No, Drama and Cannon (pictured left with Killer Mike) didn’t get caught riding dirty. Instead, according to local television news, local authorities in Atlanta raided the recording studio & offices of The Aphilliates, confiscating quite literally everything — including recording equipment, CDs, and even (from the looks of the film in the news report) promotional posters.
Seventeen people were detained, and DJ Drama and DJ Cannon were arrested. The news report refers repeatedly to “illegal CDs” — gesturing towards what are clearly Gangsta Grillz mixtapes. She claims they’ll be held as evidence, “and then eventually, they’ll be destroyed.”
In the clip, a representative of the Fulton County Sherriff’s office, Major E.A. Platt, describes the CDs as “counterfeit CDs,” and says, “statistics also show that you can make up to 900% profit, just on the resale of counterfeit CDs. So there’s huge money to be made in it, and there’s no stigma attached to it.”
You know why there’s no stigma? BECAUSE IT ISN’T ILLEGAL. THESE ARE LEGAL MIXTAPES. The record companies and artists have given their permission to these DJs to use these recordings, in the hopes of getting promotion in exchange.
And according to this scare-mongering report, “authorities say counterfeiting CDs typically goes hand-in-hand with other crimes.”
It would be shocking how embarassingly ill-informed the story is (“we’re told by some neighbors that DJ Drama and DJ Cannon are DJs on a local radio station on weekends…”), if the police involved weren’t apparently even more poorly informed.
The layers of cultural ignorance and just-below-the-surface bigotry are so thick in this report that it’s hard to even believe that it’s real, but pictures of people’s cars being towed away don’t lie. One has to presume that Drama and Cannon have the money to hire a lawyer who will extricate them from this mess, but in the meantime… is this really where we’re at in 2007? Seriously?
If anyone can find any more credible reports about this, please share them in the comments.
Update:
Coverage on Nah Right
MTV News has no new info, but some strong background
More coverage and commentary on Pitchfork: including the email address of one of the RIAA folks in the report
Update 2:
Mixunit.com, the largest online mixtape retailer, has pulled every mixtape from their online shelves.