InvalidInk wrote:ubertar wrote:Personally, I think sampling is lame. As someone who makes new instruments to get unique sounds, plays them and records them, with all the work it takes to do and learn how to do those things, I can't help but resent people who sample other people's recorded work, fuck around with it in pro tools or whatever, then say, "I made this". I recognize there is creativity involved in using samples well, but my respect for it can only go so far. Now, if people created their own samples from their own work, and used those the same way, I'd have a lot more respect for that. But the average listener isn't going to know (or care about) the difference. Most people don't really care about music; it's just entertainment for them.
What about pluderphonics? Or what about someone like Carl Stalling who quoted peoples music all the time? Charles Ives? What about Luc Ferrari doing musique concrete with Stravinsky and Beethovens music? It's weird to me that in classical its ok to quote others music but in pop music it is bad. How do you know the "original" artist did not derive anything from any other source?
Yeah someone like P Diddy sampling the Police and rapping over top isn't very creative or cool, but listen to DAB by John Oswald (which a good majority was used by splicing tape) and try to tell me your not impressed.
We can distinguish between criticism of appropriation (as distinct from collaboration, which implies consent on the part of the appropriated) on an ethical basis, vs. criticism of it in terms of creative results. I am aware that it is possible to do highly creative work with methods that I personally would never use for ethical reasons; so what ? I do not accept this or any other end justifying the means argument. It's not necessary for me to dislike (or even address) Oswalds or Ferraris results in order to differ with their methods and reasoning as they would hypothetically apply to me. Whatever is "ok" in classical is just somebody else's opinion that may have worked for them at the time.
There are many traditions and precedents in this world, they tend to have their negative sides as well as their positives, but I don't feel particularly constrained or justified by any of them. It's just stuff. We all make our decisions for our own reasons; pointing to other people's reasoning as justification for our own decisions, seems like little more than a cop out to me, regardless of the esteem in which you hold that person.
In my view, any appropriation of any recorded sound without specific permission from the person that created it, is fundamentally wrong, disrespectful, and counterproductive toward my goals. You have to understand that there is a relationship between the cavalier attitude that musicians often have about making recordings, and the cavalier attitude that much of the audience has about whether they should bother to pay for recordings, or have any other kind of respect for musicians in any meaningful way.
We're going to continue to be broke, walking cliches that are expected to compete to entertain on a high level for peanuts, yet not be good enough to take seriously as members of the community, until some time after we start treating each other with respect. Vast amounts of money are made off of music, but we live under a system by which most of us are not getting any sort of fair compensation relative to the money actually made from our music; my suggestion is for everyone to take responsibility for their own role in the way music and other IP is treated by society, unless you think it's OK that artists who make IP are second class citizens compared to everybody else, who don't get their work automatically converted into community property on a fixed schedule when the (already unenforced) copyright expires.
