Part three in an ongoing series of posts on musical appropriation (see also part 1 and 2), this time mostly consisting of a small selection of the numerous glitchy affairs, cut-ups, mash-ups etc. that have invaded, defined and excited various musical (sub)cultural movements since the end of the previous century (well, before the hype subsumed into the mainstream). These are some of the tracks that still catch my ear, in one way or another.
V/Vm, Lady In Red (Is Dancing With Meat) (with Chris De Burger), 2000
[audio:butcher01_01_vvm.mp3]
V/vm is one of the projects of James Kirby (aka the Caretaker, the Stranger, …). Since 1996 V/Vm has produced stuff on a bunch of labels (notably his own V/Vm Test label), often in collaboration with likeminded musicians ike Speedranch, Jansky Noise and Kid 606. Early releases were situated in the border zones of industrial, playful electronics and fierce individualism, littered with distorted digital noise and tuff beats. In the late 1990’s the V/Vm output saw a shift into the reworking (or butchering, if you will) of pop music – labeled as “bastard pop”. Songs by Robbie Williams, Spice Girls, East 17, Chris De Burgh, Elton John, Alphaville (V/vm’s version of ‘forever young’ was used in a never aired ad for Sony’s Playstation) and countless others – not to forget Aphex Twin, who got a special treatment – were reshaped and renewed. This approach culminated in 2000 with V/Vm achieving single of the week in the NME for this reworking of the Chris De Burgh hit ‘lady in red’ (on the B-side: ‘All Night Long (Butcher All Night)’ (with Loin-El Glitchie)). Though V/Vm “abused” copyright at this time initially no action was taken. Indeed V/Vm has often spoken about meeting Chris De Burgh in person at a TV Station and giving him a copy of his remixed version and surprisingly never hearing from De Burgh or his lawyers. In 2003 the lawyers caught up following the release of several versions of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s hit ‘relax’ (commemorating its 20-year anniversary). Within weeks of the release V/Vm received legal threats and in the end was forced to legally withdraw the release from sale. Apparently, this forced V/Vm into “hiding” in Belgium, where he rediscovered New Beat, the ultima thule of late-80s dance music (find the releases ‘made in Belgium’ and ‘SABAM’). In 2006 V/Vm spent the whole of the year on his most ambitious and challenging project to date, the V/Vm 365 project. In the words of the man “The idea is basically to create and upload free audio for one whole year and leave a massive big mess behind, warts and all for you to digest as you see fit.” This involved producing 603 audio tracks, 6 video tracks, with a total running time of 52 hours, 3 minutes and 57 seconds, all of which are free to download (via CC licence).
Here’s another, pretty creepy, V/Vm reworking:
Kid606, Straight Outta Compton (MC DSP Mix), 2000
[audio:vvmt11_01_kid606.mp3]
Another classic, released as a 7″ on V/Vm Test Records. I kinda lost track of Kid 606 now, but this track still brings a huge grin to my face. Before he became “the hottest property on the electronic scene stuff”, with releases on the prestigious Mille Plateaux imprint, Kid606 (born Miguel Trost De Pedro) combined his love for industrial music and hip-hop with DIY electronic explorations and an explosive punk attitude, with an irreverent sense of humor thrown in the mix (song titles like ‘Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass’ – itself a wink to Lesser’s 1999 track ‘Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass’ – say it all), into some of the most exciting indiepunkgabberidmraverblastbashings of that time. Labeled “the Sid Vicious of Techno” and once named as one of the “100 Most Dangerous Men On Earth” (at number 93 – ahead of Bill Gates and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and just behind former Cheers star Ted Danson), the kid with “a Tourette’s syndrome-like compulsion to deflate the pomposity of electronic music” has “has flouted copyright laws with more glee than anyone since Negativeland and The Bomb Squad” and “consistently sabotaged categorization of his work by remaining true to its core; his violence is against sound, against the sounds of comfort, against the sounds listeners expect.” This track sees Kid606 “drop NWA’s classic ‘Straight Outa Compton’ from the top of a multi-storey carpark and glue the bits together with numb fingers”. Also check out ‘The Action Packed Mentallist Brings You The Fucking Jams’ (2002), on which you hear him trainwrecking pieces of Eminem, the Buggles, the Bangles, A-Ha, Missy Elliot, Jay-Z, Radiohead and Kylie Minogue.
Alan Licht, The Old Victrola, 2001
[audio:Licht_The-Old-Victrola.mp3]
Well, maybe this track doesn’t belong in this list, but I like it so much it couldn’t leave it out. Alan Licht. You might know his work with Love child, Blue Humans, or Run-On, or his solo adventures on albums such as ‘Rabbi Sky’, ‘The Evan Dando of Noise?’ or ‘NY Minute’. You may want to check out his collaborations with Loren Connors, Lee Ranaldo or Aki Onda. You also might have read his critical writings, published in The Wire, Halana magazine or the book ‘Sound Art. Beyond Music, Between Categories’. Some of his writing has helped to create a resurgence of interest in minimalist music, especially thanks to his influential “Minimalist Top Ten,” a list of hard-to-find minimalist albums (see earlier post). His body of work is very much his own, influenced by his intense explorations of free jazz, pop music, minimalism and experimental cinema. This track, from the album ‘Plays Well’ begins with a reworking of Captain Beefheart’s “Well” (from ‘Trout Mask Replica’), drenched in guitar fuzz drone, and eventually dissolves into a hypnoticly looping of a Donna Summers sample (from a live version of “Dim All the Lights”), superimposed with layers of wailing guitars, gradually building the tension until the original disco song explodes in all its glory at the 16-minute mark. This part of the track was recorded live at the Transmissions Festival in July 2000, of which Bill Meyer in Signal to Noise said, “somewhere Andy Kaufman was smiling.” “It’s about recontextualizing”, said Licht. “I heard that song on the radio and immediately connected that section where she holds one note over several bars of changing harmony with similar sections in compositions by Reich and Glass. I knew I had something to work with.” Also great: ‘Twilight of the Idols,’ in which the audio levels of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album are manipulated; “Bridget O’Riley,” a mashup of Blondie and The Who’s ‘We Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘A New York Minute,’ consisting of a month’s worth of weather reports from a New York AM radio station, mixed with an addictive mix of some samples from Don Henley’s “New York Minute” (some of these pieces are available on ubu.com).
Girls on Top, I Wanna Dance With Numbers, 2001
[audio:whitney-vs-kraftwerk.mp3]
This is the single that essentially popularised the whole bootlegging/mashup craze, back in 2001. I still remember the excitement I felt when I heard this for the first time. Working under the name Girls On Top, Richard Philips aka Richard x released a limited 7″ featuring, on one side, the Whitney Houston-meets-Kraftwerk combiné ‘I Wanna Dance With Numbers’. “Whitney’s vocal floats over the proto-electro beats and looped synth pulses, creating a kind of euphoric techno-soul hybrid”. On the other, he placed his all-time favourite track, The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’, beneath TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’, creating ‘Being Scrubbed’, turning an insouciant funky strut into a “menacingly apocalyptic goth-pop mantra” (NME). “It was kind of a little personal thing at the time”, said Richard. “I just thought, I could listen to this all day. It wasn’t about getting one over on the majors, it was a cheeky irreverence. It was the excitement of the two worlds colliding.” These fresh-sounding R&B anthems took swinging London by storm. Tastemakers raved about them – this was novel, not a novelty. For a month or so, with-it DJs played the tracks to death. A few months later, Girls On Top surfaced again for the second and final time (an all-girl rock group who’d been performing as Girls On Top for a while took umbrage at Richard’s use of ‘their’ name) with another 7″. The A-side was ‘We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends’, a version of which the Sugababes would later take to the top of the charts. The flip, ‘Warm Bitch’, married The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ to Missy Elliott’s ‘She’s A Bitch’. The Face noted at the time: “If talent borrows and genius steals, Girls On Top commits the perfect crime, every time.” Shortly after this, loads of copyright-snubbing mixes started appearing on file-sharing networks, and for a short while I guess there was the slight whiff of freshness about them, although hardly any of these gems still resonate today (then again, perhaps that’s not the point). It didn’t take long before the phenomenon was recuperated by the mainstream. The likes of Madonna, Cher and David Bowie started commissioning what ‘bootlegs’. Universal Records, who were looking to relaunch the Sugababes, contacted Richard X with a view to using his Numan/Adina Howard bootleg, with the girl trio replacing the latter’s vocals. He has now become a successful record producer, producing hit singles for artists including Sugababes, Kelis, and Rachel Stevens.
Cassetteboy, Fly Me To New York, 2002
[audio:Cassette_Boy-Fly_Me_To_New_York.mp3]
In 2002 The UK based duo Cassetteboy – Steve Warlin and Michael Bollen – published their debut album, titled The Parker Tapes. They claim it took them 7 years to finish. It contains about a hundred short tracks, including a cut up of various Jamie Oliver samples, proclaiming himself to be a ‘tosser’ and radical hilarious takes on songs like David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, Stan Ridgeway’s ‘Camouflage’ and Lee Dorsey’s ‘Get Out My Life, Woman’. Other sample sources include The Fall, Doctor Who, Madonna, many television advertisements, Coronation Street, The Smiths, BBC News, and St Winifred’s School Choir, although cataloguing every sample used on the album is a near-impossible task. Casseteboy earned a lot of praise for their satires, which have become their most circulated works. One of their earlier singles, ‘Di & Dodi Do Die’, tore down Britain’s beloved Princess Diana. On this album they also mock ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, twisting his words to say that the Labour Party will start slashing eleven-year-olds with a knife. The most notorious track is ‘Fly Me to New York’, a satirical political swipe at the 9/11 bombing, which includes Frank Sinatra’s voice cut up to create the dialog. As well as producing two albums of their own, Cassetteboy has appeared on an album with DJ Rubbish entitled Inside A Whale’s Cock Vol 1, which includes humorous cover versions of songs by Alanis Morissette and Jennifer Lopez (a skiffle cover of ‘Jenny from the block’), along with a parodical take on a song by The Streets.
If you enjoy Cassetteboy, you’ll probably dig these videos as well:
DJ Lance Lockarm, S’wash Ya Wart, (release date unknown, I’d say around 2002-2003)
[audio:Lockarm_Swashyawart.mp3]
Let’s face it, most of the output of ‘bastard pop’ and ‘bootleg’ stars like 2 many DJs, McSleazy, Soundhog, Go Home Productions or Party Ben didn’t or won’t stand the test of time. Perhaps they are not meant to – their versions are, after all, just part of a neverending process of musical/cultural mutation. Always in the moment, as a promise (or gift) to an uncertain future. This guy knows that all too well. “NO TRACKS HERE ARE FOR SALE FROM ME — IN ANY FORM — EVER!”, he writes on his website. He just uploads his stuff whenever he feels like it, and doesn’t ask anything in return. The gift economy in its purest form. This is one of his most accomplished tracks – a mash-up of songs by the Beasty Boys, My Bloody Valentine and Schoolly D. Sounds far fetched, doesn’t it? Well, just listen and find out just how much they have in common.
Evan Roth, Explicit Content Only (fragment), 2005
[audio:Fuck_Tha_Police_EDIT.mp3]
Evan Roth (aka fi 5e) is an artist with interests in technology, tools of empowerment, open source, and popular culture. Roth’s work with graffiti, open source technology and public space led to him forming the Graffiti Research Lab with James Powderly in 2006. He frequently releases work under the name ‘fi 5e’ and enjoys spending his free time violating laws related to copyright and vandalism. “Explicit Content Only” is an album (first released as mp3s in 2005, rereleased on Vinyl in 2008) in which everything is removed except for the curse words. Side A is the ECO version of N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, and side B is EAZY-E’s EAZY DUZ IT. All radio safe content has been removed from the original albums, leaving a condensed string of content deemed ‘explicit’ by the United States Federal Communications Commission. At the age of 10, Roth bought the Straight Outta Compton album because of his infatuation with curse words. At the age of 27, Roth created this reductive mash-up as a tribute to a piece of popular culture that has had a profound influence on his career path. Despite receiving a RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) cease and desist notice, the album can still be download for free from evan-roth.com. The intellectual property concerns associated with the project highlight comparisons between the content censorship issues surrounding rap music in the 1980’s and censorship as a side effect of excessive use of copyright law today.
Del Nileppez (Thomas Dimuzio), Yawriats Ot Nevaeh, 2006
[audio:Dimuzio_Yawriats-Ot-Nevaeh.mp3]
Composer, sounddesigner and sampling aficionado Thomas Dimuzio has produced various sound libraries which have been utilized by television programs such as the ‘X-Files’, has done mastering work for the likes of Negativland, Wobbly/People Like Us/Matmos, and GG Allin and has been collaborating with the likes of Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Matmos, Wobbly and DJ Qbert. For this piece he has taken Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, reversed it, cut it up into quarter-notes and then reassembled it in forward order to retain the melody. Dimuzio claims that the resulting file contains exactly 666 regions (for years there’s been much debate whether the song was in fact a love letter to Satan when played backwards. Check it out for yourself – along with backward versions of Imagine, Another One Bites the Dust, Hotel California and the Pokemon Rap! – here). It’s certainly not the only reworking of the classic rock track – WFMU listed 101 versions – but I find this particular one very addictive. Since this piece has been published, there have been quite a bit of variations on the procédé. You can try it for yourself with the Meapsoft software.
This track also reminded me of Jeroen Offerman‘s hilarious video ‘The Stairway at St. Paul’s‘, in which he sang the song backwards in front of the Royal Albert Hall in London, reversed the tape and added a karaoke track (see below).
