The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

Author:Charles Fairchild
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Musical fidelity and sample-based music

The idea of juxtaposing materials from different pieces of music and placing them in immediate proximity to one another in a new or derivative work has a long history. Such techniques have taken shape formally, informally, legally and illegally. Some have been made by professionals and some by amateurs.48 Some composers borrowed from others and some borrowed from themselves.49 Works with borrowed material have been presented by orchestras, chamber ensembles, opera companies, jazz and R&B ensembles, soul groups, and rock bands of all stripes. Such works have been made by composers, arrangers, songwriters, DJs, and producers. They form parts of operas, symphonies, masses, concertos, musicals, vaudeville shows, minstrel shows, medicine shows, film music, radio programs, medleys, and hit songs.50 The people who made these new, composite works were diverse. Their goals were multifarious. The means by which these amalgams were effected, too. Unfortunately, since the emergence of the term “mash-up,” the unique place of this form of sample-based music within this long, rich lineage of borrowing and appropriation has been marginalized. Instead, mash-ups have been defined down to only a few characteristics neatly arranged by various authorities on music, the media, technology, or the law. Critics, academics, and writers have focused almost entirely on the humor, rebelliousness, and DIY ethos of the form.

It’s not hard to see why this might be the case. Take a piece like “Rebel Without A Pause (Whipped Cream Mix)” from The Evolution Control Committe’s 1994 cassette, Gunderphonic. The ECC deftly and seamlessly meshed the vocals from Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause” off their It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back album with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Bittersweet Samba” off Whipped Cream and Other Delights. Laying down Alpert’s bouncy horn line, hackneyed fill-ins, and blandly standard modulating harmonies under Chuck D. and Flav’s urgent vocals is immediately striking. The subtle looseness of the dynamic rhythmic relationship between the two uncannily evokes an almost live feel to the production with the vocals both pushing and pulling around Alpert’s beat. While the vocals render the Alpert’s particular brand of cheese suspect, surprisingly, the Alpert does the same to the controlled fury of Chuck D. His righteous anger suddenly becomes weirdly inappropriate.51 Underpinning the satire of artists such as the ECC is a playful and winning contempt for basic principles of the music industry, from the parceling out of sounds into “genres” or “styles” to their routinely excessive copyright-enforcement measures. It is a stance that has proven persistent and influential.

Artists such as Girl Talk or 2ManyDJs have built on the work of artists like the ECC, John Oswald, and Negativland by bringing to bear the techniques and aesthetics of audio collage and so-called “plunderphonics” on the most straightforward of musical sources.52 Girl Talk’s All Day from 2010, for example, consists of hundreds of samples arranged in endlessly evolving, intricately-layered arrangements that seem to perpetually cascade down on the listener. Girl Talk’s elaborate, almost ornate bed of samples is synched

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