We have been experiencing new technological breakthroughs over the course of our lives. Digital media is now the main source for communications, entertainment, and information. We wonder from the old media like photography and sculpting how we ever got to the new media like computers and cellphones. How does it work? Well, instead of having a continous signal like analog, we have moved on to digital, which breaks down the continous wavelength into smaller pieces to be transfered into digital. These smaller pieces are to be given a numeric value, created from a pattern of 1's and 0's. Articles like "Sample rate and bit depth - an introduction to sampling" have helped educate musicians in the digital realm so they are able to create music through computers and other digital technology.
Now, these enhances in technology do increase the possibities a musician can work with, but they can also make musicians more lazy. This how we come to the controvery of sampling. New musicians these days, such as Girl Talk, are taking sections of songs recorded by famous artists and arranging these fragments to create their music. In otherwords it's like taking your favorite pop song chorus, putting it over your favorite kind of drum beat, and adding anything else that you want. Now what's wrong with that? Copyright issues; the musicians who went into the studio to record on manual instruments year are not getting credit for having their music and performance in someone else's own claimed work without their permission.
After viewing the documentary "RIP a Remix Manifesto", I have to say that I would agree with Lars Ulrich, drummer of Metallica: "if the musicians aren't making money on their music, than who is?" (paraphrasing, of course). Good music takes a long time. Composers like Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt took months and even years to complete certain pieces. You see, with that much effort in a work, there's a deeper meaning to things. The composer's life story is within the piece. You can hear the moods of the music changing from one to another and can just sense the composer's struggles and triumphs. Art takes discipline. Art takes work. Art takes time. You can't just whip it out in ten minutes on a computer program. How can you be truly creative in such a small time, with all the various music and melodies out there already written? Come on, putting a rap beat over a rock song? Creative? Not really. What if the drummer in the original rock band just decided to change the beat? We do these kind of things when my friends and I goof off at band practice!
You have to understand that there is plenty of music out there but there is MUCH that HAS NOT been written. The 20th century use of whole tone scales, increased dissonance, jazz, improvisation, and descriptiveness pushed the boundaries forward to the point where you can blend style, genre, and instrumentation til no tomorrow. Check out all the new instruments coming out these days. There are many possibilities of combination of sounds.
"If you look at formal art, it requires discipline, it requires tremendous learning and tremendous discipline. It also requires a tremendous respect of the past. Now when you introduce fake artists who smear painting around little dreck on a canvas and called it art: no discipline, no training... therefore anything goes. ...they're artists like "my dog's droppings are art"." - Michael Savage on The Savage Nation Monday, February 2/21/11. Michael is not the alone on this idea of art taking long amounts of work as opposed to artists "smearing painting on a canvas" or musicians making dissonant noise for an entire album. This is a statement that is refreshing to hear for the artist who puts in hours of practice and/or composition each day. Why should our artwork that took so long to make and along with so much education and knowledge be trumped by artists that make a mess and call it work. Even more frustrating than this is when musicians have to steal the actual recorded performance from another musician and use it has the basis for their song. How much work does that take? A download, then some editing, and another download, and some editing, and add a beat, put in some autotuned vocals, and be done in less than an hour.
This is mostly an emotional issue. It is harder and harder to become truly creative these days. Although it is true that artists have been borrowing ideas from as long as art has existed, there is a fine line between borrowing and stealing. The problem is that now that fine line is becoming blurred. When an artist like Girl Talk comes out and depends on others' songs to create his own we find ourselves in a strange, new musical age.
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