As of this writing, a fan-made video for the Radiohead song "Innocent Civilian" has been viewed on YouTube 27,639 times. The song's words appear on at least two dozen lyrics sites, and if you want to know the chords you can find a tab on Ultimate-Guitar.com that has been accessed 2,517 times. There is, naturally, a webcam video of a guy playing a serviceable-yet-unexceptional cover on YouTube (itself viewed 3,715 times), straining to do his best impression of Thom Yorke's shuddering alien falsetto when he hits the song's emotional crux: "What am I trying to hide?"
A couple of years ago, my friend Sepie was at work. He and his boss split DJ duties in the office, and on this particular day he'd put his iPod on shuffle and "Innocent Civilian" came on. His boss asked who it was. "Radiohead," Sepie said. Wasn't it obvious? His boss shot him a skeptical look. What album? "It's the last track on the special edition of Hail to the Thief," Sepie informed him. His boss was sure he was wrong, and for a few minutes they had that particular sort of High Fidelity-esque argument that can only take place between two passionately defensive music nerds before a quick Google search solved the mystery.
The song wasn't by Radiohead; it wasn't even called "Innocent Civilian". It was "Some Things Must Go This Way", a 2000 track by the Los Angeles alt-rock group Paloalto. For Sepie, conceding this argument-- and admitting that he’d liked a Paloalto song before realizing it was a Paloalto song-- was a matter of taste. While the band’s anguished power-pop isn't a far cry from Pablo Honey, and frontman James Grundler's voice is a classic Yorke doppleganger, Paloalto's positioning in the fixed constellation of indie rock cred is light years away from a band like Radiohead. To give you some perspective: Scott Weiland reps so hard for Paloalto that he covered "Some Things Must Go This Way" on his 2008 solo album.
"Looking back, there's something almost poetic about mislabeled
P2P mp3s-- inviting the listener to imagine cross-generational
mash-ups and back-from-the-dead collaborations, the titles themselves read like fan fiction in miniature."
Everybody has an "Innocent Civilian". Or at least everybody who has halcyon dial-up memories of staring at a Napster progress bar and praying that nobody in your house picks up the landline before your "NEW UNRELEASED RADIOHEAD" files finish downloading. Sepie had downloaded his "special edition" copy of Hail to the Thief from the popular file-sharing site Kazaa, which was infamously riddled with mislabeled mp3s.
I've been grilling people about their most memorable mislabels for this column, and when I broach the topic, all of their faces light up with recognition, nostalgia, and a tinge of embarrassment. Mine is pretty emo: In my early teens, I could have recited pretty much every song by the Florida pop-punk band New Found Glory, though I always told people (with a certain hoity air) that my favorite release of theirs was an untitled, unreleased EP recorded just before their original singer left the band. It wasn't until years later that I realized this "original singer" was Davey von Bohlen and that this "EP" was not New Found Glory at all, just a couple songs plucked from the Promise Ring's (excellent) 1999 album Very Emergency. Pitchfork contributor Jayson Greene had a similar experience: "In the spring of 2000, when I was a freshman in college, some wiseass posted Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted on Napster with bogus track names and the title BRAND NEW WEEZER," he recalls. "I was duped."
From Bill Amend's Foxtrot comic strip
On P2P sites, most things that seemed too good to be true actually were: SEO-baiting, fantasy-football remixes ("Big Pimpin' Remix [ft. Eminem, Dr. Dre, DMX, Nas, Biggie and Tupac"), "covers" that were actually just the original song ("You Really Got Me" by the Who turned out to just be the Kinks’ version), or painfully obvious amateurs uploading their demos and calling it, say, "Beastie Boys-- Intergalactic ALBUM VERSION." Plenty of mislabels were obvious as soon as you previewed them, so you could simply cancel the download in progress-- but this was still annoying. Considering that plenty of Napster and early P2P users had temperamental, slow-as-molasses 56k modems, these kinds of mislabels spelled nothing but frustration; they were wastes of all-too-precious downloading time. Looking back now, though, I find something almost poetic about them-- inviting the listener to imagine cross-generational mash-ups and back-from-the-dead collaborations, the titles themselves read like fan fiction in miniature.
But what I'm calling an "Innocent Civilian" requires belief. Now that we're older, wiser, and implanted with that jaded, post-Catfish, fake-until-proven-real brand of digital skepticism, it's almost impossible to imagine mistaking a Stone Temple Pilots rip-off for post-Kid A Radiohead, or Stephen Malkmus for Rivers Cuomo. But the early days of file sharing were uncertain times, and technology was rapidly expanding like a just-born universe; we didn't yet have our epistemological footing. And maybe because of this, I don't ever remember thinking too much about why there were so many mislabeled mp3s out there. Like Jayson, I either assumed it was the work of "some wiseass" playing a prank, or that a large swath of the music-uploading population was dumb enough to actually think "Melt With You" was a Cure song, and that the Clash did "Come On Eileen", and that Phish were this prolific, proto-Karmin force of evil behind every bad acoustic white-dude rap cover ever recorded.
But for at least some of the "Innocent Civilian"s that lingered in our libraries, we have the Fix Brothers to thank. By day, John Fix III and his brother Michael ran a hardware store in Eastchester, New York, but by night, the 12 computers in the back of the store were the headquarters of a hacktivist operation called the Cuckoo's Egg Project-- which aimed to be "a monkey wrench in the machinery of online piracy," according to a manifesto on their website. More often than not, we tend to think of hacktivists in the Anonymous mold-- merry digital pranksters advocating for transparency, free speech, and open access. But the Cuckoo's Egg Project was (with Lars Ulrich as its spirit guide) more about limiting access to music and other copyrighted media on P2P networks. Their motivation? Michael's wife Stephanie was a musician herself, and he was repulsed at the thought of people downloading her songs without paying for them. So with the intention of creating widespread confusion and distrust among Napster users, they came up with the idea of "cuckoo's eggs," mp3s that were tagged as popular songs but actually contained anything from white noise, bird sounds, barking dogs, fart noises, anti-piracy messages (which encouraged the imagined, suddenly-repentant listener to visit their website for more information), or different songs entirely. According to a 2000 New York Times story, when the Fixes closed the hardware store at six every evening, they left their computers on so they could "lay eggs" all night.
The Cuckoo's Egg Project wasn't the only operation of its kind. The artist and computer programmer Mark Gunderson was behind a movement to disseminate mislabeled, often politically-minded mp3s that he called "Napster Nuggets." Then there was StopNapster.com, spearheaded by a Bay Area band called the Tabloids. The domain is no longer live, but it's well worth a quick trip in the Wayback Machine to remember just how heated the Napster War's rhetoric got: "Audio file sharing software appears to be the digital equivalent of unsafe sex," the StopNapster homage warned beneath a blazing red skull-and-crossbones banner, "A disaster waiting to happen." Like the Cuckoo's Egg Project (which also offered a step-by-step tutorial called "How To Lay Eggs"), StopNapster tried to incite others to further the cause. There's an entire section of the site that explains how to make "Napster bombs" ("intentionally mislabeled file[s] masquerading as song[s] by a major artist") and "Trojan Horses" ("the correct song file with the accurate credits but [which] has been made useless by interspersing anti-piracy speeches randomly throughout the track").
I never knew any of this until I started digging around last week, and I was pretty astonished to find that something I'd always figured was either human error or a mischievous prank was actually a (semi-)sophisticated hacktivist ring trying to disseminate a clear political message. The Fixes' "How To Lay Cuckoo Eggs" tutorial is particularly illuminating. "Pick more popular songs for maximum demand," it instructs. "Remixes and duets are very popular downloads as are live recordings. Try and use songs from artists who've expressed disapproval of file sharing." This explains why Dr. Dre (listed just below Metallica in a StopNapster list lauding artists who oppose file sharing) made an appearance on every faux-rap remix, or why P2P sites were congested with fake "Phish" covers (while the band encouraged fans to bootleg and swap their live performances, StopNapster points out that frontman Trey Anastasio spoke out against other forms of file sharing: "It's important for people to know that what they're doing is stealing from artists.") Suddenly, it makes sense why Radiohead was such an obvious target-- not only were they one of the most popular bands of the moment, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a band whose stereotypical fan more vividly conjured the profile of "person who sits in front of a computer all day."
The irony of the Cuckoo’s Egg Project was that, as sanctimonious as its motivations were, it was just as illegal as Napster. So when a federal judge ordered the file-sharing service to be shut down in September 2001, the Fixes’ project met its end. “We have no illusions that we brought down Napster,” they write on the last update of their site, though the overall tone of the message is triumphant. The more politically-motivated Gunderson, on the other hand, was disappointed by the fall of Napster. “We wish [it] could have grown and flourished, rather than lose to the labels,” he wrote; for him, Napster bombs held the revolutionary potential to “inject a toy surprise in the mainstream’s Cracker Jack.” He saw disrupting the flow of file sharing as an act of culture jamming, which he hoped would start a widespread discussion about major-label beaurocracy, mass media ownership, and the nature of art in the 21st century.
I don’t know if I’d consider Gunderson’s attempts at culture jamming a success, since up until last week I-- and pretty much everyone else I talked to for this piece-- had no idea we’d been jammed in the first place. As the YouTube comments thread on "Innocent Civilian" attests, there's still plenty of lingering fallout from Napster bombs, though I don’t think it's quite as esoteric and philosophical as the discussion Gunderson hoped to inspire:
nimmrod1102: “this IS NOT radiohead…this fake version has been floating around online for years now”
minkaworks: “then why does it sound just like him”
ThelemicMagick: “This IS Radiohead…this song is actually Nigel Godrich’s favorite song of the pre-Kid A era…get your facts straight.”
noxxus39: “If you’re a doubter and still think that this is Radiohead go see for yourself. Search ‘Paloalto’ on Amazon.”
angeles flores cuevas: “es un cover !!!!”
Still, maybe what was jammed was that fixed idea of indie-rock cool-- that unspoken, dangerously immutable rubric asserting that Pavement is better than Weezer, Radiohead is better than Paloalto, and everything is better than Scott Weiland. In 2007, writer and Radiohead superfan Andrew Unterberger penned a thoughtful blog post about his belated discovery that one of his favorite Amnesiac B-sides was actually-- gasp-- a mislabeled Muse song. “Muse had always been something of a musical punchline to [me],” he wrote, “the palest of pale imitations." But being forced to come to terms with actually liking one of their songs by accident taught him a lesson about the politics of taste in the digital era. “Who created a song isn’t what’s important, what’s important is the way a song makes you feel," he wrote. "Or, failing that, at least always make sure to double check your Audiogalaxy file information.”