Uproot by Jace Clayton

Author:Jace Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374708849
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

6

CUT & PASTE

Mixtape as flirtation device was one of the great uses of late twentieth-century recording technology. That’s what I knew, pouring my heart into homemade dual-cassette-deck compilations, then Xerox-collaging cover art. So much of adolescence is spent in thrall to emotions we can’t articulate, much less control. What better way than mixtapes to respond? The stories you can tell by putting the right songs in the right sequence for the right person. Later I began putting together zines. The underlying approach remained the same.

Cut and paste.

It’s an impulse as old as humanity. In his delightful book In Praise of Copying, Marcus Boon argues “that copying is a fundamental part of being human, that we could not be human without copying, and that we can and should celebrate this aspect of ourselves, in full awareness of our situation. Copying is not just something human—it is a part of how the universe functions and manifests.” That “universal function” powered hip-hop, jungle, and lots of other music that set my head spinning. When I bought a sampler, my friend DJ Moosaka asked, “What’s the first thing you’re gonna sample? Everybody has some records they’ve been dying to cut up.” He was right. We thought about musical creation in terms of cut and paste before we had the gear to do it. We weren’t the only ones. This mix-and-match trickster spirit powered many of last century’s most emblematic creative strategies.

The modern meaning of cut and paste settled into place in the early 1900s. Mass-manufactured visual culture had swept in with the industrial revolution, and artists responded by hacking apart those very images—newspaper ads, flyers, and more—in hopes that their reassembled shapes could counteract the logic of homogenizing sameness. From there the provocative art-making approach leaped across media, switching names with each jump.

At the end of World War I, Berlin dadaists coined the term photomontage to refer to the photographs and newspaper clippings they’d scissored into startling composite images that spoke to the shell-shocked postwar reality. Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein used the jump cuts of montage as the principal tool in their political films. Texts whose authorial integrity got razor-bladed into punky palimpsests were called cut-ups. On it went, from photocopied zines to photoshopped memes. DJ culture runs on the stuff. By 2001 it seemed as if more people spliced incongruous pop and rock songs together into bootleg mashups than released “original” music. The surprisingly cathartic yet suspiciously short “Every Scream from Every Arnold Movie” (only seven minutes of Schwarzenegger yelling?) is a prime example of supercuts, which aggregate thematic bits from TV and movies for absurd satirical effect.

All these cats love underdog logic; cut and paste ushers it in. What better way to shake an audience—and oneself—out of the complacency that comes from familiarity and into a funkier, freer space where questions can begin?

Hannah Höch’s 1919 breakout photomontage, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, set the tone early: cut breaks authority’s framework,

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