Recombinant Pop

To what degree does metaphor shape reality? In 1946, ENIAC, the first modern digital computer, becomes operational; in 1953, Watson and Crick announce the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA; a few years later, transistors replace vacuum tubes as computers' primary physical component, and the digital age kicks into high gear. Before was analog, with individual elements constituting a fungible whole. Now there are bits: discrete units that are in one of two states, forming no whole, and thus able to be reordered and added to or taken away from. Part of one bit can never pass into another bit, because nothing constitutes them beyond themselves. They are discrete, interchangeable units. Early programming methods, like punch cards, emphasize this granularity.

DNA, it turns out, works in a similar way. It is built from four separate nucleotides, each occupying a place on the DNA strand, and with a matching nucleotide joining it in the other helix. They're bits, but with four states instead of two. By changing the state of a given element on the strand, you change the output. Each unit is the same; only the information it relays is different, and this is changeable.

Obviously the model of recombinant DNA suggests a certain metaphor, and that metaphor takes a different form with digital computing. Would computers have developed as rapidly as they did without the presence of this metaphor? John von Neumann says why not, but he wanted to bomb Russia before they could get the bomb themselves, so maybe he's not the guy we should be listening to. [1] Still, perhaps it's not the best example.[2]

So let's take music. And let's take ourselves. We sit around and we listen to music on computers, read about music on computers, talk about music on computers. Some of us--many of us--make music on computers, or DJ on our computers. And those of us who write about music do, as a group, like certain things you don't really find lots of other people liking, at least not as a group's canon. We like extended remixes, mixtapes, mashups, DJ sets. We like hip-hop that refers to its own history, that uses samples smartly, that's been chopped and/or screwed. We like rock music that alludes to literary or musical antecedents, and music that sounds like chart pop but isn't. We like[3] Jacques Lu Cont, Destroyer, Girl Talk, Kanye, Soulwax, the Scissor Sisters. Look at that list: dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It doesn’t make any sense; surely that's not a genre. Is it?

Consider the metaphor through which all of that is viewed. Here we are at the computer, looking at pixels on a screen produced by information contained in bits, or listening to sound encoded as a series of numbers. We can take songs out of their context on an album and put them up on a blog (at this point, we're actively encouraged to do so). We can take part of one song and mix it with part of another song with the greatest of ease. We can hear lyrics and cross-reference them with other lyrics, hear a sample and look up its source, then download it. The world comes to us now in bits. So let's call it something. Let's call it recombinant pop.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a long time: composers writing pieces based on themes by other composers, or quoting past works or folk tunes in their melodies; early recording artists stealing all sorts of things from their contemporaries (see below)[4]; and all sorts of things in other artforms, from portraits with another painter's work in the background to the real-life figures in the Inferno to, shit, the Book of Revelation. But where before these referential touches were largely filigrees, now they're the crossbeams. Technology has played a huge role in this, in ways so obvious that they don't really deserve explicating, but in short, music-making technology has now made it easier to use existing music to make new music than to play your own, and the internet's ability to provide almost any piece of music from the entire history of recorded sound has expanded the amount of existing music available to any individual exponentially. Whereas before, there were severe technological restrictions on reusing music[5], now there are almost limitless possibilities.

Recombinant pop, then, is a genre that's different from most other genres in that it's defined not by the set of sounds it uses, but the method by which it's made. (Kinda like 12-tone.) If a rock band plays a song that consists of four harmonicas playing an hour-long staggered drone, that's not rock music, even if they wrote the piece by getting together in a practice space with drums/guitars/bass and jamming until they came up with something cool. But if you make a song by throwing together a bunch of pre-existing sounds, it's recombinant pop. The use of identifiably pre-existing pieces of music as the elements of creation are prized rather than inspiration. Inspiration plays a part, but that presupposes originality, which is obviously a non-starter here. Craft matters--craft always matters, but here even more so, because there aren't the excuses of "energy" or heroic artistry to fall back on. What did you pick? How did you use them? How does it sound?

It's also defined, though, by how we listen to it. This isn't unusual: different people can hear Wilco as jazz or rock or indie, and they can comfortably fit into all those genres exclusively yet simultaneously. It just depends on how you hear it. So recombinant pop can be, as said above, dance, hip-hop, indie rock, and other. It can always be appreciated without knowing the referents. But once you start hearing those, and seeing their connection with each other and with what lies outside the song, it's part of this genre.

Let it not be said, however, that this isn't an aesthetic experience. One of the things recombinant pop has shown us is that aesthetics can absorb meaning. When you hear a recognizable sample in a song, your reaction to it isn't predicated on stopping and thinking about the release date and cover art of the song being sampled.[6] It's more like a joke: an unconscious reaction to something familiar being found where you didn't expect it to be. There's a bear in that closet! There's Elton John backing Biggie! That horse farted! You got Sting to willfully misinterpret his own song!

That's the recombinant part, but what about the pop? Well, one of the interesting things about this kind of music is that it's always contextual. The meanings being conveyed are necessarily of-the-moment, since meanings aren't fixed. There's a reason mashups almost always feature a current pop song as one of their elements, and it's because that frisson of combination comes from the temporary rubbing up against something that's endured.[8] (Also known as the "rappin' grandma" effect.) Similarly, referential rock or hip-hop always refers to something the intended audience will be familiar with, but this body of knowledge also changes, and so the reference is temporary, or at least floating. This quality of explicitly and self-consciously existing within a particular place in time is a big part of recombinant music's power.

But people tend to see this as a negative. Mashups, for instance, are often called too easy, or flavor-of-the-week. But this is exactly what people say about pop, and have said about pop since people were making the pop music that we regard today as fully canonized classics. (The Beatles!) Far from being a negative, though, maybe this is what recombinant pop is aiming for. It's created by people who feel alienated from or shut out of the pop mainstream, and so they create an alternate form of pop, still populist and transitory, but narrowcast enough to seem credible within the subcultures they operate, although ironically enough this credibility has the capacity to attract a wider audience.

If I sound a bit reserved in my praise, it's because the most prominent examples of this form--remixes and mashups--are still in their infancy. But we can see improvement: from "A Stroke of Genius," mashups moved through Ozymandias' fifteen-minute-long megamixes and Cex/Kid606's jamming cut-ups and beats under strung-together rap verses to Girl Talk's carefully orchestrated production of what can be legitimately called an album. Remixes, too, have begun to move from enjoyable-but-simplistic "make it dancier" exercises to true reinventions. To be pretentious, here's what I said about it in a recent review:

It would be interesting to see the remix collection taken more seriously as an
artistic form. Just as some bands have taken to covering entire albums, a
remixer could take an album and remix every track, with an eye less for their
individual impact than for their coherence and the way in which they play off
the original in productive and illuminating ways. Sure, there was that rash of
album-length mashups, but those lacked the access that a remixer has to not only
the a capellas but every individual track. It's unlikely that a band would offer
someone else that kind of freedom, and even less likely that someone else would
want to invest the time necessary to make it work. But it sure would be
interesting, no?

This is just one avenue the form could pursue, but there are many others. One of its great advantages is that it actively encourages incorporating outside influences, and so individual artists might begin to borrow from their peers, rather than keeping strictly to non-recombinant sources. It's exciting to watch.

What could kill it, though, is the law. The law has its problems, and certainly needs to be changed; since you're on the internet, you probably know the usual suspects. But what's interesting is that the law hasn't changed all that much, at least not in terms of your standard-issue we-made-some-msic-and-are-putting-it-out-on-some-sort-of-physical-object scenario. In Douglas Wolk's book on James Brown's Live at the Apollo, there are a number of songs whose history, as he recounts it, sound nothing short of criminal. People steal songwriting credit, people steal other people's riffs, people blatantly replicate a hit song and release it without any compunctions. Some of this is illegal and some of it isn't, but if an established record label today caught wind of it, this would likely be enough to halt the release, let alone if it was sampling entire verses from other songs. The reason isn't that they would get successfully sued so much as they would get threatened with a lawsuit, and dealing with that costs time and money[9], especially when you're in the kind of legal gray area that these sorts of examples represent.

The point, though, is not that the law is too harsh, but maybe that the labels are too lawsuit-happy. There's a whole spiel here that I've probably written elsewhere, but suffice to say that once you're a corporation the benefits to litigation start to drastically outweigh the drawbacks. Despite all the quasi-legal/clearly illegal business that Douglas details in his book, though, it seems like the people involved didn't really sue each other. Oh sure, lots of people got really screwed, and they probably should have sued. But if they hadn't been able to release a song that had a legally questionable background, it's unclear how music would have developed. Douglas points out (I think) that James Brown basically invented funk by yelling over cover songs until the song part disappeared, and if those songs weren't there for him to yell over…who knows?

So the law needs to be changed, yes, but in the meantime there is a model to emulate. One of the benefits of grabbing from your peers is that, if they're doing the same thing, there's far less impetus to start flingin' lawyers. This sort of arrangement is already in place to a certain degree, with mixtapes and Illegal Art and unofficial remixes released online. This, too, is in its infancy, so we'll see where it goes.

The law is the ultimate example of a metaphor that's become reality. Words are written and they become actions: because someone wrote that you aren't allowed to pee in public, if you do, someone can come around and lock you up. If something takes on the designation "illegal," that changes the reality in which it operates. Meanings shift, contexts change, but law stays the same.


[1] Damn fine job with the game theory, though.
[2] Although SIGARCH did put out a paper on the double-helix model of computing in 1986, so it can't be that far off.
[3] Or liked, anyway.
[4] Unexpectedly, I'm finding myself echoing a Congressman in this. I like this a lot, mostly because when netnerds get on the subject (and boy do they ever), they come at it like it's some social justice issue, whereas it's, you know, playing a Beatles song and a Jay-Z song at the same time--not exactly gay marriage.[7] This is presenting it as a political/legal issue, which is way more interesting.
[5] Check out the specs on the old samplers--wahoo sampling and all, but you only got a few short snippets to work with on even the best equipment.
[6] By the way, Mark, if I'm a poptimist, then this is popism, OK? I'm not going to claim that particular term at this juncture, but come on. Pleasure's opposed to difficulty, not meaning. Modernism, dude!
[7] (insert your own joke here)
[8] Presumably one day people will be pairing current Swizz Beats productions with whatever pop style is popular then, which I imagine will be something along the lines of children chanting political slogans over pitch-shifted whalesong. Hott!
[9] Since the company's gone under, maybe now some of this shit can be told. Of course, this is all ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY ALLEGEDLY. Remember when "The Ketchup Song" was a huge hit? The label I was working for distributed a single released by a label we had an agreement with, and this single was a blatant rip-off of "The Ketchup Song." (I think it may have even been credited to "The Catsup Girls.") Well, the problem is, the company that released the actual Ketchup Song distributed our label internationally. Who knows what happened, but suffice to say we dropped the single, and the company putting out the cash-in song sued the hell out of us. I won't say how much money it cost just to get that dismissed, but it was enough to finance the release of at least two albums.

Labels: comedy, pop, recombinant pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 10:17 PM