I love Michael as much as I love Marshall, so please don't get me wrong. But no matter how many cow-brained Canadians woke up early enough to catch CBC announce The Book Canada Reads Together As A Nation--At Exactly The Same Time, Turning Each Page Together With A Delicately Audible Cross-Country Flap--For No Particular Reason, Michael Ondaatje will never move as many units as Eminem--and not that any of it matters, but who, of the two, is the better poet? The guy who finally found a rhyme for orange: door-hinge (Slim Shady), or the guy who drove over white birds and called it love ( M. Ondaatje)? Those two golden lanterns, whom we gather around like charmed moths, are our twin lights of inspiration. I'm not saying Kid 606's fucking jams have anything to do with Ondaatje, or that the skin of a lion is tattooed and bleached blonde. All I'm saying is that, as we sit by the window looking out over our driveways, exhausted by every day's new invention, the young turn to their palm-streaked Eminem CDRs and the elders revisit their yellowing Ondaatje paperbacks, wondering where those guys get their energy.

Kid 606's new record is put out by a questionable Kiwi label called Violent Turd, who have, with only two releases, scared the living shit out of most major label copyright lawyers, and intimidated legions of pimpled hackers who proliferate the internet with their mp3 newsgroups, exchanging illegally laptop-dickered remixes of evanescent pop songs. I say Violent Turd is questionable because most people know that the label is Kid 606's own, and the boy lives in Oakland, California, not New Zealand. It is also questionable because its mandate is that of a thief, to break & enter songs and steal their best shit. Kid 606 is the poster-boy for ADD, nothing fascinates him for very long, but in his own criminal way he has stolen gently, without any sense of attack or right.

The reverse of the jewel case reads, along with the track titles, "All songs not written by Kid606", and so then, who did, if not the Kid? In a Level 5 aural shit-storm, we are introduced to a collection of strangers all ready to milk us cow-eared lads brought in from the pasture of our discontent for regular nipple-tweaking: Eminem's crew D12 is pilfered for it's 'Purple Pills', remixed at twice the speed in a song called 'MP3 killed the CD star', which, appropriately, also rips The Buggles of their classic hit 'Video Killed The Radio Star'. The Bangles, Bikini Kill, Missy Elliot, and Radiohead all weather their own 606 mutations, and the album is always one step away from reducing them all to a hail of white noise as high pitched as a prairie snowdrift. Kid 606's version of Missy Elliot's 'Get U R Freak On' is so hot you can put your gloved-hand to the stereo and warm yourself like that. "I'm copywritten," Missy raps, "So don't copy me." And then, that little 606 bastard turns her words against her, "Copy me. Copy me." She repeats through digital coercion. It's the fattest baddest pimpinest motherfucking song on the album.

So what is Kid 606 doing? The album is basically a crushing defeat to all the laws concerning artistic property; and not because it's such blatant theft (nothing new in that), but because it's so damn good. "In terms of being a performer," Kid 606 told Eye magazine recently, "I'm not going to go up there and sit behind a laptop and masturbate to obtuse electronic stuff. I was never going to release this record, but this was the best stuff I could make to get a reaction live." Kid 606 has plunder-fucked Eminem for his Arcadian poetry, his master-beats, for that pop aggression the avant-garde is too afraid to express.

Today, all us Canadian readers and writers are in conspicuous thrall over one literary lion; the cynic in me has a big hate-on for the whole silly project, but it might be time to embrace the wisdom of Kid 606. Russell Smith once begged in a national paper for someone to put an end to the wintery climate given young writers by awards judges. But the end of winter means the disappearance of these men, the Ondaatjes and the etceteras of literary Canada. I suggest we plunder instead of whine, and enjoy our books together or totally alone, illegally or officially stamped with the CBC's approval. It's a continuum, and if the blue river of the mainstream dries up, so does the underground. The last song on Kid 606's album--featuring an a capella version of 'Creep' by Radiohead and the repeated lyric 'I don't belong here'--is called 'This Is Not My Statement', and that's a good way to end.

Lee Henderson has already-gotten-over. Plenty.