Ian Urbina

Starting when my son was maybe 10 years old, as I drove him and several of his friends around in the car, we had a competition called “The Imagination Game”. I’d play the first 20 seconds of a song that had no words, but was epic and dramatic. Then, I’d abruptly turn off the music and one by one each of the kids had to describe in rich, evocative, five-senses detail what the scene they’d imagined in  their head was that would go with the music we just heard. Whichever kid offered up the most lively and convincing scene that fit with the music, won that round of the competition.

I’m a writer by trade, not a musician. In some ways, The Imagination Game was a writing exercise. But it was also an experiment in reverse engineering and a form of creativity calisthenics, demonstrating that music is a deeply impactful way to communicate feelings and emotions. This game is what first got me thinking about the power of music to tell stories.

 I’ve spent the past several years reporting on lawlessness at sea across five oceans, 14 countries, and all seven continents. In 2019, I published my book, The Outlaw Ocean, based on my series in The New York Times. I have subsequently launched various initiatives and projects related to it, which are primarily focused on spreading awareness about the environmental, labor, and human rights abuses occurring at sea. One of these ventures stemmed from those car rides with my son and his friends: The Outlaw Ocean Music Project.

The Outlaw Ocean Music Project is a first-of-its-kind collaboration of journalists and musicians. In their creative mediums, these narrators have conveyed emotion and a sense of place in an enthralling new way. The result is a captivating body of music based on The Outlaw Ocean’s reporting. All of that time spent at sea allowed me to build an audio library of field recordings. The library features a variety of textured and rhythmic sounds - like machine-gun fire off the coast of Somalia and chanting, captive deckhands on the South China Sea. Using the sound archive, and inspired by my reporting, over 400 artists from more than 60 countries are producing extended plays (EPs) in their own interpretive musical styles - be it electronic, ambient, classical, or hip hop. Many artists are also using reported footage to make their own videos tied to their song, including Louis Futon, Roger Molls, and De Osos.

It's hardly surprising that a music project was born from The Outlaw Ocean book, since I used music in various and sometimes oddball ways while reporting offshore. Certain songs were my version of Adderall (helping me focus in distracting conditions) while others offered an incredible salve for the deeply troubling things I witnessed. But perhaps my most valuable use of music while reporting was when songs served me as mnemonic devices.

When I write I usually listen to music without words, and cast soundtracks to things I see. On one ship, I watched 40 trafficked Cambodian boys and men work brutally long days, and I remember late that evening, trying to polish up my notes, I was sifting through a playlist that I had of instrumental songs. Was ‘The Leftovers’ or ‘Ad Astra’ more fitting to the scene of boys eating between shifts, I wondered? (I went with ‘The Leftovers’ for its haunting and weighty sensibility). Capturing the scenes with music was a memory aid for me, because the music was an easier and more efficient moniker for the mood of a moment.

When I tried to build on my notes at the end of a day of reporting, I'd listen to the songs that I tagged to a page of scribblings in my notebook. And listen to that song again as I sat down to write the story. The song would come to embody, at least for me, more than my words could. It was a bit like a designed Pavlovian Effect. Each time I'd link my notes and a scene to the chosen song, it would conjure up images, feelings, and an entire setting.

Musicians are masters at telling stories with their songs, and yet journalists don't use music enough to access people. Why should movies be the only things that have soundtracks? Why can’t a book have a soundtrack? By pairing two types of creators - journalists and musicians - around content that is urgent, dramatic, and global, the outcome is music tied to something much deeper: a collection of issues that connect us all.

The artists involved in this project have taken a real leap of faith in lending their creative capabilities to help spread the message about issues at sea. They’re all trying something new to support this type of journalism. And importantly, they’ve produced some gorgeous music! Some artists decided to choose a theme from The Outlaw Ocean to inspire their EPs (such as human rights abuses at sea); telling a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Others focused on conveying an emotion or feeling, without necessarily spelling it all out in lyrics. All of them struck the perfect balance between a vast, open, and ‘free’ ocean, and a melancholy, dangerous, and limiting space.

'Trafficked' by Philip G. Anderson (created for The Outlaw Ocean Music Project) was used for an animated rendering by the Oscar-nominated animator, Youngran Nho, of Ian's investigation of illegal fishing in Korea.

Across the participating artists, we can reach a global audience of more than 90 million - thanks in part to the geographic diversity of the artists. In recruiting artists from around the world, the project conscripted an army of cultural diplomats who are talking (in their own language: music) about the weighty concerns facing the ocean and the millions of people who work or depend on it. This disparate audience is one that could never be achieved through traditional journalism.

The Outlaw Ocean Music Project’s design also features a new business model. Most of the streaming, licensing, and sync revenue from it goes to funding future journalism from my non-profit, The Outlaw Ocean Project. Long form investigative journalism is dying largely because it's economics are abysmal. To take one example, I have an investigation coming out in a month or so that costs about $98,000 to produce. The magazine I’m writing for is paying less than $9,000 for the story. That gap explains why even lucrative, large, legacy outlets like The New York Times struggle to produce investigative pieces. If longform journalism is already expensive, doing it at sea is impossibly so.

The music project is reaching a new audience, in an innovative new way: delivering stories to young people and accessing them through their ears and their hearts, more than their eyes and their minds. The project is a clever way to commandeer music platforms like Spotify, Apple, and Amazon and turn them into news outlets. This coveys messages about ocean issues to a younger demographic Like my now 17-year old son, who might not otherwise read The New York Times, but nonetheless still consumes a lot of news through alternate channels.

 The scope is unusual. We are releasing 50 new albums every month and each album consists of a 5-track EP. The sheer size and global reach of the music is partially what makes this a bit like an international and creative flash mob.

Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter and the Director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organisation based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on reporting about environmental and human rights crimes at sea.

If you’ve enjoyed this article from Ian Urbina, you can follow him @ian_urbina on Instagram and Twitter, or on Facebook. And make sure to check out The Outlaw Ocean Music Project.

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