Well, I'm the old one now.

I was listening to “Funky Drummer” this past weekend (and fondly remembering mom). It sounded familiar, so I did a quick search and found out that “Funky Drummer” (featuring drummer Clyde Stubblefield) is sampled in over 1,000 tracks, but he never received royalties for his work.

What really made me pause is the incredible number of times it has been sampled. That makes the fact that Clyde never got paid royalties all the more shocking.

However, if I pause to think about it, I shouldn't really be surprised. Record labels were incredibly unfair to artists. It seems studio artists like Clyde had even less protections.

Take the Temptations for example. Their singles were selling for 70 cents up to a dollar. For every single that was sold, they got three cents. Not three cents each.

Just. Three. Cents.

Such inequalities weren't unnoticed. Abe Somer, the entertainment attorney, gave Williams one word to understand his own exploitation – slavery. It hit so hard that decades later Williams still remembers it.

Somer used the word “slavery” to make his point while Clyde's point was made for him by the sheer number of times that 20-second drum break was sampled.

Stubblefield didn't get paid royalties but that didn't mean nobody got paid.

The royalties went to James Brown. The law at the time allowed James to pay his studio musicians a flat fee while he took credit for the music.

Stubblefield may not even have expected to receive royalties from any of his work as a session musician. However, he is quoted as saying, “It didn't bug me or disturb me, but I think it's disrespectful not to pay people for what they use”.

The distinction here is that the cold gaze of the law saw no wrong-doing. But it is still similar to how artists were exploited.

M'Dear knew this. The music industry wasn't the only place that treated Blacks as second-class citizens.

M'Dear grew up in a small southern town that still had a “Whites Only” sign on the water fountain on the Courthouse wall. She and my dad attended a segregated school and were taught lessons from hand-me-down text books from the Whites-only school (I still have dad's text book).

So yes, she knew about the unfairness of it all, including the music industry. She would grit her teeth at the very mention of Elvis.

She resented Elvis and at the same time loved James Brown. I was a witness to her unfiltered joy when, during the holiday season, she heard “Merry Christmas, from the Temptations”.

My mind keeps coming back to one of my favorite hip-hop groups: NWA.

Different time (almost 30 years later) and a different genre.

Similar recording industry. Similar issue.

The industry's normal financial architecture makes it hard to tell exploitation from legitimate risk-sharing from the outside. I believe the “cold gaze of the law” would not find fault – legally.

It would be easy for Jerry Heller and Ruthless Records to exploit young black teenagers even within the bounds of the law. These were nineteen and twenty-year-olds straight out of Compton signing their first contract.

Music contracts and the people who wielded them created a power imbalance when it came to Black artists and their works. The record labels and managers created a structure that took advantage of people. And it wasn't just White managers.

Black managers were just as guilty of exploiting Black artists. However, I think White Privilege somewhat shielded White artists.

Blacks were seen as second class citizens which made them more vulnerable to structural leverage, an industry-wide power structure that abuses the disadvantaged.

This is vastly different from the fairy tale I was letting myself believe. In my naive view, Black record labels and managers, seeing the inequality, would not willingly take part in the exploitation of Black artists.

I think that “the system” (the structural leverage) is so powerful that standing together doesn't stand a chance.

The system should not be given a pass. It should definitely be called out for its exploitative practices.

I'm not going to stop enjoying the music. I'd like to believe that's what Stubblefield would have wanted. He improvised that drum beat from his heart. He wanted people to hear it, to feel the driving beat deep in their chest. But from this day forward, every hearing will be just a little bit different. Every time I hear The Funky Drummer or one of its many samples, I will also hear “he didn't get fairly paid for that work”.

#funkydrummer #motown #nwa #copyrightlaw #racialexploitation #structuralpower #inheritedmemory #complicity #PersonalEssay

I was very curious as a young child and M'dear would answer my every question with unshakeable confidence.

Even if she was wrong.

I don't remember the exact question, but I do remember looking up into her eyes as she answered. I could actually see the confidence in her answer. It wasn't until several days later that I figured out she was wrong and confronted her about it. Her answer was simply, “I didn't know the answer”.

I can understand why she did it; the earnest questions from her child were just too much pressure. She did not want to let me down by saying, “I don't know”. Maybe she thought I would think less of her? Feel disappointment?

When I learned that mom didn't have all the answers I was a bit disappointed but I learned also that mom and dad were simply human. Like me. It was forgivable because ultimately, she was only doing her best to be a good mom.

Social media influencers are also human but are driven by different needs, such as the need to acquire that lucrative contract and the need to have an ever growing audience.

I was on social media the other day watching video shorts. I stopped to watch a social media influencer tell me how some foods were processed before being sold to us consumers. He looked directly at the screen and delivered his message.

His confidence was palpable. The comments section was full of “thanks for this info” and “I'm so glad you took the time to research this for us”. It was easy to imagine hundreds of people nodding along, sharing with friends, and accepting this information as fact.

But that was just it. Everything didn't quite add up. A quick web search confirmed it. He was spreading pseudo-science to hundreds of people.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe the vast majority of influencers start out with malicious intent. Maybe they were seen as “experts” in their real-life social circles. When they got online and their audience grew, so did the pressure to always have the right answer. That pressure, that drive can easily lead them to the point of deception, where the influencer's online persona has forked from their real life persona. The danger is that their audience is unaware of the split.

I felt that same confidence myself, recently. A few months ago, I was researching ideas for a print-on-demand business. I wanted to be able to boot-strap this business with little-to no upfront costs. Everything would be handled by the POD website.

As I got started, things were going great. Every question was answered by the AI with total confidence. Every scenario, every brainstorm session went smoothly, without the hint of doubt.

It was when I was pretty deep in designing the process of order fulfillment that I realized me and the AI had parted ways several steps ago.

Those assumptions snowballed until the gap between what I wanted and what the AI thought I wanted was huge.

At first, I had no idea where things had gone wrong. I even blamed myself until it occurred to me to simply ask. So I did. I asked the AI what assumptions it was making during the course of our planning. I was surprised at the number of assumptions made.

AI delivers that same confidence and we eagerly gobble it up. But there's no one behind it.

It has no emotions. It doesn't feel any pressure to not disappoint me like my mom felt, and it doesn't care about always appearing right or infallible in front of their audience like influencers.

AI is simply providing the most-likely plausible output to our input.

AI is not maliciously deceiving us. Not even on accident. I would go so far as to say that every hallucination an AI gives us is our own fault.

In many ways, AI is a magnification of the humans who programmed it and a magnification of all the content it consumed while AI was learning. Yes, programmers wrote the code, but it was trained (or fed?) on the best and worst society has to offer.

Confidence does not equal truth. We must override the instinct to trust confidence itself. Expect hallucinations, our own and AI's. Take five minutes. Just ask.

#ArtificialIntelligence #AIHallucination #CriticalThinking #MediaLiteracy #Misinformation #SocialMedia #Influencers #Pseudoscience #PersonalEssay #DigitalLiteracy #TrustButVerify #ThinkForYourself #TechAndSociety