Body Count

Back in 1992, Ice-T was a rap artist who decided to get a metal band together. What ended up happening is only something you can read about in the news. And did we ever.

The debut album is mostly a political and social rant, mixed with some humor that’s meant to be humor. It was released to mixed reviews at the time, but as time went on, the album ended up standing on it’s own and defied religious bans, record company boycotts and conservative protests.

Back when Warner Bros was a record company that stood up for their artists, they didn’t back down to pressure when the cries came in to ban the album. Only after Ice-T himself stepped in and changed the album, removing the song “Cop Killer”, did the album take a censored hit.

Speaking of the afore mentioned song, it was never intended to be a rally cry to kill a cop. It was a statement about the black community and it’s constant badgering from law enforcement. In fact, take a listen here (if you dare):

“Cop Killer”

Metal Voice

It’s been years since I’ve heard this album and a friend from work starting singing “KKK Bitch” a few weeks ago and I told her how much I loved this album back in the day. So I dug it out of the archives and have played it a few times in the last few days. It still holds up very well and even 18 years later, I’m still of the same mindset with the humor and message of this album.

Here’s the official track listing of the uncensored original release:

1. “Smoked Pork”
2. “Body Count’s in the House”
3. “Now Sports”
4. “Body Count”
5. “A Statistic”
6. “Bowels of the Devil”
7. “The Real Problem”
8. “KKK Bitch”
9. “C Note”
10. “Voodoo”
11. “The Winner Loses”
12. “There Goes the Neighborhood”
13. “Oprah”
14. “Evil Dick”
15. “Body Count Anthem”
16. “Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight”
17. “Out in the Parking Lot”
18. “Cop Killer”

Tracks like “Oprah”, “Smoked Pork” and “Now Sports” are small clips that are spoken leaders that meld into the next song. It’s like a series of events told in song, and mostly with a social message.

Not For Everyone

I admit this album is not for everyone. It’s something that you either get or you don’t. For me, I liked it on first listen. It’s abrasive, but I’ve always liked the envelope pushing in music. And it’s been one of those albums that not only started the metal core sound, pushed the limits of censorship boundaries and ignited the start of the “PARENTAL WARNING” labels that are found on albums with explicit and controversial material, but also placed a true dividing line of music for that understand to those that want to ban it. And any musician today that wants to release an album without being censored can thank Ice-T and Body Count for paving the way.

YouTube has censored another one of my videos. Nope, not another Scooter or Snowy Sunday video. This time is was concert footage from a show I went to this year.

Back in September, I went to see The Psychedelic Furs live here in Salt Lake at a small club. Even got to meet them afterwards, which was nice. And as I normally do, I had my digital camera with me and took some photos and a short video clip.

I’ve posted clips of concert footage before from other shows and have never had any warnings or notices until now. Here’s the first notice I got in my email:

Emailed notice of copyright infringement

Clicking through to my YouTube account, I was greeted with the following notice:

I had to click the Acknowledge button to get into my account

Here’s the offending footage that YouTube removed (which I uploaded to Vimeo, hoping they won’t yank it):

Psychedelic Furs – 9/12/09 – Salt Lake City, UT from Marty Mankins on Vimeo.

Puzzled and Confused

Obviously, I’m a bit concerned as I don’t want to be have my YouTube account disabled or removed. So I decided to do a bit of research to see if there were other videos by Psychedelic Furs that were removed. Imagine my surprise to find another video of concert footage uploaded from the October NYC show, which still remains online.

What The Fuck? Why is mine taken down while this video gets to stay? Is it that the quality is better? Surely it can’t be that the video is too short, as this footage is most of the song. Mine was just a couple of minutes of the song.

And I found another one from the Philadelphia show two days before the NYC show:

Quality wise, this guys video is so-so, but yet it’s not the video that YouTube is taking issue with. It’s the music. And I really think this is coming from RIAA or the bands record label, not directly from the band, as the notice states.

I was under the impression that the copyright issue didn’t apply to concert footage that you personally shoot on your own camera. But according to YouTube’s video upload page, they now include “music concerts” as content to avoid uploading. Yet, my concert footage clips from Pearl Jam, Green Day and Depeche Mode remain on my page, with no issues or warnings.

Which is why I am further confused about what gets to stay and what gets removed on YouTube.

And which is why I will make even more efforts to further reduce what I upload to YouTube.

YouTube and Warner Music Group (WMG) have gone through a divorce.

This all stems around WMG’s decision to not continue their license agreement with Google (owner of the YouTube brand), sifting through the millions of YouTube videos and removing songs “belonging to WMG” that were part of user-uploaded video submissions.

This decision has permanently changed any uploaded YouTube video that used a WMG artist’s song for any reason. Such is Warner’s far-reaching efforts to protect any of it’s precious properties that it takes out other label’s artists in the process.

For example, in my video Snowy Sunday Ep. 002, I use clips of three different songs: Dean Martin “Let It Snow”, Crowded House “Four Seasons In One Day” and Van Halen “Dreams”. Of these three artists, two of them are with Warner [Dean Martin and Van Halen]. Crowded House gets crowded out of the YouTube house, at least when their songs are used alongside any WMG artist in the same YouTube video.

In addition to Snowy Sunday Episode 011 having the audio removed from it [which I completely removed from YouTube right after I discovered it contained no audio], previous videos of mine that had soundtracks of WMG artists have also suffered the same silent fate. Here is the list, each one linked to their respective blog posts where you can still watch the “un-altered” videos using Vimeo:

• Snowy Sunday Ep. 004 – [Red Hot Chili Peppers "Under The Bridge"]
• Snowy Sunday Ep. 002 – [Van Halen - "Dreams"]
• Scooter Sunday Captured Ep. 009 – [Led Zeppelin "Tangerine"]

I will not be pulling these videos [at least for now], leaving them in their WMG-revised state.

A Better Solution

While WMG play their greedy fucker card, other labels have used better options for finding their licensed songs in a YouTube video. And I think it’s a WIN-WIN situation.

Let’s take Universal Music Group. There’s been a couple of my videos that have been flagged as having Universal-owned tracks in them. But instead of getting all “nose in the air” and greedy, they get smart: they give me the option to add links to legitimate places to legally download the songs.

The orange-circled area shows the iTunes and Amazon.com buttons to purchase music

Now how hard is that? Actually, not that hard at all. And both Universal and myself benefit. I get to keep the song in my video and they make money from additional purchases of the song [I'm sure Google also has a deal with the labels to make more money on the backend]

A pop-up banner comes up while the video plays, showing the title of the song

They also place a pop-up banner while the video is playing, but it’s easy to click away, if so desired.

The Future

So what am I going to do here? This has put me, a blogger that uploads regular videos, in a different place. Sure, I can be creative and make my own songs and music, but I’m trying to generate laughs on a different level.

I will still continue to use YouTube as an alternative viewing option for my regular videos [sorry, but Vimeo kicks ass in all areas], but I will have to come up with different options when confronted with these new rules.

I can use music from artists that are not on any WMG label, which is what I will try to do. But there are some videos where a certain song fits just right. And sometimes that song belongs to a WMG artist.

I respect the position of any person or company that owns the rights to their music and their efforts to protect that. I’m in no way against that. I’m simply suggesting that there are smarter ways of doing that, where both the end-user and the license owner benefit. It’s called “Fair Use” and it appears to be working for Universal. It can also work for Warner, if they want it to. They just have to put the greedy mindset aside and think like a modern and progressive company should.

Yeah, I’m not waiting, either.