And kill your
turntable. It's old. It was nice ear candy way back when, with Flash or Hollywood slicing and dicing
pop music on the wheels of steel, and Trevor Horn or Mantronik's novel
mindfuckery, but now it's just clichéd. What was once "
fresh postmodern collage art" (whatever) is now the stuff of
commercials, a fitting medium for
short attention spans. There are better ways to apply this
wisdom, and it doesn't involve
samplers or
turntablism.
Jeeves! Fetch hither my Viagra!
John Cage (gawd bless 'im!) is to blame for a lot of this. Anything goes! Everything is music! Cage could be wrong sometimes; he could be a little too cutesy-poo with his little games and theories, for instance, and it resulted
in music that was/is a lot of cutesy-poo little games and theories.
We live in wonderful times. Life is good. We have a thousand years of recorded music to which to make reference. Why not pick up our instruments - real instruments - and make music that touches base with that millennium of references in unique ways. No, not the bloodless, soulless, cutesy-poo, pop-progeny-of-Cage stuff with mix-n-match, slice-n-dice turntabling and sampling. But the underlying ideas can be valuable in the making of new, real, musics; by all means, let's mix, match, slice, dice, and jump cut. But let's lose all this disembodied technonsense and puerile eclecticism.
I'm talking about getting your hands dirty with some blood, toil, tears, and sweat, and making real music with real instruments. Touching base, say, with Igor Stravinsky, "Louie Louie", and Eric Dolphy, all in the space of one tune. But then, of course, you'd be like Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, true originals, a law unto yourselves, massively misunderstood, unpopular, and broke.
I seem to have lost the thread...
Anyway, Beefheart stopped making music over 15 years ago, and much of his stuff still sounds newer than next week; his work may far outlive him, as his friend Zappa's probably will. DJ Loop-de-doo, meanwhile, will be a legend that lasts a lunchtime. And you'll be hungry an hour later. For some other kind of food. Real food.
kill yr sampler