Sweet sounds at the Sugar Water festival

How do you feel about illegal downloads and the bootlegging of your music?

EB: I don’t know if it affects us at this point because being on tour is how we make our money.  You are supposed to make money off residuals but you have to sell the same number of records as Michael Jackson to get some royalties back.  So at this rate, me personally, how ever people can get the music and enjoy it is OK.  And that is one reason we have other businesses because we have learned that this whole system is not built for the artists. 

JS: I am the kind of person who feels you deserve the fruit of your labor.  And if anybody take the fruit off my plate, I have an issue with it.  I don’t know if I am necessarily angry because I do understand the other side of it with people in the system trying to make a living but because that is my fruit on your table and you are not giving me a cut I have an issue with it.

QL: I feel anger and I feel understanding.  It’s a difficult position to be in.

JS:  I don’t even watch bootleg movies.

QL: The way this industry is set up, it is doomed to failure.  The more you push the budgets up, the more you make records cost $20, the more you make records last 4 and 5 minutes on the radio.  The point is, there was the variety to allow you to do different things but somewhere along the lines they made it this homogenized thing. And you can’t ask someone who is not making that kind of money to go to the record store and buy an album when someone down the street has the same record with same sound quality for $5.

Do you feel like the industry categorizes its artists?

JS:  Yea, you see it in the media.  Like when I came out, ‘if you like Erykah Badu, you will like Jill Scott.  Or if you like Jill Scott, you will love Floetry.’  Like we need another one of those because we did well.  It’s like, can you hurry up and make another one of that?

EB:  You talk about political; everything we do is a political statement from Jill’s hairstyle to Queen Latifah being a covergirl.  The Sugar Water festival, the fact that we own the festival is a political statement.  You don’t have to think about it.  It just is.  In this country anything an African American woman does, whether her hair is permed or pressed is a political statement.

Erykah, to your point about political statements, some press publications have been quoting you because at the end of your song “Danger” you say “F**k the police.”  Are you concerned about how people will interpret what you do and the repercussions of your actions?

EB:  A part of me is sometimes.  But no matter what I do I know I am being guided. 

But I just want to clear this up.  I am not talking about the police as individuals.  I am talking about the police system that forced us to do some of the things we do because we are impoverished and in projects, and then we are made to depend on the system.  But when we try to survive in the system, we are arrested.  So that is what I am saying.

QL:  If you want to come to the show and see what she meant, you should just spend your money and come see what she meant (laughing).

[For details on the festival, click Sugar Water Festival]

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