Sam Conniff Allende

being more pirate permits you to find creativity through destruction

you can’t get stuff done on a big scale by breaking rules alone. You have to provide an alternative. You have to change the game and rewrite the rules

it better to seek forgiveness rather than permission

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour

When you know what you’re rebelling against, and you’ve got your idea and others who want to follow, if you want your new rules to stick, let others own them as theirs

old Ben Hornigold said, ‘Fuck Society, let’s take these great democratic principles we’ve made, reject this broken system and start a new way of life,

The fine art of the remix

Hip hop is and always has been about the remix, its own term for mutiny.

Back in the early 1970s when DJ Kool Herc pulled off a previously unimaginable act, playing two copies of the same record simultaneously, looping and extending the drum section of the tune, the breakbeat was reinvented. With a longer backbeat from Herc, it was down to Afrika Bambaataa to add the lyrics. With these two pirates at the helm, hip hop became the new voice of rebellion, bum rushing the political jazz poetry that inspired it out of the way and bringing to life rap instead. When rap and breakbeat were joined by breakdance and graffiti, the so-called Four Elements of hip hop were established and a new culture was born.

RZA’s new rules paid off in millions of dollars for him and the rest of the crew, but they also became the new rules of hip hop and the dominant idea of artists as enterprises became the norm, or, as Jay Z put it as he followed suit, ‘I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.’