- Are Radiohead the new Bob Dylan…what?
- Is Banksy the New Dali?
- Are there Space Invaders in my cereal?
- How can this happen?
If you were born after about 1975 bad luck. You really have missed out on alot.
But good luck too – we live in a almost completely free world. So keep rockin’ in it!
We live in an increasingly hyperconnected yet somehow fragmented world but what makes it interesting are the AGGREGATORS that momentarily break the surface, the magnets around which information clusters; furthermore…as Mike D says :
…there are only 24 hours in a day and only twelve notes a man can play!
Thirty years ago this task was performed by the sharp media intelligences of svengali producers such as Malcolm Maclaren who brought us the innovation that were the filthy kings of punk destruction The Sex Pistols, the mad-genius of Stuart Goddard in Adam and the Ants, the hybrid hip-hop African American Duck Rock (plus the Art of Noise), Maclaren was truly a man with his finger on the pulse and the uncanny ability to take previously underground and street level phenomenon and recycle them for a mass audience.
Buffalo Girls took ELECTRO, a genre borne of the plagiarism of cutting breaks on the tables, and put it on the world map – Maclaren had his hands on all the greatest breaks, cuts and beats….he stole `em from DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash….I digress…
These days everything is already connected for us – the advent of digital has allowed music to inhabit topologically deviant forms with an increasingly loose attention to genre, style, content and delivery mechanism with a kind of twisted cross-fertilisation of genres, artists and materials. The visual nature of the medium allows time to be mixed through the Z axis too….Just consider the interrelation of the videos below. We are all producers these days – just ask Kutiman.
“What the hell has all this got to do with guitars?” I hear people yelling….Everything.
In the same way that guitar players like Beck and Hendrix began ustilising the guitar as a control surface for a feedback system between amp and pick-ups similarly reflexive loops have been set up in the formerly more linear metrices of the media mechanism itself. The internet and digital technology with its egalitarian focus upon content production rights for all means that everyone is, or can be a content producer.
Ask Nile Rogers…. Anyway, if you`d like further elucidation please click here to read Ethan Hein`s post upon mash-ups…
