I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.

It's a depression. People aren't going out, people aren't buying anything and every goddamned thing they could buy is on the first page of Google a week before you release it anyway.

I hear plenty of things that my grandmother would find funky and it sounds like bullshit to me, just pure, unadulterated bullshit, music made for cocktail parties and swingin' bachelor pads and beat poetry slams and makes me want to fall asleep with how goddamned respectable the whole thing has become.

The outlaws became the industry and now the industry is falling to pieces and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know our music isn't as popular as it used to be, and we sit reading DJ Mag or BPM telling us that electro and mash-ups and gigging with an 808 and the Buena Vista Social Club in the background are the hot new things and they sell 15,000 copies and we can't sell 63, as if that's the way things are supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad, they're crazy!

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, pointing and clicking and creating smooth jazz with a 4/4 beat and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our bedrooms! Let me have my Serato and my iTunes and my super unreleased Masters at Work Rip-Off Volume 47 and I won't say anything. I'll make nice, quiet lounge music with sophisticated tempos and very warm instruments that you could put on AM radio and not offend anyone. Just leave us alone!"

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone! I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to shut down Blogspot or Rapidshare. I don't want you to send angry twitters to 500 broke DJs and producers that you know because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the economy and the filesharing and the sell-outs and the days when good music was just as popular as their music and we didn't need to put fucking violins in it to make it that way. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a fucking human being and I like House Music, this music has value goddamnit!"

I want you to get up now, I want you to put on the last goddamned record that made you excited and then I want you to break it and make a better one. I don't want you to think how many units it's going to sell or what wallpaper you can rip off Google Images for a cover when you put it on Traxsource.

I don't want you to submit the same Top 10 DJ Chart to 15 different magazines in hopes they'll print your name and your myspace so you can get even more fake friends you're never going to meet.

I don't want you to puff up your resume about the bodies you've rocked and the houses you've brought down and the Beatport charts you've topped and the names of the DJs more famous than yourself that you can drop.

I don't want you to mention your Facebook fan page and how many people SEND U SUM LUV with sparkly graphics and all of the other forms of meaningless bullshit. Because I've run completely out of bullshit. I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Things have got to change. They've got to. But first, you've got to get mad. Then we'll figure out what to do about the economy and the filesharing and the days when good music was just as popular as their music and it didn't even need congas and warm guitars and violins that would put a senior citizen to sleep.

But first you've got to get mad. You've got to remember why the fuck you're doing this, and it isn't to become a low-resolution flash video star and it isn't to make tribal cocktail music. It isn't to make five more pennies than the poor schmuck next to you. It isn't to become the most recognizable name on YouTube that no one's ever heard play in the flesh.

You've got to stick your neck out, you've got to put a speaker in the window and tell the rest of the fucking world that this is what you like, you're not going to apologize for it and you're not going to take it anymore.

(With apologies to Peter Finch.)