Reality Hunger (30 page)

Facebook and MySpace are crude personal essay machines. On everyone’s Facebook page is a questionnaire, on which each person is asked to list personal info—everything from age to sexual status. A MySpace user can choose a sound track for his page, post pictures of himself, post downloads, and redesign the graphics however he wishes. Many people update their pages constantly and provide running commentary on their lives in the blog function that comes with a site. Millions of little advertisements for the self. I learn more about my
younger brothers from reading their Facebook pages than I ever have from actual conversation with them. They write detailed accounts of their personalities and take everything very seriously (as many do) in a sincere attempt to communicate with others but also to control the presentation of their “image.” Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage. In this new landscape, everyone gets a channel. It seems to be the ultimate destiny of every medium to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator, which is at once democratic, liberating, exhilarating, bland, deafening, and confusing. User-made content is the new folk art. If an eighteen-year-old girl in Delaware can’t be in a Hollywood movie, she takes pictures of herself dressed how she imagines a movie star would dress and posts them on her MySpace page. If the members of a Missoula bar band can never be on MTV, they borrow their boss’s camcorder, make their own video, and post it on YouTube. Reality-based art by necessity. Me Media. Blogs, wikis, social-networking sites, podcasts, vlogs, message boards, email groups, iMovie, Twitter, Flickr: more than a third of adult American internet users have created original content and posted it on the web. And it gets more sophisticated every day: chain email gives way to the blog, which gives way to the vlog, which gives way to the webisode. The massively popular video games
Guitar Hero
and
Rock Band
not only turn once static content into an interactive experience, but the newer versions have extra functions to let the players actually create new music with the building blocks the game provides. YouPorn, a free YouTube-like site on which users post their homemade porn, has become one of the most popular porn sites. Karaoke is another example of how reality-based art is winning at a grassroots level, among nonexperts. Karaoke is a generic version of
live hip-hop. Little skill or equipment is needed to allow people to perform, but no matter how bad or ill-advised the karaoke singer is, he or she is using existing material for means of self-expression, and the audience accepts the fact that there is no band and the music is recorded. The song already exists in the culture and is known to all involved. What is also known is that the music itself has been rerecorded and is a bastardized version of the original backing track. Everyone knows there is nothing original going on, but somehow the whole thing becomes original in its dizzying amateurness. What happens in karaoke is a disposable variation on something iconic in the culture, such as a big ’80s hit like “Billie Jean.” It’s reality-based art nearly devoid of art. The only self-expression is the uniqueness of the particular rendition that the karaoke singer performs. And within the space of the original hit, anything goes: squealing, shouting, changing lyrics, wishing friends happy birthday—whatever the singer chooses to do with his three minutes of spotlight. For some it’s just a gag, but others take it very seriously. There’s a communal feeling between audience and singer, because they’re interchangeable.

From age thirteen to twenty-four I was in a four-piece rock band (same model as the Beatles through Nirvana). I came to Seattle at eighteen, playing that form of music, but at some point I felt there was nothing else—nothing more—to be done with the standard rock format. The band broke up, and I had a year to float around artistically. The fusion of hip-hop techniques and rock ’n’ roll seemed to be much more exciting. When I came out with the new sound, many of my old friends in rock bands thought I was selling out. It was a tough jump to make. Many musicians said if I was using loops of other
recordings, I was unoriginal or untalented or hiding behind technology. There was definitely a line in the sand, and when I crossed it, there was no returning to traditional rock.

Language is a city, to the building of which every human being has brought a stone, yet each of us is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef that is the basis of the continent.

Just as the letters of our language are metaphors for specific sounds, and words are metaphors for specific ideas, shards of the culture itself now form a kind of language that most everyone knows how to speak. Artists don’t have to spell things out; it’s much faster to go straight to the existing material—film footage, library research, wet newspapers, vinyl records, etc. It’s the artist’s job to mix (edit) the fragments together and, if needed, generate original fragments to fill in the gaps. For example, when Danger Mouse’s
The Grey Album
was released in 2004, listeners heard the Beatles chopped up and re-presented underneath the contemporary rapper Jay-Z’s vocals. The album simultaneously reflected back to the Beatles, to Jay-Z’s 2003
The Black Album
(from which the vocals were taken), and to the artistic tastes of the professional DJ who made the new piece of art. The songs work as songs, but they also work as history lessons. Another layer was added by the fact that it’s illegal to use the Beatles for sampling. Capitol Records went to court to silence the album, but it was already too far out into the culture to be stopped. Beyond the use of old media to make a new project, there was the added benefit of a “plotline” on top of the music (underground art vs. corporate empire). This combination led to record-setting free downloads.

The DJ known as Girl Talk is taking sampling to its inevitable extreme. He runs Lil Wayne over Nirvana, Elton John over The Notorious B.I.G. Sometimes the juxtaposition is fantastic; usually it’s not. The novelty wears thin very quickly. Anyone can throw together two random things and call it collage art. When musical artists began using existing recordings as a medium of creative expression, they created a new subclass of musicians. An artist making use of samples, while going by a variety of names, is, essentially, a creative editor, presenting selections by other artists in a new context and adding notes of his own.

A literary equivalent would be along the lines of “creative translation” such as Ezra Pound’s
Homage to Sextus Propertius
, in which Pound picked through the elegies of Propertius, translated them, cut them up, and reassembled them in a fashion he deemed entertaining and relevant. Examples from other forms:
Thelonius Monk Plays Duke Ellington
, in which Monk takes great liberties with Ellington’s songbook. Lichtenstein’s appropriation of comic book art. Picasso’s use of newsprint, among other media, in, say,
Composition with Fruit, Guitar, and Glass. Paul’s Boutique:
The Beastie Boys, Dust Brothers, and Mario Caldato, Jr., sample from more than 100 sources, including Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, James Brown, and Sly & the Family Stone. Steve Reich’s “Different Trains,” which incorporates audio recordings about train travel by Holocaust survivors and a Pullman porter. Musique concrète—for instance, John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” written for 12 radios, each played by 2 people (one to tune the channel and one to control volume and timbre). A conductor controls the tempo; the audience hears whatever is on the radio in
that city on that day. Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Offertium,” which mutates themes from Bach’s “Musical Offering” until they’re beyond recognition. In “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel,” Brian Eno bends and twists Pachelbel. The nineteenth-century Christian hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was “put together” by Eliza Flower, whose sister, Sarah Flower Adams, had written the lyrics in the form of a poem. Eliza set Sarah’s poem to the music of Lowell Mason’s “Bethany.” Over the years, it’s been set to other tunes as well. Eliza Flower never gets credit for writing the song, credit going only to Adams for the lyrics and Mason for the music, although it was Flower who “edited” the two together.