Is Chris Walla & Label Shamelessly Using Homeland Security Issues To Promote His Solo Album?
Chris Walla and the Case of the Confiscated Hard Drive.Yeah, this isn't a movie story, so what. Get your own blog.
You've all heard about this story concerning Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla, his solo upcoming solo album Field Manual, his confiscated hard drive of songs and Homeland Security, yes? (written by my old MTV News pals)
If not, the gist is this: Walla was in Vancouver recording his solo album (that's been in the works for about 4 years now) and his label Barsuk hired a courier to retrieve the mostly-finished effort and bring it back to Seattle (something they'd done many times previous).
[According to the AP, "Barsuk needed the music to meet its production schedule, and a Hipposonic Studios employee volunteered to drive the mixed songs, on tape, and the original master tracks, on a computer hard drive."]
Well, when their courier got to the Canadian border to enter the U.S., legit paperwork in hand like usual, U.S. Homeland Security confiscated the hard drive that stored his master files for "reasons not abundantly clear, and sent [then] to the department's computer-forensics division for further inspection," according to MTV News.
Walla was understandably upset and pissed off; no one likes their harmless non-terroristy materials confiscated by an overzealous government. "I couldn't even venture a guess as to where [the hard drive is], or what it's doing there. I mean, I can't just call their customer-service center and ask about my drive. There's nothing I can do. I don't know if we can hire an attorney ... is there a black-hole attorney? You can't take a black hole to court," Walla said.
Late yesterday, Mike Milne, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the forensics experts had examined the hard drive and it was free to go. "We have attempted to make two notifications to the importer to pick it up, that it's free to go, but we haven't heard back from him," they said.
Ok, all well and good, right? But something else appears rotten in Seattle and this seems to be Walla's label Barsuk (and in some cases Walla himself) using this Homeland Security issue to plug his upcoming record.
The confiscation was naturally random, you think any U.S. border guard knows or even gives a shit about Chris Walla's solo record, let alone know who Death Cab For Cutie is? Walla even himself in the aforementioned AP said he believed the confiscation was random.
But on the Barsuk page for Walla, the label implies that the government may have known what they were doing, or perhaps provocatively suggests a conspiracy of sorts?
"Interestingly, a strong political thread runs through the record's lyrics; Walla takes more than a few shots at US policy, both at home and abroad, and challenges at least one senator to find the exit door...." they write, ellipsis left trailing off for you to come to... your own conclusions?
But, ok we're not naive, of course they're not suggesting a conspiracy, more like they're using this issue to promote Walla's album and that's pretty lame.
The same U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson brushed off any sort of these implications. "These guys don't even know who Death Cab for Cutie is, let alone that he's doing political music," Milne said of the border guards.
According a more robust version of the AP story at Seattle PI Milne did offer some explanations as to why the album might have been confiscated, noting that child pornography is sometimes shipped across the border in hard drives.
And - perhaps a more likely explanation - commercial items may not be imported through the Peace Arch crossing, but must go through the nearby Pacific Highway border point. Such commercial merchandise typically requires formal importing procedures.""Recorded music is commercial material," Milne said. "Chris Walla is a commercial entity in a multibillion-dollar industry."
This hasn't stopped Walla from continuing to talk to the press about it though. In fact, by the time he gave interviews to MTV news and the AP about it this week - including choice quotes like "Luckily, the tapes are Plan B, so while I'm bummed about the whole thing, it could be a whole lot worse," he laughed. "I still get to play music. I mean, I'm not at Guantánamo or anything like that. I mean, my drive might be. They could be water-boarding my drive for all I know." - the entire incident had passed into history. Deadlines had been missed, but no intellectual property was lost (Walla had a backup drive at the ready anyway.) And according the US Customs, phone messages had been left for Walla and Barsuk to pick up the drive between Sept. 19 and Oct. 1 (the confiscation incident took place on September 19) So why is this whole hubub news this week?
Was this him throwing salt on a healed wound?
Wired is going out on a limb positing the hard drive may have been nabbed because it might have contained imagery involving instructions on how to create an improvised explosive device (this feels really weak and a stretch to us).
They use this MTV quote to further their case. "I'm calling it Field Manual because myself and the guy who designed the packaging were looking through all these Army field guides from World War II. And there was one that he found that was really terrifying, actually. It was basically a manual issued by the Army in the late '30s, early '40s, about how to build what we now call an [improvised explosive device] in Iraq or Afghanistan. Like how to hide a bomb in a bed or in a tube of toothpaste. Just terrible stuff, and I started having this feeling of, like, 'Well, we need a new field manual.'"
But is this packaging actually on the hard drive? Wouldn't it just be master files of music as Walla implied earlier in the MTV interview?
Meanwhile, the clumsy media is all over this story in some cases twisting it with stupid and irresponsible headlines that imply or even outwardly state that the U.S. Government stole his album because of the politically-charged content (let's lump Wired into that crowd; that's kind of retarded). Pop "Death Cab For Cutie Guitarist" into Google search and 131 related articles on this story come up.
Pretty good press for his album, no? Some cynics are seeing this as an active marketing campaign, and while we wouldn't go that far, we do think Barsuk's implications here are a little sketchy.
UPDATE: Chris Walla responds: 'Clarity is important'...plus US Customs is pissed at the press and Barsuk Records doesn't 'buy the whole politically motivated thing'...
Additional contributions to this piece were made by our friends at the Daily Swarm.
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