evening redness

Here is the draft intro for my unsuccessful 33 1/3 proposal on The Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera. See here for the chapter by chapter summary.

3. Draft Introduction

Introduction: Never Trust Originality

I remember Vanilla Ice all too well. And I remember that I know “Under Pressure” not because I was a Queen fan in the 1980s. Similar to how I first knew “Another One Bites the Dust” as the walkout music for pro wrestler The Junkyard Dog and “We Will Rock You” from every American sporting event ever, I first knew “Under Pressure” because Vanilla Ice sampled its bassline for the hook to “Ice Ice Baby.”

And when I hear Vanilla Ice make a cameo on 2004’s A Night at the Hip-Hopera—in a new mashup of his vocals with that bassline—I realize The Kleptones know all of this, and that they think it’s funny. They’re laughing at me because I didn’t always know where that sample came from, because I owned To the Extreme on cassette, because I still know all the words to its signature track. See what happens when it comes on at a party, and see the shame set in with the hangover. But I also realize that The Kleptones are laughing at themselves. After all, by making the joke they acknowledge that their history with “Ice Ice Baby” and “Under Pressure” is similar to mine, that they make the same association I make whenever I hear that bassline.

But that’s all good fun—a groaning recollection of misspent youth and a nod to the convoluted ways we come to know our cultural past in a highly mediated world. The real joke is not some kid who bought into a one-hit wonder created by radio and MTV saturation, but rather the larger cultural paradigm that feeds his contemporary anxieties about that moment. Whatever my present thoughts on the artistic merits of the sample and the mashup, I wish I knew “Under Pressure” because I knew Queen first. I wish I knew in 1990 that Vanilla Ice was “desecrating” the “original” song. I wish I had never thought, even for a second, that Vanilla Ice’s version was the original. Once I understand, however, why I wish all those things, I realize that The Kleptones’ joke comes not at my expense, or even at Ice’s. Rather it comes at the expense of the concept of originality itself, a concept that underpins my shuddering recollections, a concept wielded by the music industry in the name of protecting past music, and the profit that comes with that music, from those who would appropriate it, sample it, and mash it up.

The Kleptones guide me through a journey over the course of A Night at the Hip-Hopera. They play the Virgil to my Dante, the Mephistopheles to my Faust, the Ferris Bueller to my Cameron Frye. They reveal to me a complex history of popular music, one that we cannot understand through the blunt instrument that “originality” has become: the romantic notion that that which is truly great is also truly new; the idea that an artist, no matter how influenced by the past, escapes that influence to speak in his or her own unique voice; the claim that idea x can be simply traced and attributed to person y. Simply put, “originality” tells us that we can determine where our inherited culture comes from and therefore who owns it.

The Kleptones reject this notion of originality and all that comes with it. They narrate their history of popular music, among other things, entirely through the mashed up samples of our televised, broadcast, recorded, filmed, and videotaped past—a past that belongs to everyone who experienced it, for good or for ill. The mashup, which mixes a vocal track sampled from one song with an instrumental track sampled from another, terrifies a music industry that would tell a story very different than the one The Kleptones tell, one in which music belongs only to the individual or very small group who created it—one in which originality rules. As the album progresses, The Kleptones’ appropriations (or thefts, as the lawyers would tell us) blend with one another into something strangely and wonderfully new—something somehow original. But this origin is different. It does not claim to be the product of any individual genius, but rather that of a network of influences so complex that I cannot hope to trace it. As I hear this origin reveal the music industry’s notion of originality for the sham that it is, I hear something else. I hear the industry demonstrate its inability to cope with a world transformed by the new technologies that afford this new form of originality or with the new cultural attitudes that value it. I hear the industry die like the dinosaur it is.

And only when I understand the nature of this death—the most significant of Hip-Hopera’s several themes—does the joke, in all of its complexity, begin to make sense.

Let’s start at its beginning to see how it works.

As “Sniff,” Hip-Hopera’s twelfth track, begins I (the listener) am invited, by way of a sample from Lil John and the East Side Boys,¹ to see what’s happening at “another part of the studio.” Upon my arrival there, by way of a second sample (this one from a tourist advertisement for the Pacific Northwest), someone tells me to “sniff.” A third sample represents that rather loud sniff as I apparently suck something up my nose. Finally, a voice from yet another sample suggests that, if I am having trouble, I need to get in touch with my dealer.

And then “Under Pressure” begins. Instead of Freddie or Bowie, instead of Vanilla Ice even, Belinda Carlisle, slowed down to match the new beat and coming now in a deeper octave, tells me that “heaven is a place on earth.” Well, I am high after all. And then I hear the refrain from “Ice Ice Baby” and heaven turns to hell, the hell of cultural shame. I knew it was coming and I know what comes next: “All right stop! Collaborate and listen!” And what comes next, and next. Again, I still know all the words.

Although many of us who dug To the Extreme were, at the time, too young and too suburban to have ever seen cocaine, The Kleptones tell us that the “chumps” Ice raps about weren’t the only ones “full of eightballs,” that we, as a culture might have been the chumps, that we must have been high. How else can we explain the fact that we drove To the Extreme to number one as the fastest selling rap album of all time? How else to explain that, in the golden age of sampling (what with It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back and Paul’s Boutique so recently released), we celebrated the vanilla rhymes and vanilla samples of Vanilla Ice. “Heaven on earth”? Nothing but irony.

(Of course, we may have also been high just a few years earlier when we celebrated the mediocrity of a post-Go-Go’s Carlisle, so she’s one to talk.)

But that’s only the first part of the joke, the friendly part.

That part of the joke, in which The Kleptones poke fun at those who know Vanilla Ice, leads to the second, more trenchant part, the part in which I come to understand that I should never trust originality.

The Kleptones know that when I hear that bassline I am as likely to associate it with “Ice ice baby” as I am with “Mm ba ba de.” Because of Ice’s theft, I’ve lost the “original” association between bassline and band—one that I never actually possessed as it were. However, rather than giving me “back” that origin, this mashup creates for me a new association between Queen and Belinda Carlisle. And then, just as Carlisle fades out and Ice begins, yet another association! Prince Paul cuts Ice off with “Yo! Yo! Excuse me!” from “More Than U Know.” These words might shove Ice out of the studio, but they still don’t get me back to Queen. In fact, they take me further from the original than I have ever been. When I next hear that bassline, what association will I make? What will I start to sing? “Mm ba ba de”? “All right stop! Collaborate and listen!”? “Ooh baby do you know what that’s worth?”? Yo! Yo! Excuse me!”? Can I ever get back to Queen? Can I ever simply hear Queen in a culture that—legally or illegally, expertly or amateurishly—increasingly exists as a mashup of its past?

I can’t. I can’t unhear what I have heard, cannot destroy the network of songs in my head.

Originality is over, if it ever existed at all.

According to the music industry’s concept of originality, inherited from certain accounts of nineteenth century romanticism, the original bassline was newly created by Queen, a product of their genius. After all, that’s their name on Hot Space, the 1982 album on which “Under Pressure” appeared (it had been a single the year before). It turns out, however, that this bassline’s origins are rather complicated. “Under Pressure” was a collaboration between Queen and David Bowie, who are listed as its writers and producers. In the decades since its recording, accounts of who developed the bassline have conflicted with one another. Queen bassist John Deacon once attributed it to Bowie, while guitarist John May and drummer Robert Taylor have attributed it to Deacon. Bowie claims that the riff was in place before he became involved with the song.² We might identify “Under Pressure” as the musical and cultural debut of this bassline, but prior to that debut its origins are murky at best. Even if I want to ignore Bowie and simply call Queen its author, I have to acknowledge that “Queen” signifies not a single coherent subject, but rather the complex interaction of four individuals. Even that acknowledgement does not account for the engineers, executives, session musicians, and others who contribute to the entity known as “Queen”. Finally, even if I account for all of these people, and no doubt others, I have not yet begun to account for Queen’s influences, the innumerable past musicians, songs, albums, sounds, theories, etc. they have consciously and unconsciously adopted to create “their” sound.

The term “origin,” I come to understand, does not refer to a simple thing, but rather masks a complexity that has no end. And yet, when Queen and Bowie demand and receive payment and writing credits for “Ice Ice Baby,” or when Hollywood Records sends cease and desist records to those who offer A Night at the Hip-Hopera for download, “originality” hides this complexity, this network, in order to maintain “Under Pressure” as an original creation and, therefore, as property.

The Kleptones belong to a generation that no longer trusts originality or values the claims about artistic genius and property that come with it. The “group” has only one member, Eric Kleptone, but maintains a plural name as if to acknowledge that no single person is ever single, that any “one” is in fact “many.” Thus I refer to this “he” as a “they.” The Kleptones, who work exclusively with sampled music “originally” made by others, are nothing but the intersection of countless influences, a network of past sounds remixed in the present. Eric Kleptone is not so much a musician, if by musician I understand “creator of original music,” as he is a DJ: someone through whom music flows, someone who arranges old music into new combinations.

A Night at the Hip-Hopera is the product of a cultural moment in which how we make, share, buy, listen to—in short, how we experience music, has been redefined by the personal computer, the mp3, the Internet, Napster and other peer-to-peer filesharing protocols, the iPod, iTunes, and the amazon.com music store. It was produced, distributed, and consumed entirely outside of those channels sanctioned by the mainstream music industry, a crime for which it will not be forgiven. But it knows it has already won the battle. It knows that the generation to which it was given lives in and is conditioned by this transformed world. In this world, one in which free music seems more a right than a crime, conventional notions of originality have no place.

This is the world of the network.

Come on, let’s see how it works.

Note: I will expand this introduction for book, starting from this point. The expanded introduction will include:

• further information on The Kleptones (namely on their previous albums, Never Trust Originality and Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots);
• further discussion of “originality” (specifically insofar as it is a legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism);
• a brief definition of the term “network” that anticipates my more detailed discussion in chapter one;
• and a brief summary of chapters one, two, and the conclusion that explains the overall plan of the book.

This writing will expand the introduction from its present ~2100 words to 4 – 5,000 words.

Well, my proposal for the 33 1/3 series on The Kleptones‘ A Night at the Hip-Hopera did not make it past the first round of cuts. I’m rather disappointed by that, but thankful to Eric Kleptone for his support of the proposal. Here is the chapter by chapter summary from the proposal. My draft introduction follows in the next post. I will eventually post the PDF of the whole thing, in case anyone is interested in the wonkier parts.

2. Annotated Chapter Outline

Anticipated date of completion: January – February 2013

Abstract

The Kleptones, comprised solely of DJ Eric Kleptone, released A Night at the Hip-Hopera in November 2004. The album is a series of twenty-three mashups (songs made up of the music from one song remixed with the vocals from another). It is one of the twenty-first century’s most significant musical statements, not only for the nature of its sampling, but for the deep insight it offers into how new technologies, and the cultural shifts to which those technologies lead, impact the contemporary production, distribution, and consumption of music. Hip-Hopera’s samples were all used without permission and the album was given away freely online, entirely outside of commercial distribution streams. As a result, those who aided in that distribution became subject to cease-and-desist notices from Hollywood Records, who objected to both Hip-Hopera’s prolific sampling from Queen’s catalog and the challenge the album presented to older business models.¹Hip-Hopera anticipates precisely this response. Such a response, and the philosophies behind it, is a significant part of Hip-Hopera’s story of cultural and musical revolution. This book recounts that story, that of an album that continues the rebellious spirit of our most important popular music.

This book describes Hip-Hopera as a product of, and response to, certain technological, political, and cultural transformations that have rocked the music industry. The album, in its form and themes, is about a world in flux, an account of the redefinition of music in the era of the mp3, Napster, and the iPod. Finally, it tells the story of those in the music industry who fight against this redefinition. I argue that this album cannot be understood as an original product of individual genius. Rather, it must be understood: first, as a node within several overlapping and larger technological, social, and legal networks (the subject of chapter one); and, second, as itself a network that articulates several different but intersecting cultural narratives (the subject of chapter two). Hip-Hopera thus not only participates in new networks, but thematizes how music itself has generally caused and taken part in the deterioration (or even destruction) of older network configurations through which music had been made, sold, and heard for the previous fifty years or so. For the way it blends the mashup form with a story of a shifting cultural landscape, all while being a great pop/rap/rock album, it is among the most important albums of the past decade.

Eric Kleptone has enthusiastically agreed to contribute to this project both by assisting with the marketing of the book (see part five of this proposal) and by sitting for exclusive interviews with me. I will draw upon these interviews mainly in chapter one (see below).

Introduction: Never Trust Originality (4 – 5,000 words; will be expanded from draft included with this proposal; see part 3 of this proposal: Draft Introduction)

The introduction begins with a detailed discussion of one of A Night at the Hip-Hopera’s best moments, in which The Kleptones poke fun at the listener and themselves for associating the bassline to Queen’s “Under Pressure” with Vanilla Ice’s use of that bassline in “Ice Ice Baby.” This joke operates not through any original statement or observation, but rather through the mashing up of cultural referents recognizable to the listener, made strange in their new context. It thus recalls for us several historical moments and musical styles (and arguments about those styles). As such, the joke demonstrates the complex network of influences in which music specifically, and society generally, participates and, finally, the problematic nature of “originality,” a concept that continues to underpin the music industry and its business practices. My discussion of this joke thus serves as a means for me to introduce two of the book’s key themes: first, how the networked culture of the last fifteen to twenty years makes this album possible; and, second, how this album is itself a network of other cultural objects and meanings, recontextualized by the mashup form.

From this opening, I transition to my argument that A Night at the Hip-Hopera, insofar as it exists within networks and participates in the shaping and reshaping of those networks, cannot be understood in terms of originality or individual genius. If we listen to Hip-Hopera according to such traditional notions (maintained even today by a music industry seeking to protect its business model), its significance will be lost on us. Contra the romantic notion of genius, which exists outside of or beyond society, this album celebrates its cultural origins, its musical influences, and the degree to which it cannot exist without its larger context. Its “originality” lies not in how it achieves a purely new statement, but rather in how it re-arranges old fragments (in what thinkers such as Lawrence Lessig call “new from old production”). A Night at the Hip-Hopera reveals the connectedness of what seem to be discrete, even contradictory elements of contemporary culture and music. Any music that claims originality for itself, by hiding its debt to the past or its connections to other parts of culture, is not to be trusted.

Chapter 1: “One more copyright nightmare for the music industry”: The Kleptones and the Network (14 – 15,000 words)

Chapter one’s title comes from one of A Night at the Hip-Hopera’s many samples. As spoken by former CBS news anchor Dan Rather on the nightly news in early 2004, these words indicated that new technologies and cultural norms were again challenging the aging business model of the major labels. As sampled by The Kleptones, they position A Night at the Hip-Hopera itself as a “nightmare for the music industry.” This chapter situates A Night at the Hip-Hopera as a node within several diverse “networks,” in the sense that Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker define the term: complex systems that connect machines, their users, institutions, ideas, and other heterogeneous elements (each of which is a “node”).² The Internet is a network, itself composed of smaller networks (social media sites, ethernets, peer-to-peer file sharing protocols, the World Wide Web, etc.). Each of these networks includes the machines that make them up as well as the humans who use those machines. A file sharing network integrates protocols (such as Bittorrent), individual computers, cables, files (such as mp3s), and the humans who manage the network and share the music. On Galloway and Thacker’s argument, music itself is a network, one made up of influences, genres, record formats, institutions, artists, concert venues, production equipment, agents, executives, laws, etc. Changes to the configuration of this network (the shift to digital formats, listeners’ newfound abilities to share music online, etc.), coupled to new cultural attitudes about what constitutes property and theft in an era of “free” music, lead to the music industry’s “copyright nightmare” generally and A Night at the Hip-Hopera specifically.

The chapter is divided into three parts. Part one describes Hip-Hopera as a product of new technologies that threaten the music industry by allowing individual musicians to produce and distribute their work (i.e. become part of the network) without the aid of a record label. Such technologies include: the personal computer and software such as ProTools (in terms of production) and the internet and peer-to-peer filesharing networks/protocols (in terms of distribution). This section also discusses how new technologies of consumption, such as digital music players and the mp3, contribute to this context by allowing, even encouraging, people to share music with one another. Part two discusses Hip-Hopera as an act of civil disobedience and cultural hacking that, through its method of production and distribution, engages with the political and corporate responses to these new technologies (such as that of Hollywood Records, described above). Part three investigates what Hip-Hopera, as an instance of civil disobedience/hacking, suggests about twenty-first-century culture. That it exists, and that it was successful, implies a cultural acceptance of its form—if only a somewhat limited one. However, that mainstream commercial acts such as David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead have associated themselves with mashup culture and/or embraced new models of online distribution, implies a mainstreaming of the ideas that Hip-Hopera manifests. In other words, this civil disobedience has “worked.” I return to the issue the mainstreaming of mashups in the conclusion, where I discuss Hip-Hopera as a manifesto for continued cultural change.

In chapter one, I draw upon historical and critical works on technology, law, and music (such as Galloway and Thacker and others I discuss in part four of this proposal), as well as the aforementioned interviews with Eric Kleptone.

Chapter 2: “What’re we gonna do?”: Our Night at the Hip-Hopera (14 – 15,000 words)

This chapter is divided into twenty-three sections that correspond to A Night at the Hip-Hopera’s twenty-three tracks. At the beginning of each section, I list the samples The Kleptones used to create the respective track. These short sections describe individual tracks’ contributions to the narratives and themes of the overall album.

Chapter two recounts the story that isA Night at the Hip-Hopera: an adventure we take as listeners, exploring the world as imagined by The Kleptones, a world we see through the joy of musical rebellion (even if, along the way, we encounter forces that want to spoil our joy). When we spend a night at the opera, we are told a story through music. Our night at this “hip-hopera” is no different. The Kleptones, disguised as Ferris Bueller, are our guide. We ask (by sampling words spoken originally by Ferris’ girlfriend), “What’re we gonna do?” The Kleptones (sampling Ferris), respond: “The question isn’t, what are we going to do? The question is, what aren’t we going to do?” We see several concerts and we go backstage to rock-star parties. We visit a museum and we take a nap. The Kleptones narrate each of these events through a combination of samples. They guide us from place to place as we explore the pressing issues of our culture first discussed in chapter one. The album, I argue, aspires to epic proportions: an articulation of our culture’s values and a model for our behavior in the networked age.

By describing this story, and the manner in which it is constructed out of numerous, disparate samples, chapter two explores the networks that Hip-Hopera creates through its mashing up of Queen music, lyrics from the history of rap, and other cultural texts. With careful attention to how Hip-Hopera produces all of its meanings by creating networks of disparate samples (each of which conjure cultural, historical, and musical references), I discuss, among other things, how it:

• criticizes hip hop’s homophobia by juxtaposing rap lyrics with Queen music;

• questions the way in which Queen has become associated with sports and war as a result of the appropriation of the band’s music by masculinist culture;
• rethinks the intertwined histories of rock and rap by noting how criticisms of rap’s “detrimental” effects on youth were once leveled against rock (which was perceived as less rebellious by the 1980s);
• and calls attention to how these same arguments have been redeployed in the music industry’s battles against mashup music and remix culture, the new “new thing” that threatens, in the words of one sample, “to crumble the morals of America.”

The Kleptones invoke the spirit of musical rebellion handed down from rock, blues, and jazz and beyond and reconfigures that spirit for a world transformed by network technologies. Even as Hip-Hopera “steals” from the past, revels in its network, it shows that the mashup form continues the traditional task of our most important popular music: that of redefining culture itself.

Conclusion: “Here comes the question” (4 – 5,000 words)

This conclusion, which draws from my essay “Mashing-up the Past, Critiquing the Present, Wrecking the Future: The Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera,”³ considers how, as an epic mash-up, A Night at the Hip-Hopera challenges its listeners to examine themselves and their historical moment in the early twenty-first century. Similar to other epics, such as The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Hip-Hopera is more than a story about a culture; it suggests a moral model for the culture out of which it emerges and for which it was “mashed.” However, whereas Homer and Virgil offered authoritative tales of heroic and coherent individuals for their audiences to emulate, Hip-Hopera, by offering its listeners a mashup of cultural bits, offers a practice of networks. Eric Kleptone is not an author, but a DJ. He does not “create” culture: he arranges it, he mixes it, he mashes it. Hip-Hopera thus shows us how to reclaim our culture from those who own it (increasingly, the entertainment industries) and thereby make new things out of a past which ought to belong to everyone. The album’s final track, “Question,” asks whether anything can exist eternally (by sampling from Queen’s “Who Wants to Live Forever,” a song from the soundtrack to The Highlander, a film about a battle between immortals who wish to rule the world). “Question” fully understands that Hip-Hopera, along with other mashups and new cultural forms, threatens the status quo. To acknowledge this self-awareness, “Question” samples the words of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (spoken by media theorist Marshall McLuhan): “Major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” Thus the “Question” is answered: no, nothing lasts forever. Progress begets the destruction of the old (here the music business as conceived by the major labels). However, this answer raises a further question, as indicated by samples from The Decline of Western Civilization: namely whether this decadent period of contemporary culture is merely decadent, whether this culture is in a true decline or if new musical forms can reconfigure society into something else, something better. The album seems to imply that, yes, mashups and remixes, rock and rap—in short the newness that popular music creates every decade or so—can in fact point to a new society. Looking beyond the album, however, to the appropriation of the mashup and its uses of new technologies by mainstream acts, I conclude by asking whether the mashup can maintain its radical nature or whether some new form must replace it as the force that “crumbles the morals of America.”