Tim Fite Likes Stealing

07/11/08 4:36pm

by Jessica Lewis (CHARTattack)

There's a thief taking the do-it-yourself music scene by storm. His name is Timothy Sullivan, but he goes by Tim Fite.

"The taxman doesn't know shit about Tim Fite," he says over the phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. "But his children, they might listen to music."

Fite has become known for shamelessly dancing between genres, his funny yet creative stage show and stealing other people's music for his records by rifling through bargain bins or MySpace pages. He even stole from Toronto's beloved Constantines.

"I do a lot of stealing," Fite confesses. "I would say stealing sometimes plays a bigger part in the music than I do. I steal more than I contribute. I don't know if I own anything."

Fite says this with gusto because he's found a way to perfect this "art" and is becoming respected for it by fans and critics alike.

"The way I make music is the standard old-school hip-hop production style, when you start with that and continue on into the song and it doesn't sound like it because of the way I steal," he says. "So it doesn't always sound loopy, and I had so much that it disappears. The theft disappears."

Fite's theft has reigned all over his records — from 2004's blues-based 2 Minute Blues to 2007's online-only rap record, Over The Counter Culture, to this year's almost-folk full-length, Fair Ain't Fair.

"The record label doesn't want to get in trouble for selling it, so they cover their ass on that end and get the proper permission," he says. "If it was up to me, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.

"The wrongness is in the system. Credit should be given where credit is due, and payment should never equal credit."

But Fite is giddy about what he's doing. He believes that his stealing is actually an effort to give back to the people he's taken from.

"I'm not the guy who comes into your house and turns everything over and pulls the cushions off the couch and the stuffing out of the pillows," he says. "I'm the guy where you notice that there's a new couch in your house."

Fite's socially-conscious ways don't end there. His lyrics often deal with money, gun control ("I like singing about the money that bought the guns"), consumerism and capitalism.

"The hope is that it's not so much that I get in trouble," says Fite. "But that people start to think, because thinking is actually the biggest troublemaker there is."

No matter what genre Fite chooses, the messages will always come through — and sometimes the way he emphasizes them can be as goofy as his performances.

"Genres, fuck 'em," he says. "I don't really hear the difference in the way things sound to people, but I don't think that they're in any way different to each other in the way that they can hold hands and cross the street, and neither of them will get hit by a car."

Fite will open for The Watson Twins at Montreal's Club Lambi on July 14 and Toronto's Lee's Palace the next night.