We do need Nathan Fake!
Today’s Flavorpill Daily Dose delves into the world of papercrafting – the construction of little 3d models out of paper as facilitated by sites like Cubeecraft – which eventually led me to an intriguing website calling itself We Don’t Need Fake. Apparently nothing to do with our own Nathan Fake, Shin Tanaka‘s We Don’t Need Fake project features printable paper model templates contributed by seven designers from around the world, collected together to drive home the importance of creative originality under the mantra:
“Creation is from inspiration and imitative learning, however don’t to be a fake of someone. Respect your own creativity.”
For it seems that the rip-off merchants have penetrated the cuddly world of papercrafting, just as they have done with almost every other creative discipline, including of course electronic music: and in this sense perhaps the We Don’t Need Fake website actually has more to do with Mr Nathan Fake than one might initially realise. Pretty much on a daily basis we are bombarded on all sides – via email, our demo box and the output of the world’s less imaginative record labels – with unsubtle, indelicate and downright plagiaristic reworks of our back catalogue masquerading as a new release: the perpetrators probably know who they are, but I am not going to go so far as naming them here as our current line on this is to just pretend that they don’t exist. But what the culprits may not understand is why we have no interest in adding any of their contributions to our roster, even though they make such similar-sounding “Border Community style” music: for your answer might I refer you to the originality-valuing We Don’t Need Fake website’s slogan as quoted above?
Only for our particular case we probably ought to adapt the somewhat ironic project title slightly: for we do need Fake, or Nathan Fake to be precise, but we definitely don’t need any more fake Nathan Fake knock-offs, or pale imitations of any of the rest of our back catalogue for that matter. And in answer to all of our prayers it is just as well that Nathan’s new ‘Hard Islands’ album is already visible on the horizon, stuffed full of fresh ideas: I dare say that his emulators are just as pleased about that fact as the rest of us are, as surely they must be starting to run out of things to copy by now?
