[78-L] Copyright Criminals on PBS

[fnarf at comcast.net]

> You 
> dislike my characterization of trad blues?  You understand it and hear
> the subtle nuances in it.  You "dis" hip-hop?  It is because you don't
> understand it and hear the subtle nuances in it.

Thank you. I was going to use the blues example myself but figured I'd be in deep doo-doo.

Some hip-hop these days is positively cinematic in its scope -- not just beats but beats tortured out of orchestral string sections or seagulls or sighs or cross-faded car horns or truck-backing beeps, with the "drums" being played on bells or breaking glass. I've heard some hip-hop that sounds like Bernard Herrmann, played backwards maybe. Moody and spooky and spacious. Really interesting stuff. It's not all guys yelling about their firearms over stolen drum beats, booming out of cars driving too fast in your neighborhood.

> Likewise we should NOT accuse samplers
> of cheating by creating their composition using manipulated samples
> instead of bleats on a saxophone

The hip-hop artists see two things here: it's a continuum, from the organic sound of an acoustic string vibrating, to the electronically amplifed sound of a string vibrating over a pickup, to the electronic sound of a synth patch or key, to the electronic sample off a record, to the whooshes and bloops and booms that come out of a Boss Dr. Rhythm. It's all sound to paint with. Is it "cheating" when Robert Fripp uses his tape technique to achieve infinite sustain on his Les Paul? Were the Beatles stealing when they used a Mellotron, which uses recorded loops in response to key presses? What about those few seconds of "King Lear" at the end of "I Am A Walrus"? Is it stealing when I play my Optigan, which uses light to play discs of recorded sound? Is Stockhausen cheating? Varese? Is it stealing if they play the drum sample backwards through seven different processing boxes?

To a purist, and there were plenty at the time, electrically-amplified instruments were cheating. Hell, Segovia thought steel strings on a guitar was cheating.

And they also see the mediated world as their material. People are surrounded by it. They do the same thing with video; YouTube is FULL of it, guys chopping loops of Batman or that kid with the light saber in his garage or the Hitler freakout scene from some movie or other, adding stuff, drawing cartoons over it, adding soundtracks.

But really, the samples themselves are far from the whole story.