[rumori] The Sample

Steev [rumori] The Sample
Thu, 27 Aug 1998 09:36:14 -0700 (PDT) (00904264574, Pine.LNX.4.02.9808270908271.18533-100000ATflotsam.detritus.net)

On Wed, 26 Aug 1998, Jon Leidecker wrote:


>At present it's just not humanly possible to officially 'recognize' the
>creators of all those being sampled via money; neither economically for
>the new creators or fairly by the copyright owners of the creators. So
>'they' will do their best to prevent 'us' from distributing or even
>creating this work, and 'we' will keep struggling to create it.
>
>Until Capitalism actually ends, the concept of a sampling 'royalty rate'
>can't be written off completely. But until we find the system or the
>technology that can implement such a rate without crippling the production
>of new work is found, it's just going to be fighting. Tiring to think
>about, but it's not as if any of us have any choice if we're going to be
>serious about our work.

Jon, you hit the nail squarely on the head. Beat me to my punch. But
here's my elaborate coup de grace:

SAMPLED VIA MONEY
This is the key. Cut out and Rewrite as SAMPLING VERSUS MONEY. ART vs.
COMMERCE again. Late Capitalism out of Control.

UNTIL CAPITALISM ACTUALLY ENDS
Until it ends we will be fighting this fight forever ( and many other
fights over how our lives are lived, but that's another story).

The probem is encapsulated with 3 statements:
1. Our culture believes in a thing called "property".
2. Many in our culture believe that ideas can be property.

3. Many in our culture want to make money from Art.

To fully solve the problem at least 2 and 3 must go away, and probably 1
as well. Period. As long as the worldview represented by those 3 points
is in force and is the dominant paradigm on this planet, there will always
be a fight over cultural re-use.

So my solution to the question i posed earlier (do we and how do we
distinguish between "good sampling" and "bad"?) is No, don't distinguish, don't draw lines. And don't: own culture or try to make money from it.
Once no one is making millions from stuff like Puff Daddy, there will be
nothing like Puff Daddy. There might be still some cases of "bad" art that uses samples, but I think the worst of it comes from people trying to
overtly "cash in" on cultural nostalgia.
So there you go. Of course, the solution is no solution at all, because it
will almost certainly never happen. Capitalism and intellectual property
are here to stay. <sniff>.


>On Saturday Night Live, David Duchovny introduces Puff Daddy; the camera
>zooms in to sheet music, top title reading "COME WITH ME", underneath "M &
>L: PUFF DADDY" as the live chamber ensemble intone the opening chords of
>"Kashmir". And there's Jimmy Page, playing along, live on stage, playing
>the chords alone, no space given for a guitar solo. A moment for sampling
>artists everywhere.
>
>Alvin Lu's column went on and on and on about how Puffy's version was a
>true 90's pop masterpiece that stripped the original song to it's musical

I saw that SNL! It was indeed jaw-dropping time...
Amazing. This surfaced on an earlier thread a couple months ago here,
but this time with some Indiana journalist calling Puff Daddy's stuff
"theft", and Steven Pav defending sampling against that characterisation. Of course the much more sophisticated San Francisco critics are far past
that gross cluelessness and have come full circle to pronounce the
profane sacred... ;-) heh.

gloomily yours,

smh

Steev Hise, Technical Thug
steevAThise.org http://www.cyborganic.com/people/steev recycled art site: http://www.detritus.net -----------------------------------------------------------------
"...dissatisfaction itself became a commodity as soon as economic abundance could extend production to the processing of such raw
materials." -Guy Debord
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