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Looper's Delight
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At 01:11 AM 8/14/01 -0700, you wrote: >>but when you talk about >>lifting entire verses wholesale from other artists' music, to what extent >>can you really say it's your *own* work? > >My opinion? To the extent that the whole is greater than the sum of its >parts. Hmmmm, maybe, but here's an analogy: Restaurant A makes a fine artichoke appetizer. Restaurant B is famous for its rich, chocolatey Black Forest Torte. Restaurant C has had rave reviews for its pesto tortellini. Restaurant McD is well known for a burger with two all-beef patties, special sauce, et cetera, and has sold them in figures that would make Carl Sagan look like an understater. Now along comes a conceptual chef; let's call him Caligula Tiberius Whiplash. He opens a new, artsy eatery right there in the same neighborhood as restaurants A, B, C and McD. Now Caligula himself doesn't prepare anything from scratch. Tonight's special is a dish consisting of the aforementioned foods obtained by unspecified means from the neighboring restaurants and presented together on one big plate. It's bold and daring, and is artfully presented with an attractive cilantro and watercress garnish (that came from the tortellini place, but has been moved to the other side of the platter to be *creative*). Caligula's new place is unlike any other in town. It's kind of pricy, but the contrasts in tastes on that plate are unexpected and thought provoking. It can't be denied that Caligula is good at what he does, and he's looking forward to basing a career on similar combo plates of other cooks' cooking. But is he a chef? (How do you spell R-E-T-A-I-L?) >Ice-T over Lynyrd Skynyrd is much more than just rap with guitar. It's >urban with rural, black with white, rebellion with loyalty (etc) Yeah, I *got* that. >that's where I draw my line on creativity: does the new recording say >something the original recordings didn't? The answer here is clearly >"yes". Sure. Just as when a curator puts together an exhibit at an art museum, the way the works are juxtaposed can have a LOT to do with the way they're perceived by the viewer. But the curator, skilled as he may be, did not create the art. The presentation skills involved in putting together such a show do indeed call for a refined artistic sensibility and certainly manifest a high degree of talent (assuming the curator did a good job), but the works on exhibit are not themselves examples of the curator's creativity, and without the original creative impulses that resulted in these works, there would be no show. > >Now, whether that makes it "art" is something we could argue about for >months. Nooooo! :-) >Whether it's a viable strategy on which to found an entire >musical career is another long argument. But as a tool in the toolbox, I >think it's certainly something worth carrying around. I think there's some validity to that last part, but to me it's a matter of degree. John Coltrane soloing over the changes of 'My Favorite Things' is a very different animal than if he'd stood there and held up two boom boxes playing the soundtrack from 'The Sound of Music' and the theme from 'Rawhide' simultaneously. (Not that boom boxes had been invented yet, but y'know?) > >> Remember "Stairway to Gilligan's Island"? > >No, but I remember "House of Amazing Grace".... I suspect you're >mentioning something similar. Chet Atkins (RIP) used to do 'Yankee Doodle' and 'Dixie' at the same time in fingerstyle counterpoint, which is a little closer to the cultural contrasts in your Skynyrd example, but we're not talking about the same thing... My point in mentioning 'Stairway to Gilligan's Island' (a setting of the Gilligan lyrics to the ubiquitous Zeppelin tune, for which there was an inevitable lawsuit) is that while parody may certainly be entertaining, it's ultimately not as satisfying as an honest, original artistic expression, and doesn't stand up to repeated listening. And anything that uses recognisable, unauthorized Beavis & Butthead samples, no matter how tongue-in-cheek, is IMO dangerously close to getting caught in that neighborhood... >My take: it doesn't matter how >long the sample is. It matters what you DID with it. If you didn't do >anything, it's theft. If you did something interesting and unusual, it's >creative. But a whole VERSE?! >Oh, yeah, I *love* to stir up trouble. It's one of my favorite pastimes. >:) Heheheheheh.... -t