We recently connected with Nick Cooper and have shared our conversation below.
Nick, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the toughest things about progressing in your creative career is that there are almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?
Free Radicals has put out 9 albums of diverse original music. With the tiny amounts of money that artists get for streaming, it is almost impossible to make money from albums. In 2022, we counted 1.3 million streams across all platforms, but this only translated to $98! The other biggest challenge is that rent and costs of living are going up rapidly. Cities that have cheap real estate foster culture. However, cities with expensive rent, no matter how many programs they have to “support the arts” kill culture.
Nick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Free Radicals started in Houston in 1996 and really went for it, rehearsing 3 times a week, performing a 24 hour concert for charity, and recording albums with dozens of musicians. Within 2 years, we were being flown up to New York several times a year to perform, and released The Rising Tide Sinks All, which we intended as a warning against the dangers of treating the entire Middle East like our oil pump, but of course, musicians don’t have much influence over such things. Here are the liner notes:
The Joint Chiefs, corporate thieves and intelligence communities invite us to join in bon voyage bonfire festivities on our balconies
waving our hats to the aircraft carriers and oil tankers off to the wavy seas where untold millions of minions and collaterally clogged clams and manatees wash up on the shelly shores, Shell oil dripping scores of scores of black gold casualties to add to the dominions of our empire, victims of surgical strikes and cold war insanities, waving our flags, wanting so badly for more stores to honor our coupons and warranties that we impose martial law, wage war, and warm our extremities in the wartime economies rubbing our hands in the warmth of infernos of oil wells, exhaust fumes and off-shore refineries waving our hankies to the underhanded bankers, waving our number one undies to the undertakers burning in oil slicks, diving beneath jellyfish chandeliers into tentacles of standard oil subsidiaries turning up our thumbs to the handsome arms manufacturers and army contractors until we’re numb turning on petro-chemical corporation tv stations, turning into a history channel hypnotized culture saluting our sets, catatonic from commercials, confusing c.o.p.s.’ constabulary blunders with the laws, Pre-empting regularly scheduled prime-time programming to present the Wagnerian air-raid vulture promoting two-party persuaded patriotism and proliferation of punishment by beak and claws portraying ‘patriot’ or ‘peacekeeper’ missile explosions as extensions of our remote controls permitting no recourse except escapism while our wonderful world goes under and on the way down realizing our escape boats are defective pointing our fingers at whichever scapegoats we’ve selected under the illusion that our predictions have been fulfilled, our delusion is perfected which was about all we should have expected with these protectors of defaulted S&Ls we’ve elected
After September 11th, a rush to war engulfed the entire country, Free Radicals was like the Dixie Chicks of jazz, funk, ska, reggae, and hip-hop, because we got blacklisted because our anti-war message angered a lot of people. Meanwhile, there were no more trips to New York, because all funding for the arts dried up.
We took our frustration to fuel our 3rd album, “Aerial Bombardment,” about the little kids being killed by bombs that people in the US were about as aware of as blips on a video game. In 2012, Free Radicals took on the border walls between US and Palestine and Mexico and the US with our 4th album, The Freedom Fence. Again, the exact nightmares we were warning against seemed to manifest. Trump’s candidacy was like an attempt to ignore all the real problems we face and instead scapegoat immigrants. Our 6th album, Outside the Comfort Zone was about the system of US apartheid, where people have different levels of protection and enfranchisement under the law. The US economy requires citizens, guest workers, and undocumented immigrants, and but they have distinctly different rights.
Our 8th and 9th albums, White Power Outage, volume 1 and 2, were the response to the new rise in far right Christian nationalism, fantasizing about the end of white supremacy. So, even though were a band, it often feels like we’re passengers on a bus where the driver seems intent in running into every obstacle possible.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
It’s all rent. When I was playing in high school in NYC in the 80s, and when I moved to Houston during the “ghost town years” rent was affordable enough for all kinds of musicians and artists to thrive. Now, rent prices destroy everything. No one has time to jam for hours on end and create new forms of music when they can barely afford their rent. If cities want to support the arts, they don’t need cultural arts programs and grants, they need to displace the dominance of predatory real estate.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
We’re a huge group — there are dozens of us playing shows and recording together every month. So, it’s a goal of ours to act like a caring family towards each other, and that means being democratic about all the creative decisions. Everyone who contributes has a voice. Our other mission is political. Themes of peace and justice are always reflected in our song titles and album art, and in the street protests we play. It’s not a hippie dippie kumbaya kinda thing — it’s more like a, “WTF are we doing! We’re going to war with the world and destroying everything beautiful on the planet! Stop it now!”
Contact Info:
- Website: freerads.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/freeradicalsband/
- Facebook: facebook.com/freerads/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@freeradsmusic
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/album/2Q843N4io3pn1WnM05QNvH