Turn on, Mash-Up, Sell-Out

In this month’s Special Ulrich Gutmair takes apart the multiple layers of the recent bootleg phenomenon to reveal a pile-up of good and bad intentions

>> The Strokes spliced with Christina Aguilera

TIRED OF PLAYING DANCE TRACKS?

If Britney Spears was a public limited company her share price would have fallen drastically when the teenage producer of Britney’s World, one of the biggest fansites around, recently declared he was going to quit. He complained, with great insight, that Britney was just a product these days. To be a fan is based on the belief that the relationship to his or her object of desire is more than just a matter of exchange value.

Young people who are a little less naive about the character of the global culture industries, don’t have any problem with the fact that a popstar is a brand and pop music is a product first and foremost. Goods can be bought or stolen and since they have become data they can be altered, no matter what copyright laws exist. During the last year the internet has seen the proliferation of so-called bootlegs – tracks which usually combine two well known popsongs – coupling, for example, the iconic guitar riff of Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ with some vocals from Destiny’s Child.

As a growing community of do-it-yourself producers exchanged their warez on the net, radio stations began to play their tracks on air. This fits well into a trend recently spreading across British and continental clubs. Since the traditional dance genres like techno and house feel somehow worn out, DJs and audiences alike seem to appreciate the blend of pop songs and dance music.

One of these bootlegs was listed in a lot of best-of lists for 2001: Freelance Hellraisers’ ‘A Stroke of Genius’, which in fact ingeniously mashes up the voice of Christina Aguilera and a looped piece of bass, drum and guitar cut out of a song by the Strokes. Like many other successful MP3s, ‘A Stroke of Genius’ was finally transferred onto vinyl and sold under the counter as a white label 7” single.

While its empty flipside referred to its digital origins (MP3s don’t have a B-side) Aguilera’s lyrics seemed to comment on the fact that digital technologies have released a genie. Easy to use software makes it possible for everyone to create versions and combinations of their favourite popsongs, doing whatever they like with cultural data. Even if, as in the case of DJ Frenchbloke’s bootleg, the result is the unlikely mash-up of the Dead Kennedys and Destiny’s Child. This album-length feat of miscegenation was recently released on vinyl.

IT’S NOT DJ CULTURE, IT’S SOFTWARE

The cultural reading which dominates the flood of articles on bootlegging over recent weeks, points out that bootlegs are just another result of DJ Culture’s avant-gardist compositional techniques - in short, postmodern. That’s not wrong, but at the same time it misses the crucial point.

Of course the idea of mixing different songs in order to create a new one is not new. An early rap song like Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ was entirely based on the rhythm section of Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’. But only software made it possible to freely operate with recorded material.

The creation of a genre like Drum&Bass only became possible through cheap samplers and home computers which allowed the combination of funk breaks, reggae basslines, electronic sounds and vocals because their speeds could be accelerated to fit. One of the side effects of imperfect technologies was the typical Mickey-Mouse-appeal of early jungle recordings that made them so unique in the first place: if accelerated, the pitch of the sample would rise as well.

The most astonishing feature of ‘bastard pop’ is the way different songs can be amalgamated seamlessly. ‘A Stroke of Genius’ is not merely a mix of two songs, it is more than just the sum of its parts, it is actually something new. This holds true for the artistic value of the result as well as for the process of achieving it.

Software like Traktor or Acid have made it increasingly simple not only to mix several sources, but to synchronise them perfectly in terms of rhythm and harmonies. The sampling technologies developed since the 1980s made it possible to record and loop a piece of music, but only new programmes allow the user to mould sound material freely.

As a user of Acid, you simply drop a section of music you have cut out of a song on one track of the graphical user interface. Acid will automatically stretch or condense this piece of music so it fits into the rhythmic structure you have chosen. If you select another piece of sound, it will be synchronised the moment you drop it into your arrangement. To loop this piece of sound you just drag the end of the graphic representation of the soundfile to the point where you think the now looped sound should stop.

Yet more important is the possibility to timestretch samples without altering their pitch or the other way round. In ‘A Stroke of Genius’ the original pitch of the Strokes sample has been changed to meet the harmonic needs of Aguilera’s voice.

But how do you get a hold of Aguilera’s voice in the first place? New software solutions filter out certain frequencies, so you can get rid of the music until almost only the voice of the singer is left. Before technologies like these existed, producers sometimes had to build the whole harmonic structure of a track around the sample they wanted to use. DJs would use the B-side acapella versions to mix them with instrumental tracks which is why you sometimes find these versions on old rap songs.

WHO OWNS AUDIO CULTURE?

Legally, bootlegs are cases of copyright infringement. Early sampling activists, however, used recorded material protected by copyright explicitly as a form of acoustic resistance. Why should you be condemned to passively endure the ceaseless bombardment of uniform pop music? A key idea behind projects like Negativland was that if you are sentenced to listening you should at least have the right to use the material you are being force-fed.

When The Justified Ancients of Mumu recorded ‘1987’ in the same year, it was clear that there would be trouble. The Jams used bits and pieces of ‘All You Need is Love’ and ‘Dancing Queen’. When Abba’s record company objected, all unsold copies of ‘1987’ had to be destroyed. One year earlier Culturcide from Houston published ‘Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America’ using some top ten hits such as Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark’. Over the top Culturcide laid annoying guitar sounds, effects and new lyrics intended to dismantle the ideologies of corporate pop. On the lyric sheet Culturcide encouraged their listeners to copy and spread their music: ‘Home-taping is killing the record industry, so keep doing it.’

In this sense every bootleg is a refusal to pay and a clear sign of disrespect for the current copyright regime, even though most bootlegs are obviously produced as jokes. But for some of the pirates, bootlegging lost its innocence precisely at the moment when Kylie Minogue played a bootleg version of ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ at the Brit Awards, laying her own voice over New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’. Apparently the track was produced by her own staff, who quite probably cleared the rights in advance.

On the scene’s central organ, ‘Boomselection’, bootlegger Kurtis Rush sounds defeated: ‘It’s gone too far, what started off as fun is almost turning into an industry and a “marketing” tool, and I don’t want anything to do with it.’ Still, successful bootlegs are sometimes able to shed a new light on the messages of corporate pop. ‘If you wanna be with me, baby, there’s a price you pay’ declares Christina Aguilera on ‘Genie in a Bottle’ – in the original version as well as in Freelance Hellraiser’s bootleg mix.

Ulrich Gutmair <supertxt AT mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de> lives in Berlin and is editor for the online newspaper Netzeitung.de [http://www.netzeitung.de]