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Rapper's
Delight
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Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together |
Untitled (Patsy Spool) |
I Love Everything Rock and Roll (Except the Music)
By Dario Robleto
Much has been made of our generation. If you believe what you hear we will
certainly never be accused of optimism, originality, depth, hope. The nihilism
that permeates our culture has undoubtedly affected our aesthetics and artistic
strategies of art-making. Our representatives lineage:
James Dean's emotional, humanistic based angst to Keanu Reeves' one-syllable
cyber-cool philosophy ("whoa"). Grandmaster Flash's incredible
inventiveness out of the fragments of our past to the paper thin youth anthems
of just another boy band in the Top 40. Method acting versus
a drum machine.
Don't get me wrong. I am not mourning what we've lost. I will redeem what we've
gained from our time. I am setting up a scenario for us, one in which levels of
detachment have reached such a point as to make us a generation of artists
where no expectations are placed on us. Gen Xers,
Slackers. 18 to 36 demographics. I have grown up in
this era of postmodern cynicism. What has been offered
at this point are various critiques of our impending doom, paranoia, a variety
of social ailments, etc. Cynical, ironic, "whatever could be done has been
done" attitudes that have served as a great injustice to my generation.
At this stage of our culture it is a given that our world is presented to us in
a fragmented, chopped up way. It's in the air. You can see it in people's eyes.
What has not been offered at this point is a way to creatively maneuver in our
world. DJ culture has changed all that. The rich and beautiful legacy of
hip-hop/DJ culture and electronic/sample-based music is a flat-out rejection of
all pessimistic strains of postmodernism. The worlds of aesthetics and
art-making strategy will only benefit from this revolution in thought.
DJ culture/sampling implies one very simple but powerful idea. The idea that
even if all we have is the wreckage of the past, so what—we are still going to
make something out of it. DJing is about showing how
something so plain and forgotten can suddenly be transformed into this strange
entity. That there are possibilities within the limitations of everyday life,
for the things we have looked at as disposable. What if one said no to boredom,
and demanded romance—not for a moment, but as a social formation?
A romance with the world. This is what the aesthetics
of sampling offer: a re-enchantment with the world. Sampling is about
re-constructing. Sampling is about re-enchanting. Sampling is about having a
profound respect for Foucault but only falling to your knees for Patsy Cline,
and then showing how both histories can be integrated. It is based on gut, on
rhythm, on soul.
It is no secret that as soon as one loses their sense of contributing to the
construction of history/meaning in their world they have just lost a very
important battle over power and liberation. It is very hard not to feel like
you are just a viewer, cold and distant in our hyper-mediated world. I cannot
think of another contemporary cultural movement, more specifically a youth
cultural movement, that implies and even insists on
our active participation in creating meaning and history in our world. Being a subject and not an object of history. A youth cultural movement that actually cherishes history.
There is no such thing as a good DJ who is historically ignorant.
This is just the aesthetics we need: a system of thought that embraces the
chaotic sound byte we live in and implies we are far from powerless against it.
DJ culture has offered this from day one. The moment people from Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash
to Aphex Twin and Q-Bert decided all they needed were
"two turntables and a microphone" was the beginning of another great
day in the ongoing history of liberation and democracy. The punk rock,
three-chord aesthetic has been replaced by the sampler.
It is an often noted fact nowadays that samplers and turntables consistently
outsell electric guitars. And a very significant fact.
It signifies a radical shift in how artists and art are going to be made. The
age of the protest singer is over (Cock Rock, take stock.) We have a new tool
for protest. The sampler. A sampler is not just to
make music with but a way to understand the world, a way to creatively filter
and re-configure it. It is an organizational tool. It is a critical tool. It is
a democratic tool. Everyone now has the ability and right to access our
recorded history and re-enchant the world.
DJ culture invites re-readings, implies a shareable world and an endlessly
flexible language. Sampling is not passive consumption. It is the creation of
new meaning out of shards of the past. An alchemical liberation of the magic
trapped inside dead commodities. A voice retrieved from the destruction. The ability to both devalue and re-invest the heritage of a dead
cultural past. The DJ/artist's strategy of today involves listening for
echoes of a new conversation from the past and leading speakers and listeners
from unawareness into dialogue. To maintain one's ability to
be surprised at how the conversation goes, and to communicate that surprise to
others.
If we as a generation have been given nothing but the wreckage of the past,
then I say thank God for that. Because what has blossomed is
akin to turning shit into gold. DJ culture/sampling has given us the
slap in the face we all need. It has reminded us to still feel as though
something actually depended on our actions. We are all social archeologists
now—mining raw history and actively participating in its critique and
reconstruction/re-enchantment. Let the digging begin.
