Sunday, November 12th, 2006 // Paperhouse
In all my preparation to study abroad in Switzerland this semester, one thing I did not figure out was how often the soundtrack of my travels would come to the forefront. From the first exhausted step into my temporary home, I began to see American music in a completely different light. I was shocked — nay, disgusted — by the popularity of the breathy voice of Paris Hilton when I first turned on the TV. MTV Europe is one of three channels in English we get in our apartment. I thought I was in serious trouble, musically speaking… but it hasn’t been that bad.
Shortly after I moved in, a town festival blasted 2 Live Crew only a street down from the Beatles, with the Swiss drunkenly milling about and mumbling heavily accented lyrics to “Pop that Pussy” and “Yesterday.” “Aloha Night” at a local club promoted “American surf music,” which turned out to be wedding reception favorites like “The Twist” together with some stranger selections: Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” mixed into Justin Timberlake. Even on the bus, I can usually pick up the faint sounds of Beyoncé or The Killers leaking out of the headphones of at least one fellow rider.
My favorite encounter with American pop music thus far has been in Hamburg, Germany. I had the intriguing opportunity to go to a karaoke bar, where I heard a passionate medley of Elvis tunes sung in a faux-American accent. That same night, I witnessed reasonably sober grown men singing along to the Backstreet Boys without any shame. (I sang along to ABBA, but that hardly counts; they’re Swedish.) A day later, I witnessed an extraordinarily amusing German hip-hop show, which, suffice it to say, deserves its own article.
Fortunately for me, the pervasiveness of American pop music here has been an advantage. My classmates know the perfect pronunciation of promiscuous thanks to Nelly Furtado, and they can drop it like it’s hot with the best of them. Getting away with listening to Justin Timberlake for the past three months has been fun, but it isn’t enough to satisfy my ironic hipster tendencies for much longer. I have to switch to something more disgustingly infectious to amuse myself, and Wham! is climbing up my Most Played list in iTunes.
I’ve got to cleanse my system and return to the too-cool U.S. of A. where this musical sacrilege isn’t tolerated on a regular basis — and listen to some ’80s-inspired indie remixes in somebody’s basement, stat.
Sunday, November 5th, 2006 // Paperhouse
Almost everyone I know has made a mix CD for someone else. What a lot of people aren’t aware of is that the art of the mix CD is held in very high regard by certain musicians and record labels that continue to produce meticulously crafted mixes that are as successful as albums of entirely original material.
Germany’s Kompakt label, for example, has released many mix CDs to complement its selection of minimal techno and house music. Artists such as Superpitcher and Michael Mayer have released seminal mixes that are now regarded as milestones in the mix CD genre. Mayer’s Immer, released in 2002, is known as the album that gave birth to the minimal house genre by compiling a series of innovative tracks by different artists and emphasizing the fact that they all had something in common.
Coldcut, founder of the Ninja Tune label, is also responsible for an excellent release that is part of the Journeys by DJ series of mix CDs. What makes Coldcut’s mix interesting and different from Mayer’s is the way it jumps from genre to genre. It reminds us that mix CDs can often give us a richer experience than any single artist could ever provide within the context of a single album. Coldcut exploits this notion by cutting back and forth from ambient to spoken word, from reggae to drum and bass, layering multiple tracks on top of each other and seamlessly transitioning from track to track, truly living up to the idea of the mix CD as a journey.
Studio !K7 also produces a well-known compilation series called DJ Kicks; Erlend Oye’s interesting compilation stands out. Oye, who calls himself “the singing DJ,” removes vocal tracks from songs and replaces them with himself singing. A haunting composition is created when, on the album’s second half, Oye combines a minimal Royksopp remix with the vocals from “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths. A wholly new composition is created, one that is at once more personal than a simple mashup and exists powerfully not only on its own but also as part of an album.
Mix CDs provide artists with the power to make more exciting statements than they may otherwise be capable of on their own. They provide a medium for the exchange of ideas through the assimilation of familiar and unfamiliar material together into a new whole.
Sunday, October 29th, 2006 // Paperhouse
Intellectual property (IP) law has become an increasingly important part of everyday American dialogue and culture during the last 20 years. Piracy in the ’80s, via tape trading, evolved first to Napster and then to today’s BitTorrent. Laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and technologies like digital rights management keep up the debate about what we can and cannot do with creative works.
Probably the most interesting debate related to IP is the issue of sampling, re-using pieces of existing songs to make new songs. This has been revisited lately with artists like DJ Danger Mouse (now part of Gnarls Barkley) bringing the “mash-up” into mainstream cultural awareness, and artists like Pittsburgh’s Girl Talk having to release their popular sample-based music on smaller labels like Illegal Art because of problems with getting permission to use the samples used to make it. However, this is just a new dance-based angle on a much older issue.
Negativland is another band dealing with sampling legality. Using a style often termed “plunderphonics” (a term coined by John Oswald, originator of the technique), they use samples in a sort of collage to create their pieces. Sound clips, including outtakes from radio broadcasts, education films, and news reports, are used without any other adornment and mashed together.
Their best-known release is U2*, a record released in 1991 parodying U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and *America’s Top 40 host Casey Kasem. This album includes extensive samples of U2 and Kasem, over which Negativland placed samples of children’s shows and themselves playing kazoos. Naturally, Island Records (U2’s label) sued, claiming copyright infringement and intentional, deliberate confusion of U2 fans. Negativland lost, and U2* is still illegal for sale in the U.S. (but it is on http://www.negativland.com/*).
They later rereleased these tracks on 2001’s bootleg These Guys Are From England And Who Gives A Shit, with more political songs containing samples saying “copying is a criminal act,” “they’re trying to target Island Records,” “even if you too have done nothing wrong,” “oh, please don’t sue us, we’re really sorry about this,” and others, highlighting the issue at hand quite explicitly and making an impassioned plea for relaxed copyright law. In “their own” words: “Can’t be blase about it … it might be the music business, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.”
