Reality Hunger (29 page)

You don’t need a band to do this stuff. You steal somebody else’s beats, then—with just turntables and your own mouth—you mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at.

Lil Wayne, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead are hugely popular artists who recently circumvented the music business establishment by giving their music directly to their audience for free on the web. The middle man has been cut out; listeners get a behind-the-scenes peek at work in progress. Lil Wayne can put out whatever he pleases, whenever he pleases, and the music fan gets access to far more material than a standard album release would provide. For all three of these acts, sales went up after they had first given away some, if not all, of the new release. Their fans rewarded them for creating this intimate link.

In 2008, Damien Hirst, the richest visual artist in the world, sold his work “directly” to buyers through a Sotheby’s auction rather than through the time-honored method of galleries; it was the largest such sale ever: 287 lots, $200 million.

What’s appropriation art?

It’s when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context you change the connotation.

Reality-based art hijacks its material and doesn’t apologize.

My taste for quotation, which I have always kept—why reproach me for it? People, in life, quote what pleases them. Therefore, in our work, we have the right to quote what pleases us.

Elaine Sturtevant, an American artist born in 1930 in Lakewood, OH, has achieved recognition for works that consist entirely of copies of other artists’ works—Beuys, Warhol, Stella, Gonzalez-Torres, etc. In each case, her decision to start copying an artist happened well before the artist achieved wide recognition. Nearly all of the artists she has chosen to copy are now considered major artists.

Looking for songs to sample and melodies to use—picking through the cultural scrap heap for something that appealed to me—I went through the
Billboard
R & B charts and the Top 40 charts from the late 1940s until the present. With the aid of the search function on iTunes, I was able to hear a twenty-second section of just about any song I wanted to hear. It was fascinating to watch popular music morph and mutate year by year, especially on the R & B charts (black music has always been quicker to incorporate new songs and technologies). It was like watching stop-animation film footage, seeing this object (the main style of the time) grow and shrink like a plant, rise and fall, swell and collapse: swing music slimming down and splicing into gospel and making rhythm and blues,
rhythm and blues slowing down into soul, soul hardening into funk, funk growing into disco, and disco collapsing under its own sheen as hip-hop hid in the underground. It wasn’t until after I’d gone through the whole set of charts and reviewed my notes that I realized there was a trend in the songs I chose to sample. The number of songs I picked remained consistent through the 1950s and ’60s, but by the end of the ’70s it dropped off. I’d picked only a few songs from the ’80s and none from the ’90s. Why do the songs of the late ’70s and afterward hold very little appeal for me? Somewhere along the way, as recording technology got better and better each year, the music lost something; it became too perfect, too complete. Which is why so many artists have turned to using samples and other preexisting sources in various forms: in this rush of technological innovation, we’ve lost something along the way and are going back to try to find it, but we don’t know what that thing is. Eating genetically altered, neon-orange bananas, we aren’t getting what we need, and we know something is missing. We’re clinging to anything that seems “real” or organic or authentic. We want rougher sounds, rougher images, raw footage, uncensored by high technology and the powers that be.

Rappers got the name MC (master of ceremonies) because they began as hosts at public dances, and as the form evolved, they began to take more and more liberties in what they said between and over the records. Emceeing evolved into a channel for artistic expression—the voice of the host or the voice of the editor fusing with the selected program. The materials of art now include bigger clumps of cultural sediment. Everything in the history of media is fair game: artists painting pictures
over road maps, placing photos within comic book landscapes, Kanye West splicing together his own song “Gold Digger” with Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman.” It’s exciting to deface things that we live among, whether what’s defaced is an Otis Redding record or a brick wall.

The birth of jazz: musicians made new use of what was available—marching-band instruments left over from the Spanish-American War. Jazz also made use of different forms of music, from ragtime to blues and impressionistic classical music. Later, jazz ran improvisatory riffs on show-tune standards. Or think of a cover version: a composition that already exists is revisioned by another artist. The original composition still exists, and the new one dances on top of the old one, like an editor writing notes in the margins. Hip-hop and dance DJs take snatches of different songs that already exist in the culture and stitch them together to suit their own needs and moods. The folk tradition in action: finding new uses for things by selecting the parts that move you and discarding the rest.