Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s Jay Randall is not one to shy away from voicing his opinion as anyone who follows the man’s twitter account can attest to. It seems that when he’s not shredding his larynx to the sound of Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s sonic terrorism, then he likes nothing better than to put forward his views on the world via the internet. Seemingly the thing that has defecated in Randall’s back yard most recently is the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills, which if passed, could yield catastrophic consequences for internet users worldwide.
A series of tweets blasting the bills made their way onto the singer’s feed, starting with an attack on record labels who support the bill ‘This internet legislation is BS, do labels really think the ppl who steal music will actually start buying it again? ppl are fuckin’ broke’, a blunt but relatively accurate description of the current state that a lot of people currently find themselves in, incapable of being able to afford to fork out for new releases, something that Randall clearly sympathises with. “If you are in a position that you can still afford to buy records consider yourself very lucky because most can’t or shouldn’t be spending” adding to his earlier comments “If you got kids to feed, broke, in debt, etc. plz, by all means hit the web and have at our music if you like it but can’t afford to buy it…I ain’t about excluding PPL from listening to my shit who can’t afford luxury items like MUSIC right now”.
Judging from his recent posts, Randall, despite AnB’s nihilistic brand of noise, is a man of the people; at least as far as his work is concerned. However his apparently relaxed views on copyright infringement are not something that his more mainstream contemporaries share. Antharax’s Scott Ian was quoted in an interview back in 2011 with the Broadwalk Palm Beach New Times, calling for tougher sanctions on internet piracy. “Just stop their access, because these people live on the internet, and that’s all they care about. So stop their internet access and they’ll stop stealing.”
For many people, if either the SOPA or PIPA bills get passed, it will mean the end of the internet as a place of relative freedom. Similarly, there are those that fear freedom of speech and expression on the internet could greatly be affected, yielding the quite scary prospect of a heavily policed and censored form of communication and information. The SOPA bill it seems (for the time being at least) has been shelved by Congress, but the PIPA bill is still open for discussion. However, one thing is certain, if either bill does come to fruition, then Jay Randall will still be flying the flag for download merchants and torrent users everywhere!
The PIPA bill is being voted on in Congress on January 24th, you can find out more about both proposed bills here: www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/
You can follow Jay Randall’s musings at: twitter.com/agoraphobicnb
