need to have a tenuous relationship with our world to create and produce, but over the past year or so, there seems to have been a sea change in the mindset of many producers.
More often than not at the end of an interview I get asked the dreaded question: "So can I see the article before you send it to the magazine?" This, as one producer quite bluntly put it, was to make sure that I hadn't got any of my facts wrong, yet it amounts to a form of censorship.
It's a ridiculous request: imagine the reaction if I had asked the same producers, 'so, can I hear the album before it's released and decide on what tracks can be used and what ones can't', or if I jumped into a DJ booth or a stage and started to decide what records, CDs or digital files the performer was allowed to choose?
The worrying thing is that most people who ask this question aren't big names or prima donnas - Jeff Mills is a good example of a proper prima donna, a man who bitches about having to provide one-line answers to innocuous questions, but that merits another post alltogether! - but well-respected underground dance producers.
The most extreme example of this behaviour happened at the start of last year, when I interviewed New York producer Abe Duque for his album, 'So Underground It Hurts'. The interview went reasonably well - although it was obvious that he had a problem with the way his career had stalled for a few years until Hell got him on board to produce 'NY Muscle' - but at the end of the interview, he said to me, 'so man, can you make sure you email me the piece before you send it in', and my reply was that this was not common practice and that I would have to check with my editor in advance. His response was 'man, all the other magazines let me see interviews before they print them, if I had known that you wouldn't let me see it, I wouldn't have done this interview'.
I didn't bother to point out to him that if we had known that he was such an egomaniac that we wouldn't have done the interview either, that in the grand scheme of the magazine, that Abe Duque was about as important as a fly landing on a dog turd, or that the other interviews he purported to have censored didn't seem to exist.
Instead I made an impassioned argument about the codes and ethics of journalism (yes, some of us adhere to them!) and he backed off with sullen acceptance. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he had worked closely with Hell that he made such demands - to be fair, Hell never made such a request - but whatever the explanation, please Abe, and everyone else, back off and treat us with the same respect that we afford to you!
