US Gov't torture playlist stickers
James David says:
Mother Jones’s Torture Playlist includes the music used in American military prisons to torture detainees, and ranges from Christina Aguilera to Sesame Street. Using address labels - sized 2.25″ x 0.75″ - you can affix these stickers I designed to CDs in your local record shop and make a small political statement about state violence. I’ve developed the stickers below to raise awareness about this form of torture. There's a copyright-free PDF available at the suggested website link.US Gov't torture playlist stickers (Groundswell Collective)
UPDATE: Please don't put these stickers on CD cases unless they belong to you. As many people have pointed out in the comments, the artists didn't say their songs could be used to torture, and the record stores don't need the hassle.
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"...you can affix these stickers I designed to CDs in your local record shop..."
You mean, you can DEFACE private property that doesn't belong to you. Great. But who believes in the notion of "private property" anyway, right?
Please don't stick them on CDs in a shop, the only thing that does is make life difficult for the employees. Record shop employees (myself included) put up with so much crap and awful wages because we love music.
Don't take it out on us.
You don't have to deface anything to put these stickers up. You can buy glue sticks that turn any paper into a sticky note so they can be removed without causing damage to whatever they were stuck to. While a record store owner might object to your sticking them on the CDs you aren't causing any damage at all.
Another person here who doesn't want you defacing record store property to make a statement.
Find a way to do it that doesn't infringe on the rights of other people.
So... this sends a negative message to potential buyers of musicians' work, while the musicians have had no say in the (ab)use of their songs. To the shopper who finds the stickers, what information do they convey? Not enough. They give the impression that the record label or artist condoned or promoted the use. They also say to the local record shop, "I like to vandalize and harm your business." The record store, the recording artist, and the record label all are potentially harmed when they've done nothing wrong. Make your statements in places where it makes sense.
That's one small political statement for a man, a humungous number of sessions with Goo Gone for innocent record store employees.
The problem with sticking these on CDs is that there seems to be some implication that the artists knew about and/or condoned the torture. In other words, this seems more like a protest against the artists rather than a protest against torture.
Agreed #2... I wonder if Artists have any say in the music being used really???
I mean all kidding aside... http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/11/are-musicians-owed-r.html#comments
As an artist, I would be quite concerned about the tarnish being placed on the piece...
Totally misguided effort. You lose. Record stores are having enough problems as it is and will soon be extinct.
It warms my heart that even the worst artists in the industry can still be put to practical use helping our country.
I hope Christina Aguilera wears this as a badge of pride :)
Yep, you're right. I updated the post.
uh, don't CDs comes prewrapped in plastic? when a person buys a CD with that sticker on it, it will just come off with the other stickers the record labels cram on there.
Never realized that record store clerks were such a bunch of humorless pussies nowadays.
I more see these being applied to school textbooks. Or perhaps, surreptitiously, to schoolteachers.
Save it for Metallica CDs, since they condone the use of their music for torture, while trying to criminalize hard-core fans who share bootlegs. Don't piss on the record store employees, though. Someone should hack their websites maybe and slap these labels up there, or perhaps lobby them to give a % of sales to Amnesty International to try to make up for being such assholes (I know, an uphill battle.)
I don't think it has anything to do with clerks being "humorless pussies," Radmul. People who work in record stores don't want to deal with the potential hassle and time sink of cleaning these things off, that's all. See how calm and rational you are when someone comes up with a "clever" but utterly pointless way that new menial and annoying tasks can be added to your work day.
Everyone else (including some of the record store clerks) is pointing out that this "protest" is not just ineffective but counter-productive. How is harming the sales of particular record stores, or associating specific artists with torture in the mind of a shopper, in any way making a statement or advancing the cause against torture?
This is a classic example of someone saying "I have to do something about this serious problem!" and then just running with the first silly idea that came to them.
"These stickers I designed... make a small political statement about state violence."
No, they don't. They really, really don't. Not at all.
This reminds me of that Patton Oswalt bit about how he hates George Bush, but he also hates hippies and their useless protest efforts. "I know! We'll make the world's biggest finger painting, and that will end the war!"
These might be more effective on your tax return documents. Slap 'em on before you mail 'em to the IRS.... If you think record store clerks are whiners for not wanting to scrape these stickers off their stores' property, perhaps you shold have the gumption to make your statements in a non-anonymous manner.
Myself, I've ordered a slew of these things to stick on my OWN music, some of which is expressly written to be painful. I think I need to send one to Richard D. James (a.k.a. Aphex Twin) specifically for the album version of "Ventolin," which actually makes my teeth hurt.
Lame. This is completely misguided. If I saw this on a CD I would assume that meaning of the sticker is that the artist and/or label condoned torture.
Totally off-base.
And then there's the added work for record stores.
This sticker is an all-around losing proposition.
I certainly meant record store employees no harm.
I do think that civil disobedience should take more daily forms, and that if injustice is widespread, our resistance to it should be as well. These stickers serve to remind consumers about what their government is up to, and that awareness is the small political statement I was trying to make.
I'm sorry. But the profits of professional entertainers and the convenience of record store staff are hardly the big concerns here. As 90% of our society consists of someone else's property, if civil disobedience has to carefully tiptoe around these kinds of concerns then it is neutered and a victory for complacence is scored.
If an artists work has been used in torture, then that artist doesn't really have the luxury of neutral silence any more. It's unfortunate that they will have to confront an ugly issue as a result of an abuse of their work, but that doesn't mean they don't have an obligation to confront that issue.
We should all be talking about this more and not less. Injustice by public authorities colors an entire society. We should be having uncomfortable and unfortunate little arguments about it in far more places.
The sticker might be a selling point.
James, I appreciate that, but it doesn't convey any information about the government's role. You're expecting the consumer to make quite a leap.
Come on, Christina Aguilera isn't completely innocent in this. Sure, she didn't personally give the greenlight for her music to be used as torture, but OBVIOUSLY she knew when she made it that it would function best as a torture device.
I guess what I'm saying is, she's Wernher von Braun.
(sarcasm! not to be flamed for its literal meaning!)
I admire the intent, but this little weapon is all collateral damage, and completely misses its mark. Of course, it could simply be a very successful attempt at link-baiting... in which case: kudos!
Better kudos than Cujos...
Rephrase: USED BY GOVERNMENTS IN TORTURE. And the plastic wrap will protect the CD case.
You have to pinch yourself sometimes to realize all this is real and you're still living in the United States of America.
Paul - rgnlfth.cm
so let get this straight. hundreds of people are being tortured, sexual degraded and persecuted for their religious belief. by our US government and most of us know about it. yet all we can say is "OMG won't someone think of the CD Warehouse employees?!"
lol @ the idiots blaming entertainers for their music being used as torture. It's one thing if they go on tour in Gitmo, quite another if some corporal chooses a random CD he doesn't like to blast some radicals into submission.
Fuck it, I dig it. Anything that gets the message out there. If anyone cares enough to not buy the cd, they probably care enough to check the facts. We're not confronted with shit like this often enough. If an owner/worker was forced to clean it up, alright, I'd consider another forum. But wage-slaves (no offense, I'm one too) could be spending their time in worse ways. "Bring the war home."
first paragraph of #22: Fucking right.
Paul,
Your blog link goes in your profile. Thanks.
If you put a URL on the sticker it could truly be said to be a consciousness raising device...if there were a link to a page explaining it most people seeing it (including cd shop clerks) would likely check it out. As it is, only the politically engaged will know what it's even about.
I fully agree that minor inconvenience is no reason to passively accept that this action is useless.
These stickers have inspired me.
I think we can eliminate terrorism from the world if we all bake cookies and give them to our neighbors. The catch is that the cookies have a stylized gun on them. Maybe one in twenty will have a nuclear hazard symbol on them.
A URL is a good idea, maybe to the Mother Jones list. As far as the artists not consenting to their use, great, maybe this will be the spark that causes more of these artists to publicly renounce the government's unauthorized use of their work.
Pathetic.
Let's all just do simple things that don't take any effort, then hope really hard that things turn out the way we want them to. To increase our odds, let's complain to other like minded people. To really move your statement to the next level, paint it on an overpass. Perhaps something like, "Bush Lied - People Died" or something like that. Then, I'm sure things will turn out alright.
How about some heavy lifting? How about working hard to change things?
Protesting, whining, defacing other people's property -- what does that do?
You want to change things? Organize, fund raise, work on campaigns, vote. Like it or not, that's how our system works. Whining is just negative and lazy, and doesn't accomplish anything.
What's a record shop?
Shots.
Greetings
Rendition, secret black prisons, torture, gitmo, nacht und nebel - the best we got here is a friggin post it note!!!
Yep we deserve exactly what we get
We are sheep.
Baa Baa
BAH
Enjoy the journey
WarLord
So our protest of torture being used in prisoners is, um, pissing off record store owners and confusing the hell out of customers? Right. The torture sticker is something funny I might slap a textbook, not a bold political statement.
I see a lot of activist groups making "bold political statements" titter between pointless and counter productive.
A sit in in a 1950's segregated dinner? Bold. Taking a few bullets during an anti-war rally? Bold. Thinking you are making a difference with minor acts of vandalism against utterly innocent parties? Both counter productive and pointless. That is roughly along the same as someone keying "fur is murder" on my car door when I don't even own any damn fur. It makes me both hate you and kind of want to go beat a fox to death just out of spite.
Petty acts of vandalism are easy and self gratifying, but in the end you just make someone fully unconnected to your complaint miserable (in this case, the guy who has to remove your uninformative stickers) while accomplishing absolutely nothing for your cause. Want to make a bold statement about torture? Get a friend waterboard you in public to show people how bad it is. Call some news media and post it on YouTube and BoingBoing. You might get arrested for violating some law or another, but that is kind of the point isn't it? Petty acts of vandalism just piss people off. Getting dragged off to jail for peacefully protesting on the other hand makes people look up.
My advice? If the stickers are to be jokes, great, sell them as jokes. I am sure my little brother would love a few for his text books. If you really have a political agenda though, I suggest dumping the idea and doing something worthwhile that doesn't involve petty acts of vandalism against unrelated parties.
Screw the stickering, that's just petty and has no effect on the people misusing the music. Let's use the over-lawyered music industry's bureaucracy to do something good for a change.
Perhaps ASCAP and BMI should set up a special royalty rate for the use of their artists' music in torture.
It should be really steep, too, say $5000 a use, since the use of an artist's music as torture damages their reputation.