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Let’s welcome Taliesin – DA representative and low end theoretician with a pair of strong, intriguing mixes floating around.  In this extensive post, Tally adjusts his critical lens to explore and scope out a wide range of issues– sampling, copyright, archiving, media, ethics, race, iconoclasm, racism, white privilege, hypocrisy… It’s tremendous, you should just read.  – Lamin

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Moby’s 1999 album Play has sold ten million copies worldwide. I bought one myself from Barnes and Noble in the Spring of 2008 to better elucidate some questions I’d been floating about iconoclasm, music and sampling in the age of mechanical/digital reproduction . I hoped to use the album as a focal point for addressing these issues. As a material piece of cultural history Play is nothing extraordinary. Standard jewel case, eight page full color insert, two-color CD label. Photography from British fashion and documentary photographer Corinne Day. Five short essays on fundamentalism, veganism and Christianity. The usual list of production credits and sample clearances.

cover for Play
Copyright, sampling and intellectual property rights ownership are registers fraught with complexity in an age of digital representation and reproduction. As soon as a work of “art” is entirely represented by a series of knowable electrical signals or an infinitely reproducible code, questions of ownership are put into crisis. I have left leaning views regarding information and its inherent desire to be “free,” the laughably (unless you got an RIAA summons) inept response of the record industries to piracy, and my total lack of moral qualms in downloading the work of artists without paying them for the bits of information. What is interesting about Moby’s album Play is not how his work fits into mediascapes of rampant sharing and copyleft issues (although its ad revenue points to new/old models) , but the work itself as a package. By package I mean how the work is presented, its content, and how it is represented by secondary sources that make content out of commentary on, or inclusions of segments of the work itself.

Play appeared as a logical focal point for exploration of sampling and cultural appropriation because it is a work of art authored by a white man that heavily samples the work of black men and women. Sampling in music is about removal, reference, negation and recontextualization. To sample is both a technical act and part of a greater relationship between sound, ownership and authorship. From a technical standpoint sampling is the process of copying sound from one medium and reapplying it to another. Sound is a unique medium because it is ethereal and can only ever can be said to truly exist in the space between the source and the listener. Except for rare instances, sampling never causes the physical destruction of the original sound source. It is for this reason that from a material perspective, sampling does not immediately seem to fit under the auspices of iconoclasm. Musical artworks, however, are
constituted physically in their storage medium and in the sphere of social production. In the relationship between re-contextualized sound and authorship there are iconolastic possibilities traditionally reserved for the analysis of visual arts.

Protestant Post Iconoclasm Church Interior

The important questions to ask about Play revolve around the representation of the individual southern rural black voices sampled by Moby and how these voices and any assets they provide to the work as a whole are represented and addressed by what I am calling the “whole package” of the album. On one end of the spectrum appears the possibility of total cultural appropriation in the most negative sense. Moby, white electronic musician, strips black voices of their context, reaps huge material benefits and critical acclaim without acknowledging his cultural theft and the continuation of racist legacies in American music. OR Moby, white electronic musician, brings to light lost recordings of black cultural history, audiences reconsider their historical critical musical timelines, consumers seek out and support sampled artists and their estates bringing a huge influx of funds to ensure the continued support of rural arts. These simplified possible outcomes depend on how Moby and his label understand the meaning of the voices of southern blacks to be recorded, sampled, and released as part of a greater whole, Play , that is coded as white cultural output. Before Play can be placed on this theoretical gradient, a closer inspection of the material reality of the sample sources of the album must be completed.

Play
contains the following cleared (i.e. acknowledged/payed for) samples:

Bessy Jones “Sometimes”
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/BessieJonesSometimes.mp3]

Spoony G and The Treacherous Three “Love Rap”
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/SpoonieGeefeaturingTheTreacherousThreeLoveRap.mp3]

Bill Landford & the Landfordaires “Run on For a Long Time”
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/BillLandfordtheLandfordairesRunOnforaLongTime.mp3]

Vera Hall “Trouble So Hard”
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/VeraHallTroublesoHard.mp3]

Boy Blue “Joe Lee’s Rock”
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/BoyBlueJoeLeesRock.mp3]

The black voices that Moby appropriates for Play come almost entirely from the work of folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax is a white man who is best known for his work traveling rural America and recording traditional American culture. His work yielded more than 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of motion picture film, and 2,450 videotapes. Lomax was (according to the organization that bears his name) “A believer in democracy for all local and ethnic cultures and their right to be represented equally in the media and the schools – a principle he called ‘cultural equity.”

The mission of the Association for Cultural Equity he founded is stated on their website as follows:

Alan Lomax hoped that cultural equity, the right of every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage, would become one of the fundamental principles of human rights. ACE’s mission is to facilitate cultural equity through cultural feedback, the lifelong goal that inspired Alan Lomax’s career and for which the Library of Congress called him a Living Legend. Cultural feedback is an approach to research and public use that provides equity for the people whose music and oral traditions were until recently unrecorded and unrecognized. Cultural equity is the end result of collecting, archiving, repatriating and revitalizing the full range and diversity of the expressive traditions of the world’s people — stories, music, dance, cooking, costume. ACE’s mission is realized through a configuration of innovative projects that creatively use and expand upon Alan Lomax’s collected works and research on music and other forms of expressive culture including:

* The digitization of and free
access to a vast majority of Alan Lomax’s musical and scholarly files in an evolving website which is open to the public.

*The commercial distribution
of sound and video recordings from the Lomax collection linked to the payment of royalties to the original performers or their descendants.

*The repatriation of media
collections to libraries established in the areas where they were collected.

* A pilot project for cultural
feedback based on Lomax’s work in the Caribbean.

* A revisited performance style
research paradigm testing old and new hypotheses and including new statistical
techniques and breakthroughs in evolutionary anthropology.

While Moby shouts out “The Lomaxes” (Allen’s father recorded and brought (mostly black) cowboy songs among other things into American lore) in his liner notes, it’s questionable whether Moby really honors
the tenants of cultural equity (saving deep explorations of Lomax’s project for a later date) in his presentation of the disembodied black voices on/in Play.

The initial recontextualization of black cultural experience, by Lomax, performs a dual role of preservation and destruction. By recording traditional American folksongs, Lomax ensures that they are not lost to time. This is a function that recording always carries. Recording however, always misrepresents, or at least alters, that which it claims or can appear to be an exact reproduction of. The recorded vibrations of air pressure that we discuss as sound is always situated in a specific cultural, historical, geographical, temporal moment that is entirely lost no matter how much documentation a folklorist or other archivist attempts to complete. In this way the work of preservation comes into
question. Is there something wrong if gorgeous and haunting recordings of southern gospel traditionals are consumed as Play delivers them by an affluent audience without reflection (what ever the fuck that means) on the complex and violent history of slavery, oppression and racism from which they emerge? I believe there is.

When important parts of history are stripped from culture and expropriated for pure aesthetic value something valuable and essential is lost. The Lomax archives are important because they also spur interest in rediscovering a history that is often white washed in American public education. Because the
media is already awash with racial caricatures and rehashed minstrelsy, preservationists should not be the prime targets of criticisms about media representation. The power of these recordings speaks strongly about their historical position, and I imagine for many inspire a deep exploration of
American identity and history.

Moby’s work provides a different type of mediation however, from that of Allen Lomax and other archivists. While Lomax did indeed choose when and what to record, it is the really the technology of the
recording apparatus, in Lomax’s case 1/8” tape, that provides the essential link between the original sound and the listener. Moby’s mediation, the loading of an entire song, a complete hymnal, into ProTools (or equivalent DAW) and violently puncturing it through editing is a different kind of act. I agree with departed ethnomusicologist and cultural historian Tim Haslett when he
writes:

White Americans are actually terrified of Black
music’s aesthetic, political, and affective power. It is as if they understand
that for Black people, including artists, music is not a recreational activity,
it is a way of life and often a means of survival. It has to arrive via a white
mediator in order to be absorbed without damaging whiteness. This mediation
process is evident in the… success of the electronic artist, Moby.

The enormous power of Moby’s mediation is made clear in the commercial success of the licensing of the album’s songs for commercial purposes. The tracks have been licensed hundreds of times. Reviewers
of the album describe it as being “visceral”, “a spiritual epiphany,”
and having “uniquely affecting soul.”

Somehow Moby has tamed the crude and deep emotions of the Southern negro and created a music with all of the potent signifiers of hip (synth pads!!! safe minorities !!! bass beats!!!) and none of the burden of the lived experience of black folk. Can you imagine hundreds of advertisements that feature painfully honest and striped imagery of racism, rural poverty, death and god? Yet the potent themes are exactly what the vocals manage to do (for some) once run through and controlled by Moby’s studio. Once these words enter into the editing environment they loose their original context and retain only a vague hint of soulfulness, genuine lived experience, and foreign danger. These attributes provide an erotic thrill to Moby and his global audience when they are allowed intimate access to, and total control over the lives of blacks. When the harsh realities of the antebellum south that refuse aestheticization and corporate branding (lynching, prison slavery, endemic poverty, jim crow, and the limitation at every possible
turn of life success chance possibilities for blacks and natives…) emerge as the clear underpinning of the “soul” that is so beloved by white audiences, escape always and must be a mere eject button away. Play provides whites with the ability to imagine occupying the space of the other, the church hall, the front stoop, the chain gang without even breaking a sweat, much less addressing the continued legacy of slavery in America.

Looking back at Moby’s earlier career choices, Play appears on a continuum of artistic decisions that
consistently utilize reduced notions of blackness for emotional effect. An early 90’s track under his pseudonym Barrcuda “Party Time” also utilizes disembodied black voices. A black male voice shouts at various intervals “Its Party Time!” while a gospel choir moans “Ahhhhs” in the background. Another pseudonym of Moby’s, Voodoo Child, is also problematic. Evoking the tribal and crazy dangerous world of Voodoo practice (or Jimi), Voodoo Child is of course merely Richard Hall, middle class white man raised in Darien, Connecticut.

It appears that Moby is also aware of this position of privelege. In an interview he says, “The only way dance music culture has been accepted in the U.S. is when white people have done it. I’m white, so I can’t really complain, but the roots of dance music are gay, black and Latino. It’s weird that I’ve gotten a lot of attention when there are so many gay, black and Latino house producers from New York who never got any attention.”

Why then doesn’t Moby focus more the debt he owes to black artists, both those he samples and those whose legacy of electronic music he mines? I think what borders on iconoclasm may lie in the way samples are addressed in the total package of Play. There are no links to the sample sources on his website or that of his label. The liner notes don’t mention the cd comps (where the samples come from maybe these already are troubled), merely the artists and track titles. The artists whose voices he employs, already magnetically bound on tape are divested of all agency, even the freedom to sing the entirety of a song. Play doesn’t qualify as inconclastic because it didn’t break boundaries or cause a sensation, it merely continues plodding along appropriating and aesthetisizing the experience of black Americans, polishing them up and selling them off without looking back.

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Domingo Garcia Henriquez

-Tatico-

Despues que Dios hizo el mundo noto’ que se le olvidaba algo, entoces hizo las manos de Tatico

1943-1976

After God made the world, he noticed he forgot something- then he made Tatico’s hands

I’ve been out hunting in Washington Heights a couple times this year searching for tunes and source material in what’s left of the mixtape shops up there – damned internet.

On my first trip, I trekked uptown with Rupture on a Perico Ripiao re-con mission. The dealers will usually let you decide whether you want the original or the cd-r so you can really rack up at some of these spots. That trip was my first time hearing el fuego improvisado that is Tatico Henriquez.

I feel totally robbed that I didn’t hear this guy growing up on the island next door. At first listen, he is an artist that draws from the listener a sense of appreciation for his contribution not only to music but to his culture. I’ll see your cotton candy pop star and raise you one jibaro de campo and a bag of plantain chips.

Here’s the story of the chunky hick that comes down from the back woods with his accordion, lucky to get paid free food and rum, who completely changed the music game in DR and raised the stakes for merengue players from making 100 dollars to play a bar to making 3-5 thousand dollars a night. He also accredited as one of the earliest latin musicians to have crossed over and played in America.

After years of tagging along behind the best accordion players on the island, guys like Matoncito and Nicolora who’s names are only carried on the lips of camperos. He learned their old songs and in later years there was some controversy over the authorship credits of some of his interpretations. Copyright issues aside, should we not merit him for capturing and rescuing this music before it was lost? What he eventually developed was a sound of his own adding the first electric bass and congas to the genre. He would play shows from seven to eight hours long shredding on his two-row diatonic accordion tuned to the key of A instead of C like all other accordions. He did this to match the key he sang in making the interplay of his voice and his instrument sync.

Then there’s the fact he’s often just improvising the lyrics. How many people do you know that can freestyle and play instrument and sound ill at both? To me that’s genius level shit on par with folks like D’Angelo, Meshell Ndegeocello. Add to that a sweet voice, the g-suave charisma plus success element and what you get is jokes from his widow about women leaving their husbands on the dancefloor and go home with this guy.

The sound he unleashed via shows and his two hour weekly show on Radio Naguas spread all over the Dominican Republic. 30 years past his death he remains to this day one of the most requested artists on merengue tipico stations out there. He died in a car crash in 1976 and what they showed of the wreckage was a gnarled Caddy that resembled a plane crash. Tatico was Buddy Holly. Tatico was Kurt Cobain. Another one gone way too soon. He should be celebrated like Tito or Celia as one of the great contributors to latin music.

Large up to the folks over at the Merenyola website for Merengue Tipico events in NYC and for putting up this one hour documentary on youtube.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGKpBzN2bR8&feature=related[/youtube]

gex

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‘The Construction of the Tower of Babel’, by Hendrick III van Cleve, 16th Century, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. Click for bigger version, it’s a nice painting. Taken from Giornale Nuovo.

Hi everybody, I’ve been away off in real life (What a fucked up place to spend extended periods of time) but just wanted to stick my neck in and say a few words, and probably piss off a bunch of my friends. The goal of writing these polemical attack posts is to sort of kick the tires on our musical activities and cultural practices and to make sure that everyone is really thinking hard about why and how they’re doing what they’re doing. If you feel this as an attack on you or your music, I’d love to hear your response here in public so we can all learn something.

Gex recently posted up the Stereotyp affiliated Kubu mixtape which has some cool beats on it, below, I like the bass on the second track especially. Then Ty responded by saying “looks like Stereotyp… oh great, another Teutonic ‘barefoot baile’ advocate, what the world needs is more white european & american dudes “keeping it real” & getting sexy by going native.” And I LOLed and started writing a comment but decided to turn it into a post as it got longer and longer. Full disclosure: I am probably one of these sexy white guys that Ty is aiming at, not sure if my involvement in ukg and dancehall qualifies me but anywayyyy.

Here’s my point, more or less: I think it’s lame to use vocals in your music that are in a language you don’t really understand. That said, this is not a direct shot at Stereotyp, maybe he speaks Portuguese or whatever language the people are speaking on his mix, I actually don’t know. In vocal music, especially rap, the vibe and energy of a tune is SO MUCH about the lyrical content that putting vocals on tunes that you, or perhaps more importantly a major chunk of your audience don’t understand is just weird to me. I feel that you are using these people and their words as an idea, or a reference or a signifier in a way that’s totally disconnected from their artistic intentions.

If you, the producer can’t understand all the layers of what they’re saying and the audience can’t either then the words are just rhythmic or melodic noise, a kind of cultural texture. I feel like when it’s melodic singing then it makes a bit more sense because at least the people who don’t understand have some purely formal things to grab hold of, and melody is a kind of unconscious language of emotion and therefore there is some kind of non-verbal communication possible. But rap? Rap is words and rhythm, it’s word music.

As someone who listens to quite a lot of word music I’d argue that in the success of any given artist in any of these scenes (rap, dancehall, grime etc) the words they use, the things they say, their message, their attitude, their swagger, and their lyrical content is much more important than the formal qualities of flow or rhythm. In grime and dancehall the thing that will trigger a rewind is an artist saying something, something specific that has tremendous resonance with the audience. How they say it is important and necessary but WHAT they say is what gets them a forward. Especially in dancehall where a lot of it comes down to clashing and beefing the thing that will win a contest is some particularly clever well-timed and somehow true insult. The flow and pattern is necessary but secondary, it’s a vehicle for the message. So when the message is behind a language barrier the order is reversed – flow is in front and the message is behind, or gone.

A lot of fans will say, “Oh I don’t understand, I don’t care what they’re saying I’m just dancing along” but I actually think in taking that position you’re sort of marginalizing these people and their opportunity for artistic expression. It reduces them to being ‘the sexy and exotic other’ that we don’t understand, and don’t care to understand because we think “oh they’re probably just saying ‘dance, party, fuck’ or something like that, and that’s what we’re doing”. But what about when they’re not saying that? What about when Buju Banton is singing about shooting gays in the head over that nice easy party beat? And you’re dancing along obliviously, and because you and everyone else who doesn’t pay attention dances along then the DJ says “see look, that song always works, I’m gonna return to it” and that message gets repeated and repeated into the world. Whether you like to dance to ‘Boom Bye Bye’ or not (nastiness aside, it’s a good song) in this young new global underground dance whatever scene we’re in I think that we really need to make sure that if we’re gonna engage in a style that we’re doing it on all levels, not just formal (wow this beat pattern is great, I’m gonna put my euro synth bass on it and call it ‘global-fusion’) but on the levels of slang, culture, meaning, people, relationships, beef and history. And some may say: “But it’s too much work to learn all these languages, and I’m on the other side of the world and blee blah bleh” well then I’d say either make some friends who can teach you or maybe you should focus in on something that you can understand and try to develop some depth in it. Basically, not being a tourist is hard work but I think, worth it.

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In one of his first acts in office New York’s new blind, black Governor David Patterson (replacing hypocritical philanderer Elliot Spitzer after his scandalous flame-out) issued a full gubernatorial to Slick Rick to prevent him being deported away from his two teenage daughters back to England where he was born.  As a long-time Slick Rick fan and hater of both the US and UK immigration bureaucracies I personally am delighted.

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ching00

Lil Wayne is postmodern in a highly enjoyable, totalized and awkwardly modernist way, which makes him tough to beat. Except Chingo Bling is

ching00003

whatever comes next. potent bilingual evidence!:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO_YHf5VHi0[/youtube]

(everything else enhanced by U Mean giffordization.) so that intro…!, then some of the video and off to look at another window, tune still running, hit by a Mexican — which is to say, American — crossroads truck.

ching0022

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[we keep rollin! here’s the debut post by Geko Jones, Dutty Artz vibe springer & flyspace ambassador. We’re cooking up some of his refixes for public consumption this weekend , but until then, check the words of Papa Gex — Rupture]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=gslu9WVQBCA[/youtube]

[Te Chingo King – Do The Wetback]

I don’t remember when exactly it stopped bothering me, but being Latino in the U.S. means that at some point, some moron is gonna look you up & down and say “You’re a Mexican, right?” I by no means fit the commonly-held profile of my Mexicano bredren but in the back of my mind I brush it off on the premise that we’re gonna be the voting majority in this country in like two weeks. What I do have a problem with, however, is the standpoint that our country, which was entirely built by immigrants, has taken on its borders.

Here in the states, where we strive so hard to keep public face and remain politically correct, our administration has an apathy, if not disdain toward economic conditions south of the border and are considering funding to build a wall from Texas to Cali. Did we learn nothing from Berlin? Or better still look toward Gaza.

The Egyptian foreign minister sent a blunt message to Palestinians during a television interview being picked up by media outlets stating that “anyone daring to cross the recently re-sealed border between Egypt and Gaza will have their legs broken.” [BBC article] Imagine yourself living in a place where basic human needs and supplies are cut off by embargo except for a small trickle of goods being smuggled in by a network of underground caves. This is a complete 180 from the announcement made on Jan 24th by Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak when he told Palestinians to “come in, eat, buy food then go back- so long as you do not carry weapons”.

Living in an increasingly globalized world it’s amazing to me that despite all the law regarding crimes against humanity that no international court can find grounds to hold someone accountable for keeping 1.4 million people penned in a roughly 25×7 mile cage and denying them food, medicine and goods.

Big up all my smugglers, hustlers and I.N.S. troublers.

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They say that drugs make you dumb, but if that’s the case then what the fuck are these police taking? They must be in and out of the evidence room all day. I just saw this piece by ABC News and actually laughed out loud.

“Savvy criminals are using some of the country’s most credible logos, including FedEx, Wal-Mart, DirecTV and the U.S. Border Patrol, to create fake trucks to smuggle drugs, money and illegal aliens across the border, according to a report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”

In my mind this just goes to show that when people are hungry and committed enough, they can do almost anything. US Drug Warriors: you’re losing, you losers, think up another plan. I recommend some kind of controlled legalization. At least then we could have quality controls, cheap clean needles and people would not be killing each other over this stuff quite so often. You don’t see the executives of the Altria group going and shooting up the corporate offices of Anheuser Busch do you? I know in an election cycle this will be an unpopular idea due to the huge number of American jobs that would be lost (hustlers, smugglers, prison guards) but still, from my soapbox over here it all seems very clear. In the meantime, if the ganja pays your rent, keep on hustling!