“[Music] heralds, for it is prophetic. It has always been in its essence a herald of times to come.” (Attali, 1999 p.4)
Introduction:
Remarkable Observations
There have been repeated articulations, be they observations of the past or present, or predictions of the future, on the subject of the sociological changes brought about by developments in our technologies. Much discussed, many of these remarkable observations concern the arts as the visual and audible embodiment of cultural change, utilising and manifesting, as they do, the character of the tools with which they are made.
Progress commonly has positive associations but change is often resisted. Old habits die hard and more so a way of life. If music is a herald of times to come as Jacques Attali passionately claimed then something has been brewing since digital technology became commonplace. For as the digital progeny create new paradigms, the establishment struggles to cope, whilst an overwhelming tsunami of innovation in cultural form, bypasses the embedded codes of society’s established structures, creating resistance as the incumbents are undermined. If music is the prophet, then society is being remixed.
Theorists
In this essay I will discuss Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Attali and other theorists, looking at the publications and speeches in which they have made significant observations that are viewable in the context of today’s digital culture, its obsession with recycling the past and at some of the implications this has for our society today and for tomorrow.
Digital Culture.
This includes a continuing copyright conundrum, for if everything digital is by definition, a copy , our laws of copyrights, and definitions of ownership formerly associated with the concept of an original are redundant, and in the 21st century, when a comprehensive, high speed global digital infrastructure is prioritised by government , and its capacity, user base and creative flexibility are so wide and expanding, it is perhaps surprising that essential legislative infrastructures are not being quickly updated. If anything the outdated conventions have been reinforced. When culture truly moves, some established institutions resist change. This essay looks at some implications of this change and resistance, and at some alternative pathways.
Mash-up culture, stemming from sampling and the idea of remixing, is an important part of what comes under the umbrella of digital culture. It is as a result of digital technology, that this configurability has become a new intellectual currency, complete with communication networks and with new opportunities and new models for creativity and for the sharing of that creativity. This is central to the crisis of how our creativity impacts on who owns what and how our economy adjusts to it.
By looking at the 20th century theorists and at some from the 21st century, I aim to explore their theories, their interrelationships and by dividing them into two separate eras, illustrate the imperative that is with us now, of the crisis our digital culture presents.
Methodology & Approach
I have been using sampling technology since it became affordable in the late 1980s. Writing sample-based music enabled me to draw from diverse genres. Inspired by the boundary stretching music of Sun Ra, and under the tutelage of Free Jazz educator John Stevens and self styled ‘Ambient Guru’ DJ Mixmaster Morris, the further out I reached to colour my palette, the better.
Engaging with the acid house and rave scene and the chill-out or ambient room by giving live performances from a sampler and Atari computer, I improvised from sequences triggering samples using a variety of techniques, from the palette which included Yoruba singing from Cuba, Welsh male voice choirs, Turkish flutes, American hip-hop, English progressive rock, West African drums, Canvey rhythm & blues, be-bop, prison songs, reggae, electric pianos, drum machines, kitchen utensils, hand percussion and acid house records.
Motivated by my own practice, my research has focussed on the progression of sampling techniques enabled by the increased power afforded by the improving technology. The creative developments, their place in society and the controversy born of intellectual copyright has led me to trace sampling’s contextual history and its trajectory. This essay reflects my research as I discover significant documents and theorists. Discovering wider implications to their work has revealed patterns and decision-making beyond just my own practice and beyond music, to be found at large in the digital creative diaspora.
On reading Jaques Attali for the first time, I was immediately struck by some surprising similarities in philosophy and approach with Sun Ra. I will compare some of their statements to investigate the connections further.
I will approach the key theorists in a chronological fashion, and in relation to each other, describing a continuum of logic, in the developing context of the day or era in which they wrote whilst placing their theories into a context of today’s digital culture.
Continuum
I have begun a line of research called the Sample-Remix-Mash-up Spectrum and will include some of it here, but it is not yet a complete set of observations. I intend to include updated writings on the subject in my research continuum. In this essay, I will focus mostly on the sample end of the spectrum.
Online references.
Culture moves, but it isn’t waiting, and when researching and pursuing its trajectory, it becomes clear how quickly things need updating. Quoting and citing sources can mean transcribing important speeches from a video or audio stream made as little as a day or two ago, or from a news report from an hour ago and referring to a URL, since no other available format yet exists. Accordingly, I include an index of online references.
Whereas the open internet is regarded as a fallible information source, Wikipedia being a commonly cited example , the availability of original film, music, video and television footage hosted on the internet, is an invaluable tool for finding out what people actually said, did and recorded at the time. These documents are, despite being a digital copy, the original information, performed as intended by the subject. I have found much value and gained much information from this type of research and include quotes directly from it. A difficulty arises in the poor quality of accompanying information pertaining to the date of origin, the source of the document and the original publisher. My citations accommodate this as best as I can on a case-by-case basis.
The Prophecy
“Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organizations are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code.” (Attali, 1999 p.11)
Even if it’s economic organizations are shifting, music remains able to explore faster than material reality, but the same is arguably true of alternative modes of composition, in a new digital reality. Art emerges from software scripts; the code as well as the music and images produced by it are reaching forward irrespective of old boundaries, and are changing perceptions of what art is and where creativity lies. We are well down the road toward the day predicted in the 1960s by culture theorist Marshall McLuhan, when he said:
“Where advertising is heading, is quite simply into a world where the ad will become a substitute for the product and all the satisfactions will be derived informationally from the ad, and the product will be merely a number in some file somewhere.” (McLuhan, M. [a]).
With observations on change seeded in history from Plato to Confucius (Sinnreich, 2010. p.18), more recent history has consistently offered us an updated enlightenment and awareness in the context and language of the day. Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, Jacques Atalli, and Sun Ra in the 1970s, John Oswald in the 1980s, and in the 21st century, a growing number of theorists and activists of which I will focus on just two. Lawrence Lessig and Aram Sinnreich.
Pre Digital
“The thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, see, this is new? It hath been already of old time which was before us.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 King James version).
The printing press, photography, the telephone, the phonograph and magnetic tape, film, television, radio and the computer; each gave rise to changes in the way society has looked, listened and behaved. The technological evolution of the 20th century has accelerated into the 21st. effecting even more rapid change. The sharing of one idea can travel around the world at an unprecedented speed.
In addition to the speed and saturation levels of digital information, much of the creative expression being shared uses the last hundred years or more of recorded content as its raw materials as its starting point, recycling and re-examining our past in the context of our new environment and new technologies and thus creating clear implications for our future. More recent sages than King Solomon bear out his ancient wisdom, each adding insights from the environment of their own eras. One of the re-occurring themes is the recyclable nature of culture. Another is the way our technologies impact on our society, which in turn, become shaped by our tools.
Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin
The computer may be the defining object of the age in which we now live, but some of the inventions in the lifetime of Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin would have been equally game changing. Born before the turn of the 20th century, they witnessed a period of some extraordinary discoveries and developments in science, industry and the arts.
It is unsettling to think that such revolutionary modes of communication as flight, photography, radio and other inventions became a part of two world wars, as society reshuffled and re-configured itself, but the imperatives of war doubtless led to an acceleration in technological advancement. By the 1930’s there had been enough time for the social structures to settle around the common use of the motor car, the telephone, the radio, gramophone, film and photography. It is in this context that Valéry measured the trajectory of such development when he predicted:
“Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” (Valéry, 1931)
This foresight, born out in television, has the internet is it’s modern manifestation. Valéry’s ‘simple movement of the hand’ carries another significance in the age of high-speed data. The sheer volume of content available now via the internet, both archived and new, being continually produced and uploaded every day by an increasing global engagement with digital creativity, means that the vast majority of it has very little use for most people. The celebrated exceptions are viewed millions and millions of times, but it is impossible to keep up with such huge amounts of information, even within the realms of interest of an average consumer. But we get used to it. We become accustomed and even indifferent toward it. The simple movement of the hand could be a nonchalant, effortless wave of dismissal, in an easy come, easy go regard toward such common fare.
The hard drive on a typical domestic computer can hold many thousands of MP3s, but to receive them all in one go is just as easily done as it is to delete them; ‘with a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign’. The value placed on that number of records on vinyl or CDs would be conceived differently. Firstly in storage space, then in resale value and then in cherished value. If they are not cherished and there is no space to keep them, someone somewhere might pay something for them, especially, for example, the rare Brazilian 1970’s Jazz.
When you have stored them for a year and still haven’t played any of them and you realise you are not likely to trawl through them either, these amazing and unique recordings, moments of frozen time, once fragile artefacts, now digitized and existing only as data on your hard drive, have a completely different value. Possibly measured only in megabytes of used space. Which brings us directly to Walter Benjamin, who quotes Valéry in the opening statement to his touchstone Essay, The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Benjamin’s 1936 essay, introduced theories that have strong relevance today, and though some of his ideas may be disproved or outdated, his insights on the change in relationship between an original work of art and a mechanically reproduced copy, via photography, film and the phonograph, remain fundamentally correct in the digital age, despite these technologies having moved beyond the technological limitations of his day.
“Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.” (Benjamin, 1936)
It is vital to the understanding of Benjamin that the political dimension to his theory is not overlooked in favour of the simple and seductive association of his predictions with the digital technology of today. He makes this absolutely clear in one paragraph where he makes particularly strong associations with the 21st century;
“An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever-greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” (Benjamin, 1936)
One of the keys to the context of Benjamin’s opinions in ‘The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is in it’s epilogue, where the discussion of aesthetics can be viewed in the context of his location in Berlin during the rise of Fascism. By the time the essay was published, Benjamin had fled Germany for Paris, concluding his essay with a condemnation of Fascism in aesthetic and human terms;
“Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics, which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” (Benjamin, 1936)
The importance, to me, is that the political dimension of his work carries a message that translates into today’s environment, not in the context of Nazi Fascism of course, but in the capitalist structures, challenged by the new democracy of the internet.
Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur is scathing about this type of democracy, in the context of journalism versus blogging, invokes the famous theory about monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare:
“In the pre-internet age, T.H. Huxley’s scenario of infinite monkeys empowered with infinite technology seemed more like a mathematical jest than a dystopian vision. But what had once appeared as a joke now seems to foretell the consequences of a flattening of culture that is blurring the lines between traditional audience and author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur.” (Keen, 2007)
Noam Chomsky takes a different view, reflected in a spectrum of activists who embrace this new type of democracy to effect a change on the existing one;
“Democracy is tolerable only insofar as it conforms to strategic-economic objectives. The United States’ fabled “yearning for democracy” is reserved for ideologues and propaganda.” (Chomsky, 2011)
Thus lines are being drawn across creativity on the grounds of politics and definitions of democracy. In a time of mistrusted politicians and high profile corporate greed, Internet piracy has become a political tool. The reconfiguring of more than just music or videos is at stake.
Marshall McLuhan
“Archimedes once said, ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.’ Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said ‘I will stand on your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose’” (McLuhan, M. p.68 1964)
Using the combined mediums of mass communication to air his insight into the very subject of itself, MucLuhan’s emergence as a popular and celebrated media theorist in the 1960s has reoccurred in the new century. His message has amplified in significance since the analogue to digital conversion of what he called the information age. His prophecies have matured and for the globally networked Internet generation, McLuhan is a natural, if not a Pop icon.
In the 21st century, it is easy to be seduced by the accuracy of his prophecies. His understanding of his own time was not limited to it. He could see it’s trajectory and talked about it in neat, ready to time-travel packages. For example, he observed exactly the situation of his own day, echoed King Solomon’s words, and foresaw the situation today:
“The old medium is always the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV and as books used to be the content, novels used to be the content of movies and so every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content and it is highly observable, highly noticeable.” (McLuhan, [b] Uploaded 2009)
Having created copy-able visual and audible content since the end of the 19th century, we are now using over a century’s worth of creativity to feed today’s digital mediums. In the case of music, Mixmaster Morris pointed out:
“We’ve had sixty, seventy years of making records, now we sample them”. (Gould, 1992 in Toop, 1995 p.52)
McLuhan made predictions, but he was assessing the situation around him from the outset and suggesting we do the same. His more famous statements already applied at the time he made them. The public did not have to wait for the “Global village”, (McLuhan, 2002), they were already in it. “The medium is the message” may be harder to grasp, but the remarkable thing about McLuhan is that whether people got it, or not, with each year that passes, many of his statements become more relevant and therefore easier to understand.
Politics
McLuhan reads like a survivors guide rather than a political manifesto, and deliberately so. Suggesting no particular start point for studying his message, other than a multidimensional approach, he declined to offer a fixed viewpoint. (Gordon W.T. 1997 p.11)
His refusal to fix or extend an argument enables his audience to put the pieces together themselves, allowing access from a multitude of reference points to a multitude of approaches, avoiding partisan politics and inviting attention from the multitude of existing doctrines.
The two quotations I have used above are easily accepted as classic McLuhan sound bites. The former is used, complete as quoted here, for the opening page of a book entitled ‘McLuhan For Beginners’ and is actually taken from McLuhan’s own book, Understanding Media. The second quote is self-explanatory and relevant to the point I am making at that moment. Both quotations however, omit something important.
The first quotation I used, when seen in full, reads thus, with the omission in bold type:
“Archimedes once said, ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.’ Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said ‘I will stand on your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose. We have leased these ‘places to stand to private corporations.’” (McLuhan, M. p.68 1964)
The second quotation, now unabridged, reads as follows;
“The medium does things to people, and they’re always completely unaware of this, they don’t really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up, they think of the old medium because the old medium is always the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV and as books used to be the content, novels used to be the content of movies and so every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content and it is highly observable, highly noticeable, but the real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored. “McLuhan, M [Online].
Prophetic, even in the edit, McLuhan cautions about the hypnotic effect of the medium, rendering people incapable of resisting rise of the corporation and their own mental enslavement. Though his language is subtler, the first page of his first published book is a warning. Quoting selectively this time to highlight the politics:
“Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained minds have made it a full time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now.” (McLuhan, 1951 p.v)
He continues:
“[Since] so many minds are engaged in bringing about this condition of public helplessness…Why not assist the public to observe the drama which is intended to operate on it unconsciously?” (McLuhan, 1951 p.v)
As an intriguing TV personality who said interesting things, McLuhan was harmless enough, but if the public engaged with him and did actually think about what the implications were of what he was saying, then he did pose a political threat. He was the proverbial spanner in the works.
Republican politician Newt Gingrich, in an attempt to play McLuhan at his own game, condemned him as a “countercultural McGovernik”, a perjorative, referencing Democrat Senator George McGovern’s anti-Vietnam war politics, the beatnik counter culture and the protesting of the refuseniks. The ‘–nik’ suffix was taken from the Russian satellite, Sputnik. This was a condensed condemnation in sound bite form, from a right-wing Cold-War American Conservative politician.
Alan Ginsberg, preceding McLuhan’s invention of the term ‘Mass Media’ illuminates the context for Gingrich’s verbal assault, in a very McLuhan-like letter to the New York Times, in 1957 in defence of Jack Kerouac:
“But the “beatnik” of mad critics is a piece of their own ignoble poetry. And if “beatniks”, and not illuminated Beat poets, overrun this country they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash Man.” (Campbell, J 1999)
McLuhan is saying, much same as Benjamin, that your choice of aesthetic, is a political choice.
Jacques Attali and Sun Ra
Attali is a different kind of visionary. His statements on music as prophecy (above) relate to the subject of music in society and his coupling of noise and politics bears relationship to the context into which I have placed McLuhan, Benjamin and Valéry.
He is different, not because he says things that contradict these theorists; he insists that music is the true language of mankind and through reading it, we can understand ourselves, which is somewhat McLuhan like, but also like the extraordinary jazz musician Sun Ra. Despite Attali’s in depth discussion, consideration and great deliberation on music in his 1977 book ‘Noise, A Political Economy’, he is as dramatic as an orchestra. I find a poetic beauty in what he says about music, which is why I have quoted him at the head of this essay and again at the head of the Prophecy chapter.
Attali and Sun Ra share a view of the musician’s role and the importance of music in society beyond the historical narrative. With politics as a mid way point, it is through philosophy, if not cynicism, that they are akin. (Attali 1977 p.103-104)
Anyone who claims to be from another planet, yet remains to be taken seriously can only be living a metaphor. There is something about listening to Sun Ra’s music that is akin to stepping away from something in order to view it better. Since his subject is the human on planet earth, space travel provides a natural vantage point, better to see ourselves:
“The chaos on this planet is due to the music that musicians are playing, that they are forced to play, by some who just think of money and don’t realise that music is a spiritual language, and it represents the people of earth. When musicians are compelled to play anything, it goes straight to the throne of the Creator of the Universe and that is how He sees you, according to your music, because see, music is a universal language and what you call musicians should play, its what goes to the creator as your personal ambassador and your personal nemesis.” (Blount, H. 1980)
With echoes of Sun Ra, Attali is direct, offering the problem and the solution in a devastating opening to his book:
“ For twenty five centuries, Western Knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.” (Attali. 2009 p.3)
Whereas Sun Ra created extraordinary and unusual music, which illustrated his philosophy, music stimulates beyond the capacity of words, so it becomes quite a simple equation to seek meaning in the actual music rather than the words, especially when the music is uncommonly different or influential in the long term, ergo, according to Attali, music as prophecy.
Digital
“Sampling live, that’s the clubbing of the future, vinyl is on the way out, soon we’ll have totally computerised … a real techno club” (Gould, 1991)
The turn of the 21st century is a pretty good watershed for defining a difference between what digital technology (and hence culture) can do that it couldn’t do before. Initially it was about memory capacity but computing power and the infrastructure enabling the global transfer of huge amounts of rich data have meant that the changes have been occurring with exponential rapidity. Music has been profoundly affected, initially, more so than other mediums. Because video files, common today, carry much more data, the revolution really started with music. The new era began with the arrival of the affordable digital sampler.
In the late 1980s, Computer screens were in black and white, images were compromised with less than 200 pixels available both vertically and horizontally on a monitor. An Atari computer came fitted with either half a megabyte of RAM or a whole megabyte. An affordable digital sampling keyboard, or stand alone sampler by Emulator, in 1988 might have only ½ megabyte of memory, delivering under 15 seconds of sampling time at a rate 42,000 samples per second. Neither of these technologies, which represent the average computing power of the day, could offer enough memory to record a multi-tracked vocal or guitar track. Analogue tape was still commonplace.
Despite the limitations, which seem crippling by today’s standards, a budget sampler by Emulator or Akai with less than 1 megabyte of RAM would be used in conjunction with an Atari computer, popular because of it’s inbuilt MIDI capabilities, in an increasing number of recording studios, to produce music that either did not need any orchestration that might require multi track tape, or utilised the stylistic idiosyncrasies of sampling that were rapidly becoming the new musical dialect, as an instrumental or vocal based track. Sampling a short vocal phrase and repeating small moments of the feature, became a popular compromise between using just sampled and sequenced tracks or synchronising with tape. Sampling rapidly became the norm in a proliferation of new musical styles, built on the technology and increasingly using the unique and new characteristics and idiosyncrasies offered to define a new set of languages and intellectual exchanges.
The Sample Remix Mashup Spectrum.
Sharing samples in 1988 by taking a box of floppy discs to a friend’s house, I imagined that the medium of vinyl for sharing music would soon be redundant. I imagined that the new medium would be the floppy disc, plugged into sample playback machines, which would naturally enough to me, have the ability to view the piece in its’ component parts. I Imagined that these could be remixed at will, and passed on again in their new form. I imagined that people would want to do it and that it would be a natural cultural development.
Despite the naïve nature of the predictions, they were essentially correct. The medium is not the floppy disc but the Mp3 and there is a remix culture manifest in various forms, across a spectrum from the sample to the remix and the mash-up, the sample being the lowest common denominator.
Some samples were used clearly, as taken from their source, and sometimes the choice of artist or track to sample was essential to the concept of the piece. Other times the sample was not so obvious, buried unrecognisably in a filter or by transposition, by playing only a moment of it, or by any number of techniques in the emerging language of the sampling artist. The range of options as well as the nature of the sound and playability of a sample, really were essential parts of the creative process and outcome. Legitimacy amongst peers was far more important than legality. It really was not important to think about who owned the copyright of a sample or perhaps many samples in one tune, until you sold enough records to warrant the attention.
I once worked in a studio where a friend had previously left some ready edited samples. The producer suggested I used one. When my friend heard what I had done with what he had edited, he said “Oi! That’s my sample!” To which I replied; “Well, you must’ve taken it from somewhere.” His reply was; “Oh, I suppose so.” And left it at that. This illustrates three points. One, the irony of a sense of ownership of someone else’s intellectual property, two that it had become his intellectually property in the sphere of the sampling artist, not in the sphere of copyright law, by virtue of his identifying it as a good sample and choosing to demonstrate his prowess as a sampling artist by taking it. Thirdly, he conceded the idea that anyone can take a sample and it is not exclusively theirs to take and not even theirs to claim in the first place. His initial complaint to me was based on the sense of ownership over the idea. This was indeed intellectual currency.
It became commonplace to think of a good sample to take, identifying the moment in a piece of music or speech, and then to hear it already on a record within a day or two, perhaps on the radio or perhaps even on someone else’s sampler in a studio. Samples became held in high value and cherished as an idea and were consequently kept secret from peers until release, when the head start was as far ahead as you could get before someone else had time to exploit the same idea.
The stronger the idea however, the further it would be exploited. Samples would do the rounds of the new tunes and quickly gained names, particularly since they were traded or stolen, ready edited and named, directly from a studio’s library by a visiting producer. It was also possible to book into a studio and request samples as readily as a requesting a synthesiser sound, a session musician or an echo effect.
The musicians union grudgingly defined a category for sample based producers and chose the term computer composer. They also sent out stickers, which said ‘Keep music live’, which could soon be seen ironically displayed on samplers and floppy disc boxes.
A new business grew around the sampling scene and evolved, along with new licensing laws to cover the samples used.
Again in my naivety, I believed that this was the end of the rock star and the start of a new democratic equilibrium in the relationship between the artist and the audience in music. It was disappointing to see prancing figures miming on stage to a sequence or even to vinyl.
Within the boundaries of the technology’s limitations, ridiculously small by today’s standards, Artists were able to sculpt sound with digital sampling and analogue synthesis in one unit, improvise arrangements, filters and appreciations live on stage so composed and performed. To the artist, the differences between a sample of a record or, a sample of a fruit bowl being hit with a wooden spoon, in terms of intellectual copyright made little or no difference. Sound was catchable in the laboratory. Often the laboratory was in a bedroom. Now anybody could do it. 20 years later, household computers arrive fully loaded with a digital recording and editing suite far in excess of the power available then. Now everybody is doing it.
Mutation
In describing the societal and technological changes that are at the centre of this essay, I had avoided the word mutation, unsure of it’s appropriate use in this context, but I find Attali saying “Music makes mutations audible.” (Attali, p.4) And it makes so much sense. Any composer, consciously influenced or not, will host, in their own work the residue, the DNA of what came before. Combine this, with the societal change impossible for a previous composer to conceive of, and you have a potential mutation, invisible, but audible.
Listening to the rapid progression of electronic dance music from the mid eighties to today, it is easy to hear the building blocks of twisted samples, shapes and forms, conventions and references direct and unconscious in practically every change of style, of which there are many. In 2011, dubstep by its very name acknowledges its parentage, though many of the young generation of new producers will be oblivious to either dub, techstep drum & bass, or two-step garage. They may not be clearly audible, and the music may contain acid house, gabba and soul, but these changes happen quickly like a mutating virus. Some of the DNA remains.
As a mashup artist combines existing tunes, in combinations two three or more at once. A new energy is created that is unique to the combination. Take one out to replace it with another and many things will change, from the sound, the feel to the meaning and the magic. There is something unique in the mutation that is necessitated to make them fit, to have them exist in this form. It cannot happen in a vacuum, it must come from somewhere and that place is the here and now.
File-sharing
“Those in charge… must guard as carefully as they can against any innovation in music and poetry or in physical training that is counter to the established order… for the guardians must be aware of changing to a new form of music since it threatens the whole system. As Damon says, and I am convinced, the musical modes are never changed without change in the most important of a city’s laws.” (Plato in Sinnreich, 2010 p.7)
According to Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, legislation surrounding Intellectual Copyright, the field of law dedicated to protecting the rights of and providing an income stream for artists, is over ten years out of date. He calls it a hybrid economy, inhibited by ”a regime of copyright built for a radically different age.“ (Lessig, 2008 p.xvi)
“Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions” (McLuhan, 1996) offered Marshall McLuhan.
In a speech given at the Re-think Music conference in Boston in April 2011, Lessig stated his case for the introduction of an alternative compensation scheme for artists, to solve the stalemate between the music industry and the prevailing file sharing culture . In it he illustrates Plato and McLuhan:
“I like this title Alternative Compensation schemes because it points directly at why we are facing this problem…This is a battle between those who make money under the old system and those who might make money under the new system; the alternative compensation system. And the problem with that battle is that the people who make money under the old system have all of the levers into the existing structures of decision-making powerful enough to block transition to the people who might make money under the new system. Every industry in the world has this problem of the government conspiring with the incumbents to protect themselves against the new innovators…(Lessig 2011)
Now, if had taken any of these ideas that we knew about more than 10 years ago, if we had adopted any of these ideas, how would the world be different today?
1. More artists would have money.
2. Companies…that want to innovate using new structures to identify rights and be able to it more efficiently, would be more profitable and more prevalent.
3. We wouldn’t have waged a war for 10 years against our own kids, telling them, they are criminals and pirates and inculcating in them the idea that this is the way they are, they are just criminals and pirates.
So there can be no argument in favour of what we did. So why did we do it? Because the alternative compensation systems always have to fight against this conspiracy, by governments and incumbents, to protect themselves against this change.” (Lessig, 2011)
The Recording Industry Association of America’s infamous prosecution of individual file sharers produced fines as high as $1.92 Million for 24 songs shared by one user. (Harvey M 2009) At the same ‘Rethink Music’ conference attended by Larry Lessig, President of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Cary Sherman, also spoke. Although at a different seminar, Sherman gave answer to some of Lessig’s questions:
“Could we not have sued Napster?…No I think we would have had to do that… there were clearly people saying go after the people that are abusing copyrights and we did that and everyone regards that as very controversial but if you look at that in the context of why we did it, when we did it and the impact that we had in terms of clearly indicating to the public at large, what was legal and what was not and actually changing some behaviour constraining the growth of p2p for a long period of time , there was an immediate drop and then it basically levelled off, it increased over time but was no longer growing at the same rate as broadband penetration .
It ran its course, the educational benefit has basically worn off, you have traction now…You have to wonder whether people would have paid 99 cents for iTunes if it was completely risk free to take anything you wanted from a peer to peer service so its hard to look back and say what you would have done differently given what you were facing at the time.” (Sherman 2011)
Of file-sharing and remix culture, Andrew Keen thinks inside the box; “…it foretells the death of culture.” (Keen. 2007, p.57) Keen represents the old way of thinking. It is rational and hard to argue with its obvious simplicity; the professionals need to get paid for their work.
But file sharing is not the same as piracy. Piracy is illegal file sharing. If you were for example to legalise file sharing, piracy would be redundant. But why would anyone want that? Because of an equally simple, but exponentially liberating idea.
A file is information, therefore file-sharing is information sharing. If everyone in the world has all the information and in terms of music film art and literature, that means access to culture at their own fingertips , the benefit to mankind can hardly be measured. Freeing music, freeing culture, is not the end. It is of course only the beginning. Keen would disagree, but is it not ludicrous to withhold the greatest cultural leap in history for the sake of the profit of a few? Could we take one this one small step for man in order to release one giant leap for mankind?
It is perhaps more idealistic to imagine that file-sharing and copyright abuse can be successfully legislated out of existence.
The Prosecution in Sweden of peer to peer website The Pirate Bay found four people guilty of sharing copyrighted material. Since the site itself was never on trial, it was able to continue. The publicity and support for the Pirate bay ultimately lead to the foundation of The Pirate Party and the foundation 26 Pirate Parties internationally with the idea of reforming copyright law. The stated aims are simply to “get rid of the patent system and ensure that citizens’ rights of privacy are respected.” (Piratpartiet 2011)
Clearly, labelling and dismissing file sharing as just piracy is a misconception. There are other issues at stake. Sampling has come a long way.
Conclusion
We cannot possibly be in any doubt, that the nature of our technologies has a direct effect on our society and that we become moulded by the technology we have ourselves moulded, and that these effects bring significant, if not revolutionary change. The balance of economies, societies, jobs, careers and ways of life will come and go and we should be prepared for it. So with this much warning, and our desire for modernity, we surely should have an infrastructure prepared.
The opportunity is here for society to learn from the culture it has created and to liberate it. Dramatic as the change will be, we are already en-route.
Sun Ra is not really from Saturn and a mash-up of two existing pieces of music is not really music written by the mash-up producer. It is a metaphor and held within it is the answer to a previously un-answered question, greater than the sum of the parts.
1 Bibliography
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Campbell, J. 1999, ‘This is the Beat Generation’ Secker & Warburg London.
Keen, A. ‘The Cult of the Amateur,’ 2007 Doubleday, New York
Lessig, L. 2008, ‘Remix’, Penguin
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McLuhan, H.M. 1995, ‘Understanding Media’ MIT, Cambridge Mass, London
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Online References
Blount, H. 1980 (Uploaded 2011). ‘A Joyful Noise – Part 1 (1980) Sun Ra – Robert Mugges’ [Online]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RdG5feTAMM accessed 7/05/11
Chomsky, N. 2011 (Uploaded 2011) ‘The Cairo-Madison Connection’. [Online]: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20110309.htm Accessed 6/05/2011
Clinton, H. 2011. (Uploaded 2011) Internet rights and wrongs: Choices & Challenges in a Networked world. [Online]: http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/02/internet-rights-and-wrongs-choices-challenges-in-a-networked-world/ accessed 5/05/2011
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Harvey, M. 2009. ‘Single-mother digital pirate Jammie Thomas-Rasset must pay $80,000 per song.’ [Online]: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6534542.ece Accessed 11/05/2011
Lessig, L. 2007. (Uploaded 2007). TED Lecture. Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity. [Online]: http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html accessed 5/05/2011
Lessig, L. 2011. Models – Alternative compensation schemes. [Online]: http://www.livestream.com/rethinkmusic/video?clipId=pla_c32f953d-5c84-43ba-b047-76355773df9f&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb Accessed 5/05/2011
McLuhan, M. Date Unknown[b] (Uploaded 2009). Marshall McLuhan clip. [Online]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFBlGaoAbfI accessed 6/05/11
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Piratpartiet (2011)“Introduction to politics and principles” [Online] http://www.piratpartiet.se/international/english Accessed 11/05/2011
RIAA 2011 ‘For Students Doing Reports’ [Online]: http://www.riaa.com/faq.php accessed 11/05/2011
Sherman C 2011 “Rethink-futureofcopyrightlaw“[online]: http://www.livestream.com/rethinkmusic/video?clipId=pla_117fa661-147b-499e-8eea-5cdc98bab3a6 accessed 29/4/2011
Sinnreich, A. 2011. TEDxUSC: Aram Sinnreich – The Next generation Internet. [Online]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnx-uUeHuqg accessed 6/05/2011
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Discography
Sun Ra, 1980, Strange Celestial Road, Y Records
Sun Ra, 1973, Astro Black, Impulse.
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Filed under: Essays, Words
