[DISCLAIMER: I am just a regular venezuelan citizen with a point of view and some personal stories to write about. This should not be taken as a political analysis nor a news article. Since I'm not a native english speaker I will have to apologize in advance for any composition mistakes in my writing, so bear with me. Thank you very much

This post won't have any imagery or music related links, though I'll leave you a little playlist of music of our own to keep you company through the reading :-) It's on the house]

Foreword

It seems that Venezuela's situation is becoming part of the new "zeitgeist" or global awareness hype. Everyday day new information becomes available for everybody to read about it and the obvious amount of venezuelan migrants all around the world do their part in spreading the news the best way they can. If you search the mainstream news on the subject you will find that Venezuela is going through a crisis generated either by decades of misgovernance of the leftist ruling party, or a seditious conspiracy from a right wing empire that wants to rule the world through the banking system, it will depend on the media source you rather believe in.

A couple of days ago while I was surfing and reading posts I came across this really cool one by @lovejoy where he, very wisely, stated:

"The current situation in Venezuela cannot be understood without studying the history of Latin America, and the conditions which gave rise to the Presidency of Hugo Chavez and everything that followed."

This phrase alone is worth all the upvotes his post can get. Please, take the time to read his words and watch the video he shared. And then read the inevitable flood of comments a post like this will generate. There you will find one of mine that got this cool reply from @jimbobbill who puctually called for the importance of first hand information.

Going through @jimbobbill's posts I found this one that caught my eye. He does have a point, we don't get to listen to as much protest songs as we did in the past century (or centuries...), and it is very obvious that we don't get unfiltered people like Bob Dylan to be "mainstream" artists anymore, (tinfoil hat alert) I guess the devil might not be interested in that anymore :

You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

But this doesn't necessarily means that there are no artists creating protest content, in a country like Venezuela there are LOTS but of course, they don't really reach any audience. You see, in this country we are going through a "revolution" (it never gets old...) and this so called "revolution" always needed every branch of the cultural/social media to be on the "right track" with the lineament or tendency that favours those who control the resources needed to promote and exploit artits. It's pretty much like in anywhere, right? Only that in Venezuela as an artist promoted by a patron you never really get to know where those resources come from.

Most venezuelan "known artists" have made little fortunes (tens of millions of $$$) even by working directly in pro-goverment "cultural" related projects (compromising their image to the "cause" and where the content created is strictly filtered, if created at all...) or by following the trend dictated by "the mainstream".

The mainstream

Basically for a venezuelan, "the mainstream" would be whatever comes out of the few private and public TV channels and the hundreds of radio stations throughout the country. Of course there is cable, but CNN is banned in Venezuela so figure out the kind of news you get to see in the mainstream media here. About all those private media owners, you should realize that no one has a private business in this country if it's not alligned with the tendencies filtered by our lord father "The Revolutionary Bolivarian Government", more important if it is a media or advertising business. And yes, they actually call themselves like that...

In that mainstream, particularly in AM/FM radio, there use to be a lot of cultural and alternative stations (until to 2005 at least), you could say venezuelans used to have a very wide taste in music, and almost any artist in the world was able to get booked to come and play in a few of the main cities in front of a considerable audience, there was business to be explored in events and music production, but only if you didn't step on big papa's government foot, please remember that. Up to the start of our "revolutionary" quest we even had Paquito D' Rivera and Arturo Sandoval come on a regular basis to play great concerts here in Caracas, once we started walking this red carpet they didn't get to come so often (or at all). The same thing happened with a lot of different artists that used to include Venezuela in their tour dates, the country made a cultural shift and event production company owners just stopped booking people that wouldn't praise the glories and achievements of the bolivarian revolution.

This would call to an obvious shift in the audience's needs for "entertainment" that would have to be carefully planned and directed by the media, production and distribution companies along with the government. Leaving just a piece of the really little reach that internet's social media has on venezuelan population to the few "independent" content creators that didn't flee the country by then. Keep in mind that a large majority of the venezuelan population doesn't have access to the internet.

So I hope by now you can get a picture of how important it was for the government (or whatever works behind it) to control this shift and to maintain political relations with the owners of the media that where the ones responsible for spreading the propaganda and the tons of "urban" music that would flood the music "market" in this country. Key person here: our famous Cuban/Venezuelan entrepenour Gustavo Cisneros, quite a gem that guy. Research him, I recommend.

The "urban" pretext

When it's 2003, the "revolution" is blooming in high priced oil barrels after a failed "CIA coup" and you're a 25 years old musician that just finished his studies and doesn't want to leave his country, you get to make the choice of "getting a regular job" (you know, those that totalitariam regimes love their subjects to be wasting their lives on) in order to bring food to the table or become the best version of a "starving artist" that you can be. I went for the second one but with a little extra tool.

I applied myself to become a decent session musician, so if I didn't make it with "my music" I'd still be able to have a functional place in the music business, a music business that was growing exponentially towards a genre latin culture has stubbornly insisted in calling "URBANO"

Never enjoyed it very much to be honest, and I was lucky enoug to be able to say "no" a couple of times I got a call to play for one of the hottest projects at the time. But in time things changed, and somehow that "urban" abomination took the entire market. By 2009-2010 there were no big national artists that weren't working "experiments" with reggaeton, come on, not even Shakira was able to scape this punishment, and I used to love her Pre-Emilio Estefan music.

The thing here is that this "urban artists" never stopped growing. It doesn't matter how much money you heard they spent on promotion and "payola", these guys where putting a new song out every six weeks and each one with a no less than 25K to 40K budget videos. If you got a gig with one of them it would ALWAYS be either in a government related event and "free" for the good, pour, honorable and (now) reggaeton loving people of venezuela or in one of the famous Hugh Hefner style parties that the new "Revolutionary, Bolivarian" elite threw on a very regular basis having as main attraction any of the hottest urban artists/projetcs that were in vogue, none of them would really pay much to their musicians selling the idea of exposure as part of the payment, they would make you think that they were doing you a favor by hiring your services. The average rate would be considered less than a tip compared to international professional fees, nonetheless they would always have some shady "producer" or "manager" to take care of the bill, sometimes in cash.

By the third or fourth gig with ANY of these huge urban artist (and with a little bit of common sense) you would come to realize that as a musician you were being part of a shady scheme that exploit resources out of "nowhere" and the only working enviroment offered to you would be the same as working for drug kingpins. Once I got a tip for an extra set that tripled the amount of my regular fare for two sets of 45min each, for example.

Epiphany

@jimbobbill's and @lovejoy posts and words made me realize that living the life of a musician in Venezuela this past 18 years has given me the chance to see with my own eyes (and live in the flesh) a lot of things that are not commonly known or discussed in political retoric posts, but nonetheless hold a lot of cues to understand the social/cultural broth in which this very widely promoted "revolution" was born, lived and is actually dying.

This is why I'll be working along with my partner in crime @samuelnavas to compile a few personal stories of us, and even others lived by friends of ours that would be willing to share, in order to contribute in the help of any non venezuelan person on steemit (and even a few naive venezuelans) genuinely concerned about understanding what is going on here, always from a musician's point of view, after all that's what we really are. This we'll do through a series that we'd like to call "Honestly shady", because in this country even the most honorable person has been forced to bend the rules to be able to adapt to this lawless and anarchist revolution. We hope we can share some light on the subject and help everybody interested in an alternative source of knowledge.

Appendix: a good place to start.

In my comment to @lovejoy on his post I recommended Servando Gonzalez's work on the history of the Cuban regime as a good place to start on the understanding of the South American issue. I'd like to share it with you guys (I know for a fact that @jimbobbill will flip out with this guy's theories) and for everybody interested in the conspiranoic point of view of Venezuela's situation, the way I personally see it, it's the most sane explanation.

Introduction

Partners in crime

If you have any particular curiosity about Venezuela, and you think that we could answer it, feel free to leave a comment. We'll be seeing you in a few days with our first chapter Honestly shady: The protest song paid with dirty money.

Thanks a lot to @lovejoy and @jimbobbill for their support and inspiration.
Arturo Soto
@aurealistic