The Pop Corporation

Sampling changed the way people listened to music, where familiar (and often unfamiliar) works could be re-imagined, recycled, spliced, interpolated and chewed up and turned into something all by itself. For years, the musical brain demanded that modernity meant entirely new, but post post-modernism, swathes of people were giddy at the thought of grabbing things we knew and turning them on their head.

Hip hop is obviously the most notable exponent of the reimagining of what music could be and the millions of lawsuits that chased after it, but there’s so much more in the weeds of pop culture.

While there’s many avenues, today, we’re looking at Plunderphonics.

WHAT THE HELL IS PLUNDERPHONICS?

Plunderphonics was a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985, which basically stuck a moniker on the music that was constructed by artists sampling very recognisable pieces of music and making something new with them. His essay was called ‘Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative’, which is a bunch of very fancy words by a clearly smart person.

He describes it as a referential and self-conscious practice which interrogates notions of originality and identity. It’s not just sampling something and trying to pass it off as your own. It’s weirder and more fun than that. It might be a sound collage. It might be something eerily familiar. It might be a cut and shut. You know it when you hear it.

Oswald himself has made a bunch of Plunderphonic music, and obviously, there’s loads more music that fits the bill. Sometimes it’s avant garde, but you could easily argue that someone like The Avalanches are PlunderPop. DJ Shadow? Sure, fuck it, why not?

It’s a copyright nightmare, but in many instances, that’s the point. It’s enough to make a lawyer sweat, and frankly, GOOD.

Cut-up music existed before Plunderphonics was coined as a term – musique concrète is absolutely a bedfellow of the genre, and in ’61, James Tenney manipulated Elvis’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ for their own purposes in ‘Collage No. 1’, and after that, all hell broke loose. Low-brow art had been turned into something lofty and gallery worthy, not that we’re picking low-brow and high-brow sides.

Oswald says of the piece: “The difference with ‘Blue Suede’ is how it audaciously used a very recognisable existing recording of another musical work. This blatant appropriation pioneered the discovery, for myself and many others, of an ocean of sampling and plunderphonics in following decades.”

The Residents were at it too, mangling Beatle records together with their chaotic ‘Beyond The Valley Of A Day In The Life’. It’s part a fun game trying to pick out the various songs, part trying to stop your brain from leaking out of your eye-sockets.

It’s a towering, baffling piece of work.

Obviously, while this is all a bit arch, you have to concede that disco and house DJs manipulating records to make them longer with only one source material is absolutely related to this post-modern thinking. Long gone was sheet music thinking and now, people were able to look at the records they owned and dream up ways of working with the information stored within those discs.

I own it now. I can mess with it.

Not to say that some classical composers weren’t at it either. In the third movement of ‘Sinfonia’ by Luciano Berio, it’s made up entirely of music written by other composers. In it, reshuffled and rejigged, you’ll hear Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Brahms, Stravinsky, Boulez, Webern, Schoenberg, Pousseur, Hindemith, as well as voices reciting Beckett, Joyce and graffiti spotted by Berio in the Paris protests in ’68.

There’s been others too, but that’s the one right?

Plunderphonics really took hold as a phrase in ’85 with Oswald’s EP, influenced in part, by William S. Burrough’s cut-up techniques. The EP features a strange edit of Dolly Parton’s cover of ‘The Pretender’, which progressively slows from the start, and the listener is invited to either laugh, vomit, or notice the beautiful and strange qualities of Parton’s changing voice. Remember when we all marvelled at ‘Jolene’ being played at 33rpm? Well, Oswald got their first with this track, for the patient.

LPs would follow, but Oswald wasn’t the only Plunderphonic artist. Here’s a mix filled with Plunderphonic and related tracks, which you can leave running while we carrying on talking to you.

While DJ Shadow and The Avalanches may cite hip hop and dance music as a more prevalent inspiration, their names will indeed come up in these conversations for their Sampling Only approach to music. Similarly, an LP like J Dilla’s ‘Donuts’ have a heavy Plunderphonic quality to it, with it’s dizzying amount of layers and samples. In the early Noughties, a number of electronic records were released on indie labels made of samples and found materials, such as ‘Selling’ by Terre Thaemlitz and the V/Vm releases.

In this instance, the stance is hard and that samples are usually uncleared and can often end up in legal action thanks to infringement of copyright. In some cases, that’s the whole point. In other’s it’s the thrill of the chase and seeing if you’ll get caught. Is it fair use? Sometimes. Is it fucking around and finding out? You bet.

In the Plunderphonic essay, Oswald says: “Piracy or plagiarism of a work occur, according to Milton, “if it is not bettered by the borrower”. Stravinsky added the right of possession to Milton’s distinction when he said,. “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.””

“The property metaphor used to illustrate an artist’s rights is difficult to pursue through publication and mass dissemination. The hit parade promenades the aural floats of pop on public display, and as curious tourists should we not be able to take our own snapshots through the crowd (“tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal”) rather than be restricted to the official souvenir postcards and programmes?”

“All popular music (and all folk music, by definition), essentially, if not legally, exists in a public domain. Listening to pop music isn’t a matter of choice. Asked for or not, we’re bombarded by it. In its most insidious state, filtered to an incessant bass-line, it seeps through apartment walls and out of the heads of walk people. Although people in general are making more noise than ever before, fewer people are making more of the total noise; specifically, in music, those with megawatt PA’s, triple platinum sales, and heavy rotation. Difficult to ignore, pointlessly redundant to imitate, how does one not become a passive recipient?”

“Proposing their game plan to apprehend the Titanic once it had been located at the bottom of the Atlantic, oceanographer Bob Ballard of the Deep Emergence Laboratory suggested “you pound the hell out of it with every imaging system you have.”

Got the picture yet? Maybe not, but it’s interesting stuff and to put a spin on an existing idea is pretty Plunderphonic from the off, so interpret this line of critical thinking in any way you like.

After all, it belongs to you in the first place.