Plunderphonics - 69 Plunderphonics 96
(Seeland)

This kind of hyper-referentialism gets at the roots of modernism, and goes at least as far back as the last century, when a silly Frenchman slapped a funny moustache on the Mona Lisa and scrawled a dirty pun across the bottom. It draws on the same ideas at work in the Pop Art of the 1960s. Taking another artist's work, specifically works that have been created largely for the marketplace as commodities, and reworking them in a new context. The second artist forces the first to comment upon their own product.

All this business is what Plunderphonics is all about. Plunderphonics is a musical product of a renegade sampler named John Oswald, who, for pushing 30 years now, has been, without procuring licenses, taking the work of commercially or socially important artists, plundering samples, and constructing his own versions of their songs, or in some cases, entire catalogs. Although Mr. Oswald has not sought to market his Plunderphonic work commercially, generally offering to give it away, he has been beset at every turn by the legal owners of his source music and their copyright attorneys. Thus, according to rumor, Negativland has taken it upon themselves to bring Mr. Oswald's work to light via this two-disc set, complete with a lengthy and very informative interview booklet detailing the sixty tracks. While I cannot confirm that this is true, I like to believe that it is because, really, it's the most fitting way to bring this kind of a work to the public. It's a work of pure anarchy, where the plunderers are plundering the plunderers, which is what the music industry needs now more than ever. As our good friends Rocket From the Crypt have explained to us, in these kinds of situations, killing ain't wrong.

Now, all high-mindedness and ideology aside, what is the music like? Well, this is the best part of all because it is fucking brilliant. Mr. Oswald takes all the hits that you love from Led Zeppelin, the Doors, the Beatles, Madonna, Dolly Parton, Metallica, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and, yes, even the King of (phreakz) Pop, Mr. Jackson, plunders the breaks, the hooks, the riffs, and the noise, and stirs them up in his jolly blender. Sometimes it's totally unrecognizable, sometimes you can hear the bits and pieces, and often he surpasses the originals. For instance, with Led Zeppelin, he creates a track called "Power" (the earliest track on this collection, created in 1975, predating the exportation of hip hop's two-turntable mix and cut outside of New York's ghetto clubs) which is built around some monstrous Zeppelin riffs and Bonham's pounding beats. Though it hews fairly close to the original, it isolates and emphasizes one of the most dramatic elements of that band's work. More creative, perhaps, is "O'Hell," which opens with a quick mix of snips of various Doors' songs--demonstrating the idiosyncratic work of that band in that you are given maybe one second bits, but each is recognizable--before launching into an extended reordering of "Hello, I Love You," using chunks of Morrison's lyrics from other songs to create a tune in which Mr. Mojo Rising sings an ode to our great love for him (the exact inverse of the original song).

Though a number of tracks play like what you might hear an exceptionally skilled DJ do--and are great for their sheer fun, because, lets face it, everyone loves a song that's nothing but killer hooks and funky breaks--an equal number are far more challenging. "Exlpo" is a suffocatingly dense and relentless compilation of frantic beats, noise bursts, and yelps culled from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion that starts off merely intense and builds towards a terrifying loss of control. Likewise, "Sonic Euthenasia," uses, of course, Sonic Youth noise to create an opaque industrialized barrage of buzz, static and clang.

Then there are tracks which fall somewhere between the two, like "Cypher," a perplexing and complex, lurching construction of Fine Young Cannibals tunes. Though it has a more dynamic form than the challenging noise pieces, it lacks the emphasis on recognizable bits than the Zeppelin or Metallica pieces have. It is in this category that fall Mr. Oswald's most commercially offensive works, involving the desecration of Madonna's and Michael Jackson's oeuvres. With the former, on "Madmod," Ms. Ritchie's pop hits are stripped entirely of their candy coating and an overview of her career is chopped and condensed into two minutes of synthsized beats and her affected pop moans. With the latter, "Dab" (of which CBS and the reclusive one had all copies destroyed), Jackson's "Bad" is reduced to an alternately plodding and erratic procession of beats, with other elements of the song reduced to the equivalent of flipping quickly through radio stations. In the end all of the sounds are further reduced to an electronic drone. That is, there is no pop left in it.

69/96 is a worthwhile collection for any fan of electronic music, experimental music, pop music, illegal music, hip hop DJs, or those of us who believe that music belongs to the listener as much as it does to the musician, and, by far, more so than it does to the media corporations. Whether Plunderphonics is accessible or challenging, it is never less than compelling, and always interesting. Kudos to Mr. Oswald for continuing to work his craft in spite of persecution, and kudos to Negativland for making it readily (if only temporarily, as seems inevitable) available. Buy it now, while you still can.

dave christensen 2001 sep 14