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How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

By Rebecca Tushnet

I just watched Copyright Criminals, an interesting documentary about sampling in music that does a good job of letting interviewees speak for themselves. Some observations:

1. Men interviewed: so many I didn?t count. Women interviewed: 3, 1 artist (her music was not played); total time on screen maybe 1 minute of 54 (plus extra interview footage of 3 guys).

2. Someday I should try to write a piece on How to suppress women's remix.

3. I liked best Siva Vaidhyanathan?s statement about the early cases on sampling: the courts were uninterested in hearing young black men speak about their creative processes.

4. A recording engineer, who to his credit doesn?t think the law should prohibit sampling, advanced the anti-sampling aesthetic ideology that participation is bad. He argued that sampling makes making music too easy: one should be ashamed of sampling, he stated, much as one should be ashamed of dancing badly.

What seems easy to me, of course, are the responses: Assuming you value good dancing, where do you think good dancers come from? (Hint: bad dancers play a role, sometimes even the role of Young Good Dancer.) Is shame a good motivator to improve one?s creative output, or is it more likely to suppress the creative impulse entirely? Do I get to decide what I think good dancing is, even if I don?t like the ballet (or hip-hop)? Once you?re out of adolescence, are you ashamed when your family members dance badly? Look, I get the idea that there is One True Standard of aesthetic goodness. What I don?t get is the further conclusion that if we only got rid of the dreck we?d have more of the good stuff. I guess it?s yet another expression of the romantic idea that Art comes out of nowhere, rather than in reaction to the creator?s surroundings.

Full post as published by 43(B)log on May 24, 2010 (boomark / email).